Patent US 5,453,945

A method for decomposing signals into efficient time-frequency representations for data compression and recognition which uses adaptable wavelet basis functions and concentrates a signal or image's information to a higher degree than methods based on the discrete fourier transform, the discrete cosine transform, the standard wavelet transform and known adaptive transform techniques. The purpose of the present invention is to enable data signals and images to be stored and transmitted very efficiently. The time-frequency plane is broken up into subspaces. The method determines the optimum basis function for each of the subspace regions. Basis functions are chosen such that much of the information in the signal is contained in a small number of coefficients. The resulting coefficients form a set that represents the signal in the most concentrated manner.