Detection and classification of multicomponent signals

The multicomponent nature of many naturally occurring signals, such as speech, is exploited to provide a new means of detection and classification. A component of a multicomponent signal is defined in terms of the local bandwidth about the instantaneous frequency in the time-frequency distribution. The components are isolated by an adaptive partitioning algorithm which is constrained to overcome the interference terms often present in such distributions. The redundancy which may be present in the individual components of the signal is discussed along with the means to detect and classify the signal based upon this redundancy. The application of this approach to a vowel classification task using the spectrogram is presented and is shown to provide performance which is favorable compared to that obtained with conventional methods