The crater topography of wear patterns on a series of multi-layer coated tools after machining for a series of machining times has been measured using Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy and Stylus Profilometry in order to study the crater wear patterns and their evolution. The crater profile and raw patterns were processed using multi-resolution ID and 2D wavelet analysis to eliminate noise, spike/pits and then to decouple the large/short scale wear features in order to examine the development and history of crater wear accurately. The wavelet method proved to be very powerful to extract the meso-scale crater wear pattern free of noise/artifacts without losing the general crater pattern. Micro- scale details were successfully identified which indicates a great potential for the local analysis of wear mechanisms. Copyright © 2008 by ASME.