Two-dimensional empirical mode decomposition by finite elements

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is a powerful tool for analysis of non-stationary and nonlinear signals, and has drawn significant attention in various engineering application areas. This paper presents a finite element-based EMD method for two-dimensional data analysis. Specifically, we represent the local mean surface of the data, a key step in EMD, as a linear combination of a set of two-dimensional linear basis functions smoothed with bi-cubic spline interpolation. The coefficients of the basis functions in the linear combination are obtained from the local extrema of the data using a generalized low-pass filter. By taking advantage of the principle of finite-element analysis, we develop a fast algorithm for implementation of the EMD. The proposed method provides an effective approach to overcome several challenging difficulties in extending the original one-dimensional EMD to the two-dimensional EMD. Numerical experiments using both simulated and practical texture images show that the proposed method works well.