The objective of this article is to give a concise introduction to the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based on a technique called lifting. The lifting technique allows one to give an elementary, but rigorous, definition of the DWT, with modest requirements on the reader. A basic knowledge of linear algebra and signal processing will suffice. The lifting based definition is equivalent to the usual filer bank based definition of the DWT. The article does not discuss applications in any detail. The reader is referred to other articles in this collection.