Fully Adaptive Ridge Detection Based on STFT Phase Information

Abstract

This letter deals with the problem of the estimation of the instantaneous frequencies of the modes of multicomponent signals from their linear time-frequency representations. In most approaches, such an estimation consists of extracting the ridges associated with each mode in the time-frequency plane. A major issue associated with these techniques is that ridge detection relies on some ad-hoc parameters which essentially bound the modulation of the studied modes and put some constraints on the type of filter used in the time-frequency representation. In this paper, we alternatively propose a novel fully adaptive approach for ridge detection whose relevance is shown throughout numerical simulations.