  We consider data consisting of photon counts of diffracted x-ray radiation as
a function of the angle of diffraction. The problem is to determine the
positions, powers and shapes of the relevant peaks. An additional difficulty is
that the power of the peaks is to be measured from a baseline which itself must
be identified. Most methods of de-noising data of this kind do not explicitly
take into account the modality of the final estimate. The residual-based
procedure we propose uses the so-called taut string method, which minimizes the
number of peaks subject to a tube constraint on the integrated data. The
baseline is identified by combining the result of the taut string with an
estimate of the first derivative of the baseline obtained using a weighted
smoothing spline. Finally, each individual peak is expressed as the finite sum
of kernels chosen from a parametric family.
