Biosignal Analysis with Matching-Pursuit Based Adaptive Chirplet Transform

Chirping phenomena, in which the instantaneous frequencies of a signal change with time, are abundant in signals related to biological systems. Biosignals are non-stationary in nature and the time-frequency analysis is a viable tool to analyze them. It is well understood that Gaussian chirplet function is critical in describing chirp signals. Despite the theory of adaptive chirplet transform (ACT) has been established for more than two decades and is well accepted in the community of signal processing, application of ACT to bio-/biomedical signal analysis is still quite limited, probably because that the power of ACT, as an emerging tool for biosignal analysis, has not yet been fully appreciated by the researchers in the field of biomedical engineering. In this paper, we describe a novel ACT algorithm based on the "coarse-refinement" scheme. Namely, the initial estimate of a chirplet is implemented with the matching-pursuit (MP) algorithm and subsequently it is refined using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, which we coin as MPEM algorithm. We emphasize the robustness enhancement of the algorithm in face of noise, which is important to biosignal analysis, as they are usually embedded in strong background noise. We then demonstrate the capability of our algorithm by applying it to the analysis of representative biosignals, including visual evoked potentials (bioelectrical signals), audible heart sounds and bat ultrasonic echolocation signals (bioacoustic signals), and human speech. The results show that the MPEM algorithm provides more compact representation of signals under investigation and clearer visualization of their time-frequency structures, indicating considerable promise of ACT in biosignal analysis. The MATLAB code repository is hosted on GitHub for free download (https://github.com/jiecui/mpact).