Haptic texture rendering has recently received a lot of attention among the haptic community. By adding haptic textures onto an object could enhance its realism. The objective of this paper is to propose a rendering method that could improve such realism. We examine haptic rendering techniques that involve sine waves and Fourier series, and identify any problems that may occur. We argue that haptic texture rendering can employ 2D texture images data to generate the haptic texture, and suggest that wavelet transformations could be used to filter the texture information and generate haptic texture surfaces. Thus, a rendering method based on an image's visual information is proposed. The advantages of this method include the dynamic and instant haptic texture rendering based on the object's visual information extracted from the visual texture. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.