International audienceThis work concerns the analysis of non-stationary signals using Recurrence Plot Analysis concept. Non-stationary signals are present in real-life phenomena such as underwater mammal’s vocalizations, human speech, ultrasonic monitoring, detection of electrical discharges, transients, wireless communications, etc. This is why a large number of approaches for non-stationary signal analysis are developed such as wavelet analysis, higher order statistics, or quadratic time-frequency analysis. Following the context, the methods defined around the concept of Recurrence Plot Analysis (RPA) constitute an interesting way of analyzing non-stationary signals and, particularly, the transient ones. Starting from the phase space and the recurrence matrix, new approaches [the angular distance, recurrence-based autocorrelation function (ACF), average-magnitude difference function (AMDF) and time-distributed recurrence (TDR)] are introduced in order to extract information about the non-stationary signals, specific to different applications. Comparisons with existing analysis methods are presented, proving the interest and the potential of the RPA-based approaches

In the last decade, the applications of the recurrence plot analysis method make it a valuable alternative to the time-frequency and time-scale tools. As it was initially developed for the study of dynamical systems, and was later used in nonlinear time series analysis, the question of using it as a signal processing tool has not been put into discussion yet. In this field the projective techniques are largely used, with good results. Nevertheless, they also have some limitations -especially regarding transient signal processing. But this kind of signals are ubiquitous in real world. In addition, propagation through various media as well as on multiple paths lead to delayed, attenuated and dilated versions of the original transients. In this paper we study the behaviour of the recurrence plot analysis method in the context of analyzing some finite duration signals being subject to rescalings of the amplitude and time axes. This study is a starting point in employing the analysis of recurrences in investigations of a large class of real world signals.

The detection and characterization of burst signals are challenging tasks for time-frequency analysis, due to their very short duration. This paper investigates in this context the recurrence plot analysis (RPA) method, from which it derives the vector samples processing (VeSP) concept. The paper shows that VeSP is a generic framework that unifies signal processing concepts like histogram and autocorrelation, which it also generalizes and extends. Results of VeSP based tools are provided, concerning detection of transient signals, noise reduction, and frequency estimation.