This paper proposes a novel patient-specific real-time automatic epileptic seizure onset detection, using both scalp and intracranial electroencephalogram (EEG). The proposed technique obtains harmonic multiresolution and self-similarity-based fractal features from EEG for robust seizure onset detection. A fast wavelet decomposition method, known as harmonic wavelet packet transform (HWPT), is computed based on Fourier transform to achieve higher frequency resolutions without recursive calculations. Similarly, fractal dimension (FD) estimates are obtained to capture self-similar repetitive patterns in the EEG signal. Both FD and HWPT energy features across all EEG channels at each epoch are organized following the spatial information due to electrode placement on the skull. The final feature vector combines feature configurations of each epoch within the specified moving window to reflect the temporal information of EEG. Finally, relevance vector machine is used to classify the feature vectors due to its efficiency in classifying sparse, yet high-dimensional data sets. The algorithm is evaluated using two publicly available long-term scalp EEG (data set A) and short-term intracranial and scalp EEG (data set B) databases. The proposed algorithm is effective in seizure onset detection with 96% sensitivity, 0.1 per hour median false detection rate, and 1.89 s average detection latency, respectively. Results obtained from analyzing the short-term data offer 99.8% classification accuracy. These results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective with both short- and long-term EEG signal analyzes recorded with either scalp or intracranial modes, respectively. Finally, the use of less computationally intensive feature extraction techniques enables faster seizure onset detection when compared with similar techniques in the literature, indicating potential usage in real-time applications.