Mass spectrometry (MS) is increasingly being used for biomedical research. The typical analysis of MS data consists of several steps. Feature extraction is a crucial step since subsequent analyses are performed only on the detected features. Current methodologies applied to low-resolution MS, in which features are peaks or wavelet functions, are parameter-sensitive and inaccurate in the sense that peaks and wavelet functions do not directly correspond to the underlying molecules under observation. In high-resolution MS, the model-based approach is more appealing as it can provide a better representation of the MS signals by incorporating information about peak shapes and isotopic distributions. Current model-based techniques are computationally expensive, various algorithms have been proposed to improve the computational efficiency of this paradigm. However, these methods cannot deal well with overlapping features, especially when they are merged to create one broad peak. In addition, no method has been proven to perform well across different MS platforms.