Robust Multicomponent Tracking of Ultrasonic Vocalizations
Reyhaneh Abbasi, Nicki Holighaus, Péter Balázs, Vincent Lostanlen, Dustin J. Penn, Sarah M. Zala · 2025
Ultrasonic vocalizations (USV) convey information about individual identity and arousal status in mice. We propose to track USV as ridges in the time–frequency domain via a variant of time– frequency reassignment (TFR). The key idea is to perform TFR with empirical Wiener shrinkage and multitapering to improve robustness to noise. Furthermore, we perform TFR over both the short-term Fourier transform and the constant-Q transform so as to detect both the fundamental frequency and its harmonic partial (if any). Experimental results show that our approach effectively estimates multicomponent ridges with high precision and low frequency deviation.