Empirical Mode Decomposition: Applications on Signal and Image Processing

In this paper, we propose some recent works on data analysis and synthesis based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). Firstly, a direct 2D extension of original Huang EMD algorithm with application to texture analysis, and fractional Brownian motion synthesis. Secondly, an analytical version of EMD based on PDE in 1D-space is presented. We proposed an extension in 2D-case of the so-called “sifting process” used in the original Huang’s EMD. The 2D-sifting process is performed in two steps: extrema detection (by neighboring window or morphological operators) and surface interpolation by splines (thin plate splines or multigrid B-splines). We propose a multiscale segmentation approach by using the zero-crossings from each 2D-intrinsic mode function (IMF) obtained by 2D-EMD. We apply the Hilbert–Huang transform (which consists of two parts: (a) Empirical mode decomposition, and (b) the Hilbert spectral analysis) to texture analysis. We analyze each 2D-IMF obtained by 2D-EMD by studying local properties (amplitude, phase, isotropy, and orientation) extracted from the monogenic signal of each one of them. The monogenic signal proposed by Felsberg et al. is a 2D-generalization of the analytic signal, where the Riesz transform replaces the Hilbert transform. These local properties are obtained by the structure multivector such as proposed by Felsberg and Sommer. We present numerical simulations of fractional Brownian textures. Recent works published by Flandrin et al. relate that, in the case of fractional Gaussian noise (fGn), EMD acts essentially as a dyadic filter bank that can be compared to wavelet decompositions. Moreover, in the context of fGn identification, Flandrin et al. show that variance progression across IMFs is related to Hurst exponent H through a scaling law. Starting with these results, we proposed an algorithm to generate fGn, and fractional Brownian motion (fBm) of Hurst exponent H from IMFs obtained from EMD of a White noise, i.e., ordinary Gaussian noise (fGn with H = 1/2).