Multicomponent AM–FM signals analysis based on EMD–B-splines ESA

In this paper a signal analysis framework for estimating time-varying amplitude and frequency functions of multicomponent amplitude and frequency modulated (AM–FM) signals is introduced. This framework is based on local and non-linear approaches, namely Energy Separation Algorithm (ESA) and Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). Conjunction of Discrete ESA (DESA) and EMD is called EMD–DESA. A new modified version of EMD where smoothing instead of an interpolation to construct the upper and lower envelopes of the signal is introduced. Since extracted IMFs are represented in terms of B-spline (BS) expansions, a closed formula of ESA robust against noise is used. Instantaneous Frequency (IF) and Instantaneous Amplitude (IA) estimates of a multicomponent AM–FM signal, corrupted with additive white Gaussian noise of varying SNRs, are analyzed and results compared to ESA, DESA and Hilbert transform-based algorithms. SNR and MSE are used as figures of merit. Regularized BS version of EMD–ESA performs reasonably better in separating IA and IF components compared to the other methods from low to high SNR. Overall, obtained results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy and robustness against noise to track IF and IA features of a multicomponent AM–FM signal.

► A new framework for analyzing multicomponent AM–FM signals based on EMD–ESA is proposed.
► The approach is not constrained by the assumptions of stationarity and linearity.
► A new sifting based on the reconstruction of signal envelopes using regularized spline is proposed.
► Tracking frequencies and amplitudes of a signal without a priori on its number of components.
► Results show the effectiveness of the framework compared to previously proposed methods.