SCOUT: Signal Correction and Uncertainty Quantification Toolbox in MATLAB

TL;DR

SCOUT is a MATLAB toolbox that consolidates various signal analysis, correction, and uncertainty quantification methods into an accessible package suitable for both students and professionals, with GUI and scripting options.

Contribution

It introduces a unified, easy-to-use MATLAB toolbox combining multiple signal analysis and correction methods, adaptable for time and spatial data, with flexible GUI and scripting interfaces.

Findings

Enables comprehensive signal analysis and correction in one toolbox.

Supports both GUI and script-based workflows for flexibility.

Includes example scripts demonstrating its capabilities.

Abstract

This manuscript describes the software package SCOUT, which analyzes, characterizes, and corrects one-dimensional signals. Specifically, it allows to check and correct for stationarity, detect spurious samples, check for normality, check for periodicity, filter, perform spectral analysis, determine the integral time scale, and perform uncertainty analysis on individual and on propagated signals through a data reduction equation. The novelty of SCOUT lies in combining these various methods into one compact and easy-to-use toolbox, which enables students and professionals alike to analyze, characterize, and correct for signals without expert knowledge. The program is oriented towards time traces, but an easy adaptation to spatial distributions can be performed by the user. SCOUT is available in two variants: a graphical user interface (GUI) and a script-based version. A key motivation of having two variants is to offer maximum flexibility to adaptively and visually adjust the analysis settings using the GUI version and to enable large batch processing capabilities and own code-integration using the script-based version. The package includes both variants as well as three example scripts with their corresponding signals.