Analysis of Reassignment Operators Used in Synchrosqueezing Transforms: With an Application to Instantaneous Frequency Estimation

In this paper, our goal is first to investigate the behavior of reassignment operators used in synchrosqueezing transforms applied to multicomponent signals made of the superposition of amplitude and frequency modulated modes. Indeed, while these operators are associated with instantaneous frequency estimators very accurate on specific types of modes, the quality of the former worsens drastically when the modes depart from the ideal case they are designed for. We show in this paper that this particularly true when the modes interfere in the time-frequency plane or when some noise is present. Based on that analysis, we propose a novel instantaneous frequency estimator that only makes use of some specific points located on the ridges of synchrosqueezing transforms, and compare its performance with state-of-the-art techniques based on the same type of time-frequency representations.