Applications of a fast continuous wavelet transform

A fast, continuous, wavelet transform, justified by appealing to Shannon's sampling theorem in frequency space, has been developed for use with continuous mother wavelets and sampled data sets. The method differs from the usual discrete-wavelet approach and from the standard treatment of the continuous-wavelet transform in that, here, the wavelet is sampled in the frequency domain. Since Shannon's sampling theorem lets us view the Fourier transform of the data set as representing the continuous function in frequency space, the continuous nature of the functions is kept up to the point of sampling the scale-translation lattice, so the scale-translation grid used to represent the wavelet transform is independent of the time-domain sampling of the signal under analysis. Although more computationally costly and not represented by an orthogonal basis, the inherent flexibility and shift invariance of the frequency-space wavelets are advantageous for certain applications. The method has been applied to forensic audio reconstruction, speaker recognition/identification, and the detection of micromotions of heavy vehicles associated with ballistocardiac impulses originating from occupants' heart beats. Audio reconstruction is aided by selection of desired regions in the 2D representation of the magnitude of the transformed signals. The inverse transform is applied to ridges and selected regions to reconstruct areas of interest, unencumbered by noise interference lying outside these regions. To separate micromotions imparted to a mass- spring system by an occupant's beating heart from gross mechanical motions due to wind and traffic vibrations, a continuous frequency-space wavelet, modeled on the frequency content of a canonical ballistocardiogram, was used to analyze time series taken from geophone measurements of vehicle micromotions. By using a family of mother wavelets, such as a set of Gaussian derivatives of various orders, different features may be extracted from voice data. For example, analysis of the 'blobs' in a low-order, Gaussian- derivative wavelet transform extracts the glottal-closing rate, while the ridges of a high-order wavelet transform give good indication of the formant frequencies and allow automatic word and phrase segmentation.