The Hilbert-Huang transform and its applications

The Hilbert–Huang Transform (HHT) represents a desperate attempt to break the suffocating hold on the field of data analysis by the twin assumptions of linearity and stationarity. Unlike spectrograms, wavelet analysis, or the Wigner–Ville Distribution, HHT is truly a time-frequency analysis, but it does not require an a priori functional basis and, therefore, the convolution computation of frequency. The method provides a magnifying glass to examine the data, and also offers a different view of data from nonlinear processes, with the results no longer shackled by spurious harmonics — the artifacts of imposing a linearity property on a nonlinear system or of limiting by the uncertainty principle, and a consequence of Fourier transform pairs in data analysis. This is the first HHT book containing papers covering a wide variety of interests. The chapters are divided into mathematical aspects and applications, with the applications further grouped into geophysics, structural safety and visualization.