Waveform Data Thinning

A method for producing a thinned representation of vibration waveform data. The waveform vibration data is received and divided into sequential blocks. For each sequential block, each serially designated in turn as a current block, the following steps are performed. When the current block is also a first block, the current block is passed as a reference block. A representative value for the current block is computed and compared to the representative value for the reference block to determine a difference. The representative value for the current block is compared to a minimum representative value. The current block is transformed into a spectrum and compared to the spectrum for the reference block to determine a correlation value. When the representative value for the current block is above the minimum representative value, the current block is passed as the reference block whenever at least one of the following is true, (a) the first difference is greater than a given difference, (b) the correlation value is less than a given correlation value, and (c) a numerical count of blocks between the current block and a most recently passed reference block is greater than a given maximum.