High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A wavelet is a wave-like oscillation with an amplitude that starts out at zero(0), increases, and then decreases back to zero. It can typically be visualized as a "brief oscillation" like one might see recorded by a seismograph or heart monitor. Generally, wavelets are purposefully crafted to have specific properties that make them useful for signal processing. Wavelets can be combined, using a "reverse, shift, multiply and sum" technique called convolution, with portions of an unknown signal to extract information from the unknown signal.