Many phenomena around the research in document analysis and understanding are much better described through the powerful multiscale signal representations than by traditional ways. From this perspective, the recent emergence of powerful multiscale signal representations in general and fractal/wavelet basis representations in particular, has been particularly timely. Indeed, out of these theories arise highly natural and extremely useful representations for a variety of important phenomena in document analysis and understanding. This book presents both the development of these new approaches as well as their application to a number of fundamental problems of interest to scientists and engineers in document analysis and understanding.