A Novel Fourier Theory on Non-linear Phases and Applications

Positive time varying frequency representation for transient signals has been a hearty desire of signal analysts due to its theoretical and practical importance. During approximately the last two decades there has formulated a signal decomposition and reconstruction method rooted in harmonic and complex analysis giving rise to the desired signal representation. The method decomposes any signal into a few basic signals that possess positive instantaneous frequencies. The theory has profound relations with classical mathematics and can be generalized to signals defined in higher dimensional manifolds with vector and matrix values, and in particular, promotes rational approximation in higher dimensions. This article mainly serves as a survey. It also gives a new proof for a general convergence result, as well as a proof for the necessity of multiple selection of the parameters. Mono-components are crucial to understand the concept instantaneous frequency. We will present several most important mono-component function classes. Decompositions of signals into mono-components are called adaptive Fourier decompositions (AFDs). We note that some scopes of the studies on the 1D mono-components and AFDs can be extended to vector-valued or even matrix-valued signals defined on higher dimensional manifolds. We finally provide an account of related studies in pure and applied mathematics, and in signal analysis, as well as applications of the theory found in the literature.