Analysis of an Adaptive Short-Time Fourier Transform-Based Multicomponent Signal Separation Method Derived from Linear Chirp Local Approximation

The synchrosqueezing transform (SST) has been developed as a powerful EMD-like tool for instantaneous frequency (IF) estimation and component separation of non-stationary multicomponent signals. Recently, a direct method of the time-frequency approach, called signal separation operation (SSO), was introduced to solving the problem of multicomponent 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). In addition, SSO is simple: the IF of a component is estimated by a time-frequency ridge of the SSO plane; and this component is recovered by simply plugging the time-frequency ridge to the SSO operation. In paper "Direct signal separation via extraction of local frequencies with adaptive time-varying parameters", after showing that the SSO operation is related to the adaptive short-time Fourier transform (STFT), the authors obtained a more accurate component recovery formula derived from the linear chirp (also called linear frequency modulation signal) approximation at any local time and they also proposed a recovery scheme to extract the signal components one by one with the time-varying window updated for each component. However the theoretical analysis of the recovery formula derived from linear chirp local approximation has not been studied there. In this paper, we carry out such analysis and obtain error bounds for IF estimation and component recovery. These results provide a mathematical guarantee to the proposed adaptive STFT-based non-stationary multicomponent signal separation method.