In this paper, we are investigating the utility of several emerging techniques to extract features. A novel method of feature extraction is proposed, which includes utilizing the central projection transformation (CPT) to describe the shape, the wavelet transformation to aid in the boundary identification, and the fractal features to enhance image discrimination. It reduces the dimensionality of a two-dimensional pattern by way of a central projection approach, and thereafter, performs Daubechies' wavelet transform on the derived one-dimensional pattern to generate a set of wavelet transform sub-patterns, namely, curves that are non-self-intersecting. The divider dimensions are computed from these curves with a modified box-counting approach. These divider dimensions constitute a new feature vector for the original two-dimensional pattern, defined over the curve's fractal dimensions. We have conducted several experiments in which a set of printed Chinese characters, English letters of varying fonts and other images were classified. Based on the Euclidean distance between the different feature vectors, the experiments have satisfying results. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.