US Patent 7965779 Low power, wavelet-based spike detector

A multi-scale spike detector for performing multi-resolution spike detections of a signal is provided. The spike detector includes a gamma filter having cascaded low-pass filters. The cascaded filters collectively provide different cutoff frequencies, each of the filters having a respective output. One of the filters has an input, at which the signal is received. The spike detector further includes combining circuitry that combines at least some of the respective outputs of the cascaded filters. The differences formed from this combining provide a waveform representation of the input signal. The waveform representation consists essentially of spikes that occur in the signal.