Synchrosqueezed windowed linear canonical transform: A method for mode retrieval from multicomponent signals with crossing instantaneous frequencies

In nature, signals often appear in the form of the superposition of multiple non-stationary signals. The overlap of signal components in the time-frequency domain poses a significant challenge for signal analysis. One approach to addressing this problem is to introduce an additional chirprate parameter and use the chirplet transform (CT) to elevate the two-dimensional time-frequency representation to a three-dimensional time-frequency-chirprate representation. From a certain point of view, the CT of a signal can be regarded as a windowed special linear canonical transform of that signal, undergoing a shift and a modulation. In this paper, we develop this idea to propose a novel windowed linear canonical transform (WLCT), which provides a new time-frequency-chirprate representation. We discuss four types of WLCTs. In addition, we use a special X-ray transform to further sharpen the time-frequency-chirprate representation. Furthermore, we derive the corresponding three-dimensional synchrosqueezed transform, demonstrating that the WLCTs have great potential for three-dimensional signal separation.