We propose a continuous wavelet transform based non-parametric foreground
subtraction method for the detection of redshifted 21 cm signal from the epoch
of reionization. This method works based on the assumption that the foreground
spectra are smooth in frequency domain, while the 21 cm signal spectrum is full
of saw-tooth-like structures, thus their characteristic scales are
significantly different. We can distinguish them in the wavelet coefficient
space easily and perform the foreground subtraction. Compared with the
traditional spectral fitting based method, our method is more tolerant to
complex foregrounds. Furthermore, we also find that when the instrument has
uncorrected response error, our method can also work significantly better than
the spectral fitting based method. Our method can obtain similar results with
the Wp smoothing method, which is also a non-parametric method, but our method
consumes much less computing time.Comment: Accepted by Ap