In order to identify the horizontal seismic motion owning the largest pulse energy, and represent the dominant pulse-like component embedded in this seismic motion, we used the adaptive wavelet transform algorithm in this paper. Fifteen candidate mother wavelets were evaluated to select the optimum wavelet based on the similarities between the candidate mother wavelet and the target seismic motion, evaluated by the minimum cross variance. This adaptive choosing algorithm for the optimum mother wavelet was invoked before identifying both the horizontal direction owning the largest pulse energy and every dominant pulse, which provides the optimum mother wavelet for the continuous wavelet transform. Each dominant pulse can be represented by its adaptively selected optimum mother wavelet. The results indicate that the identified multi-pulse component fits well with the seismic motion. In most cases, mother wavelets in one multi-pulse seismic motion were different from each other. For the Chi-Chi event (1999-Sep-20 17:47:16 UTC, Mw = 7.6), 62.26% of the qualified pulse-like earthquake motions lay in the horizontal direction ranging from ±15° to ±75°. The Daubechies 6 (db6) mother wavelet was the most frequently used type for both the first and second pulse components.
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