  The extraction of oscillatory components and their properties from different
time-frequency representations, such as windowed Fourier transform and wavelet
transform, is an important topic in signal processing. The first step in this
procedure is to find an appropriate ridge curve: a sequence of amplitude peak
positions (ridge points), corresponding to the component of interest. This is
not a trivial issue, and the optimal method for extraction is still not settled
or agreed. We discuss and develop procedures that can be used for this task and
compare their performance on both simulated and real data. In particular, we
propose a method which, in contrast to many other approaches, is highly
adaptive so that it does not need any parameter adjustment for the signal to be
analysed. Being based on dynamic path optimization and fixed point iteration,
the method is very fast, and its superior accuracy is also demonstrated. In
addition, we investigate the advantages and drawbacks that synchrosqueezing
offers in relation to curve extraction. The codes used in this work are freely
available for download.
