A Separation Method for Multicomponent Nonstationary Signals with Crossover Instantaneous Frequencies.

In nature and engineering world, the acquired signals are usually affected by multiple complicated factors and appear as multicomponent nonstationary modes. In such and many other situations, it is necessary to separate these signals into a finite number of monocomponents to represent the intrinsic modes and underlying dynamics implicated in the source signals. In this paper, we consider the separation of a multicomponent signal which has crossing instantaneous frequencies (IFs), meaning that some of the components of the signal overlap in the time-frequency domain. We use a kernel function-based complex quadratic phase function to represent a multicomponent signal in the three-dimensional space of time, frequency and chirp rate, to be called the localized quadratic-phase Fourier transform (LQFT). We analyze the error bounds for IF estimation and component recovery with LQFT. In addition, we propose a matched-filter along certain specific time-frequency lines with respect to the chirp rate to make nonstationary signals be further separated and more concentrated in the three-dimensional space of LQFT. Based on the approximation of source signals with linear frequency modulation modes at any local time, we introduce an innovative signal reconstruction algorithm which is suitable for signals with crossing IFs. Moreover, this algorithm decreases component recovery errors when the IFs curves of different components are not crossover, but fast-varying and close to one and other. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real signals show our method is more accurate and consistent in signal separation than the empirical mode decomposition, synchrosqueezing transform, and other approaches.