Considering the advantage for combining different mother wavelets of adaptive wavelet transform(AWT),six wavelets selected from Gabor wavelets and Mexican-hat wavelet are chosen to construct a multi-mother adaptive wavelet.For the purpose of de-noising in optical face pattern recognition,using artificial neural networks,the parameters of the wavelets are optimized.Several criterions are used for evaluating the correlation recognition performance.After comparing the criterions of Gabor wavelets,Mexican-hat wavelet and the new adaptive wavelet,the evaluation shows that the new adaptive wavelet combines advantages of these two mother wavelets and has good de-noising ability.Moreover,the optical filter of this adaptive wavelet can be applied in optical pattern recognition.