Real time detection of harmonic structure: A case for topological signal analysis

The goal of this study is to find evidence of cyclicity or periodicity in data with low computational complexity and high accuracy. Using delay embeddings, we transform the timedomain signal into a point cloud, whose topology reflects the periodic behavior of the signal. Persistent homology is employed to determine the underlying manifold of the point cloud, and the Euler characteristic provides for a fast computation of topology of the resulting manifold. We apply the introduced approach to breathing sound signals for wheeze detection. Our experiments substantiate the capabilities of the proposed method.