Jean Morlet and the continuous wavelet transform

Brian H. Russell, Jiajun Han

Jean Morlet was a French geophysicist who used an intuitive approach, based on his knowledge of seismic processing algorithms, to propose a new method of timefrequency analysis. Geophysicists did not at first recognize the originality of Morlet’s work, but mathematicians did, and his method was re-named the Continuous Wavelet Transform, or CWT, and lead to a new branch of mathematics. In this article, we will re-visit Morlet’s classic papers and show why his work was so original and important. we will also show a modern application of the CWT to seismic data analysis.