Serial-EMD: Fast Empirical Mode Decomposition Method for Multi-dimensional Signals Based on Serialization

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) has developed into a prominent tool for adaptive, scale-based signal analysis in various fields like robotics, security and biomedical engineering. Since the dramatic increase in amount of data puts forward higher requirements for the capability of real-time signal analysis, it is difficult for existing EMD and its variants to trade off the growth of data dimension and the speed of signal analysis. In order to decompose multi-dimensional signals at a faster speed, we present a novel signal-serialization method (serial-EMD), which concatenates multi-variate or multi-dimensional signals into a one-dimensional signal and uses various one-dimensional EMD algorithms to decompose it. To verify the effects of the proposed method, synthetic multi-variate time series, artificial 2D images with various textures and real-world facial images are tested. Compared with existing multi-EMD algorithms, the decomposition time becomes significantly reduced. In addition, the results of facial recognition with Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) extracted using our method can achieve a higher accuracy than those obtained by existing multi-EMD algorithms, which demonstrates the superior performance of our method in terms of the quality of IMFs. Furthermore, this method can provide a new perspective to optimize the existing EMD algorithms, that is, transforming the structure of the input signal rather than being constrained by developing envelope computation techniques or signal decomposition methods. In summary, the study suggests that the serial-EMD technique is a highly competitive and fast alternative for multi-dimensional signal analysis.