Empirical Fourier Decomposition

Abstract: In this paper, a novel decomposition method for non-stationary and nonlinear signals is proposed. This method is inspired by the adaptive wavelet filter bank of the empirical wavelet transform (EWT) and Fourier intrinsic band functions (FIBFs) of the Fourier decomposition method (FDM). Therefore, the proposed approach is entitled as empirical Fourier decomposition (EFD). EFD is defined as the adaptive bandpass filter bank, regarded as the adaptive FIBFs based on the segment of the Fourier spectrum. Firstly, an enhanced segmentation technology of the Fourier spectrum based is presented. Secondly, the framework of EFD is established both in a continuous series and a discrete series. Finally, combined with the Hilbert transform, EFD is extended to a time-frequency representation. To verify the effectiveness of EFD, three non-stationary multimode signals, a simulated free vibration, and one real ECG signal are tested. The results manifest that EFD is more effective, compared with EWT and FDM, with higher processing precision, computation efficiency and noise robustness particularly to the closely-spaced frequencies and high-frequency noise.