Signal separation based on adaptive continuous wavelet-like transform and analysis

Abstract In nature and the technology world, acquired signals and time series are usually affected by multiple complicated factors and appear as multi-component non-stationary modes. In many situations it is necessary to separate these signals or time series to a finite number of mono-components to represent the intrinsic modes and underlying dynamics implicated in the source signals. Recently the synchrosqueezed transform (SST) was developed as an empirical mode decomposition (EMD)-like tool to enhance the time-frequency resolution and energy concentration of a multi-component non-stationary signal and provides more accurate component recovery. To recover individual components, the SST method consists of two steps. First the instantaneous frequency (IF) of a component is estimated from the SST plane. Secondly, after IF is recovered, the associated component is computed by a definite integral along the estimated IF curve on the SST plane. The reconstruction accuracy for a component depends heavily on the accuracy of the IFs estimation carried out in the first step. More recently, a direct method of the time-frequency approach, called signal separation operation (SSO), was introduced for multi-component signal separation. While both SST and SSO are mathematically rigorous on IF estimation, SSO avoids the second step of the two-step SST method in component recovery (mode retrieval). The SSO method is based on some variant of the short-time Fourier transform. In the present paper, we propose a direct method of signal separation based on the adaptive continuous wavelet-like transform (CWLT) by introducing two models of the adaptive CWLT-based approach for signal separation: the sinusoidal signal-based model and the linear chirp-based model, which are derived respectively from sinusoidal signal approximation and the linear chirp approximation at any time instant. A more accurate component recovery formula is derived from linear chirp local approximation. We present the theoretical analysis of our approach. For each model, we establish the error bounds for IF estimation and component recovery.