New theoretical insights in the decomposition and time-frequency representation of nonstationary signals: The IMFogram algorithm

Abstract

The analysis of the time–frequency content of a signal is a classical problem in signal processing, with a broad number of applications in real life. Many different approaches have been developed over the decades, which provide alternative time–frequency representations of a signal each with its advantages and limitations. In this work, following the success of nonlinear methods for the decomposition of signals into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), we first provide more theoretical insights into the so–called Iterative Filtering decomposition algorithm, proving an energy conservation result for the derived decompositions. Furthermore, we present a new time–frequency representation method based on the IMF decomposition of a signal, which is called IMFogram. We prove theoretical results regarding this method, including its convergence to the spectrogram representation for a certain class of signals, and we present a few examples of applications, comparing results with some of the most well-known approaches available in the literature.