Wavelet Trees for All (free version) (official publication reference)
Abstract:
The wavelet tree is a versatile data structure that serves a number of purposes, from string processing to geometry. It can be regarded as a device that represents a sequence, a reordering, or a grid of points. In addition, its space adapts to various entropy measures of the data it encodes, enabling compressed representations. New competitive solutions to a number of problems, based on wavelet trees, are appearing every year. In this survey we give an overview of wavelet trees and the surprising number of applications in which we have found them useful: basic and weighted point grids, sets of rectangles, strings, permutations, binary relations, graphs, inverted indexes, document retrieval indexes, full-text indexes, XML indexes, and general numeric sequences.
Good survey article but can be tough sledding depending on your math skills. Fortunately the paper covers enough uses and has references to freely available applications of this technique. I am sure you will find one that trips your understanding of wavelet trees.