Automatic mode extraction of ultrasonic guided waves using synchrosqueezed wavelet transform

Multimodal and dispersive characteristics of ultrasonic guided waves (GWs) cause the wave-packet overlapping in time domain and frequency domain, which challenges the signal interpretation. In this study, we propose an automatic method for individual mode extraction. The inversible synchrosqueezed wavelet transform (SWT) is employed to obtain the high-resolution time-frequency representation (TFR) of the GW signal. Then, two image processing steps, i.e., watershed transform and region growing, are used to process the TFR distributions and extract the TFR trajectory of each individual component. After the TFR segmentation, the individual modes are reconstructed by using the inverse SWT. The algorithm performance is investigated by synthesized multimodal signals. The results show that the reconstructed individual modes are consistent with the original ones. The experimental results measured in a bovine tibia plate and a steel plate are further employed to testify the proposed algorithm. Results suggest that the presented study provides a robust tool for processing multimodal ultrasonic GW signals.