 Vanishing moment

A vanishing moment is a cancellation condition: positive and negative parts of an analyzing function balance when weighted by a monomial. Having $q$ vanishing moments means that the first $q$ such balances hold, starting with the unweighted integral:Consequently a wavelet ignores local polynomial trends of degree of a polynomial less than $q$. A smooth feature is close to its Taylor polynomial, so only the small Taylor remainder contributes to its detail coefficient. A jump discontinuity cannot be approximated this way across its edge; its jump response of a localized analyzing function can remain large relative to details from a smooth region.^[ref]

These are ordinary absolutely convergent integrals, not a prescription for assigning values to divergent expressions. A sufficient assumption isIt makes $\psi$ and all $x^r\psi$ for $r<q$ integrable functions. Being square-integrable alone does not ensure these weighted integrals exist. For a square-integrable function with compact support, the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality guarantees every such weighted integral is finite. Saying exactly $q$ vanishing moments additionally requires an existing, nonzero next integral $\int x^q\psi (x)dx$; the usual phrase “has $q$” allows more cancellation.