Water peak suppression: time-frequency vs time-scale approach

Wavelets are the most popular time-scale analysis tool. A well-known application of wavelets in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is water peak extraction/suppression. However, spectroscopists are more familiar with frequency than scale. So, from a spectroscopist point of view, a time-scale analysis tool (i.e., wavelets) is not natural and a time-frequency approach would be much more satisfactory. We explain a time-frequency solution to this problem based on Gabor analysis. As the two formalisms are closely linked together we continuously emphasize their similarities and differences. In particular we show that, here, the Gabor method is as efficient as the wavelet approach, and we give some examples. Those remarks also apply to other NMR problems solved previously with the continuous wavelet transform, such as quantification or dynamical phase correction.