Reconstruction of crash pulse of a vehicle involved in central localized collision based on Morlet wavelets

A wavelet-based approach is presented in this paper to reconstruct acceleration pulse of a vehicle involved in a crash event. The described method for time-frequency analysis is based on techniques which investigate both: time and frequency components of a signal being considered. It is achieved in this work by application of Morlet wavelet properties. Major frequency components which are included in the original acceleration pulse are identified. Subsequently, their times of occurrence are detected as well. Those steps are necessary for multiresolution analysis which leads to creation of a scalegram of the reference signal. Finally, having full insight into the time-frequency components of the analyzed characteristics, the reconstruction of the reference signal is executed — superposition principle allows to combine major signal components yielding the reproduced crash pulse. The comparative analysis between the current method's outcome and the behavior of a real car is performed and reliability of the actual methods and tools is evaluated.