Smoothing of data is a problem very important for many applications ranging from 1-D signals (e.g., speech) to 2-D and 3-D signals (e.g., images). Many methods exist in the literature for facing the problem; in the present paper we point our attention on regularization. We shall treat regularization methods in a general framework which is well suited for wavelet analysis; in particular we shall investigate on the relation existing between thresholding methods and regularization. We shall also introduce a new regularization method (Besov regularization), which includes some known regularization and thresholding methods as particular cases. Numerical experiments based on some test problems will be performed in order to compare the performance of some methods of smoothing data. AMS (MOS) Subject Classifications: 65R30, 41A60.