  The gravitational wave signals produced by the coalescence of compact
binaries progress through three stages: inspiral, merger, and postmerger. The
evolution of their frequency follows a slow build up during the inspiral that
peaks at merger, forming the characteristic "chirp" pattern in the signal's
time-frequency map. Herein we introduce a framework for localizing further
characteristic structures in the time-frequency space of gravitational wave
signals using the continuous wavelet transform. We consider two example cases
where there are specific patterns in the postmerger stage of the signal that
are rich with information on the physical nature of the source: highly-inclined
black hole binaries with asymmetric mass ratio, and neutron star binaries with
postmerger remnant oscillations. It is demonstrated that the choice of quality
factor $Q$ plays a central role in distinguishing the postmerger features from
that of the inspiral, with black hole systems preferring lower $Q$ and neutron
star systems preferring higher $Q$. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of
chirplets as the wavelet transform basis, which allow for manipulation of
structure in the time-frequency map.
