Abstract:In recent years,the researches on combination of wavelet analysis and neural net works have attracted much attention.This paper reviews the development and status about this field.The combination of wavelet and neural networks can be categorizde into the ancillary type and the embedded type,the latter of which is referred to wavelet neural networks(WNN). WNN including its main models,algorithms and other issues are discussed.The applications and prospects of WNN are also given,which showed that WNN have great competence and po tential in the applications of function approximation,signal classification,system identification and image compression.