A heuristic approach to obtain signal envelope with a simple software implementation

Abstract

Signal amplitude envelope allows to obtain information of the signal features for different applications. It is widely used to pre-process sound and other signals of physiological origin in human or animal studies. In order to obtain signal envelope, a fast and simple algorithm is proposed based on peak detection. The procedure presented here is quite straightforward and can be used in different applications of time series analysis. It can be applied in signals with different origin and frequency content. This algorithm is implemented based on python libraries. The open source code is also provided. Aspects on the parameter selection are discussed to adapt the same method for different applications. Also traditional methods are revisited and compared with the one proposed here.