Question

How to differentiate between a double peak and a single peak array?

Also if the array represents a double peak, how to find the minimum point between two peaks? The minimum points outside of the peaks (left of left peak and right of right peak) should not be considered in finding the minimum point.

Answer 1

I found PEAKDET function to be quite reliable and fast although it’s loop based. It does not require pre-smoothing of noisy data, but finds local max and min extrema with difference larger than parameter delta.

Since PEAKDET runs from left to right it sometime misses peaks on the right site. To avoid it I prefer to run it twice:

%# some data
n = 100;
x = linspace(0,3*pi,n);
y = sin(x) + rand(1,n)/5;

%# run peakdet twice left-to-right and right-to-left
delta = 0.5;
[ymaxtab, ymintab] = peakdet(y, delta, x);
[ymaxtab2, ymintab2] = peakdet(y(end:-1:1), delta, x(end:-1:1));
ymaxtab = unique([ymaxtab; ymaxtab2],'rows');
ymintab = unique([ymintab; ymintab2],'rows');

%# plot the curve and show extreme points based on number of peaks
plot(x,y)
hold on
if size(ymaxtab,1) == 2 && size(ymintab,1) == 1 %# if double peak
    plot(ymintab(:,1),ymintab(:,2),'r.','markersize',30)
elseif size(ymaxtab,1) == 1 && size(ymintab,1) == 0 %# if single peak
    plot(ymaxtab(:,1),ymaxtab(:,2),'r.','markersize',30)
else %# if more (or less)
    plot(ymintab(:,1),ymintab(:,2),'r.','markersize',30)
    plot(ymaxtab(:,1),ymaxtab(:,2),'r.','markersize',30)
end
hold off