General linear chirplet transform

•We proposed a novel time–frequency analysis (TFA) method.•The conventional and advanced TFA methods are reviewed briefly.•The numerical and experimental examples are employed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Time–frequency (TF) analysis (TFA) method is an effective tool to characterize the time-varying feature of a signal, which has drawn many attentions in a fairly long period. With the development of TFA, many advanced methods are proposed, which can provide more precise TF results. However, some restrictions are introduced inevitably. In this paper, we introduce a novel TFA method, termed as general linear chirplet transform (GLCT), which can overcome some limitations existed in current TFA methods. In numerical and experimental validations, by comparing with current TFA methods, some advantages of GLCT are demonstrated, which consist of well-characterizing the signal of multi-component with distinct non-linear features, being independent to the mathematical model and initial TFA method, allowing for the reconstruction of the interested component, and being non-sensitivity to noise.