The QCD dipole picture of small-x physics

The QCD dipole picture of BFKL dynamics provides an attractive theoretical approach to the study of the QCD (resummed) perturbative expansion of small-x physics and more generally to hard high-energy processes. We discuss applications to the phenomenology of proton structure functions in the HERA range and to the longstanding problem of unitarity corrections, and outline some specific predictions of the dipole picture.