The influence of speckle noise in degrading performance of a reader for electro-optically reading a multiple element symbol is reduced by constructing wavelets for each element width, correlating each wavelet with a differentiated signal derived from light scattered from the symbol to obtain a correlated signal having peaks, each peak corresponding to a middle of a respective element, and processing the peaks to decode the symbol. Edge detection of the elements, which is susceptible to speckle noise degradation, is not used for decoding.