Multiridge detection and time-frequency reconstruction

The ridges of the wavelet transform, the Gabor transform or any time-frequency representation of a signal contain crucial information on the characteristics of the signal. Indeed they mark the regions of the time-frequency plane where the signal concentrates most of its energy. We introduce a new algorithm to detect and identify these ridges. The procedure is based on an original penalization of the transitions of the random walk in a bounded domain of the plane. We show that this detection algorithm is especially useful for noisy signals with multi-ridge transforms. It is a common practice among practitioners to reconstruct a signal from the skeleton of a transform of the signal (i.e. the restriction of the transform to the ridges). After reviewing several known procedures we introduce a new reconstruction algorithm and we illustrate its usefulness on speech signals.