Quilted Gabor frames - a new concept for adaptive time-frequency representation (Q719784)

The primary motivation for this article stems from the processing of audio and in particular of music signals, where the trade--off between time and frequency resolution has a strong impact on the results of analysis and synthesis. The well--known uncertainty principle makes the choice of just one analysis window a difficult task: different resolutions might be favorable in order to achieve sparse and precise representation for the various signal components. The new class of frames introduced here aim at adaptability in time--frequency representations based on the signal's properties. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is introductory. Section 2 provides notation and gives an overview over basic results in Gabor analysis. Section 3 introduces the general concept of quilted Gabor frames. In Section 4, the existence of an upper frame bound for general quilted frames is proved. In Section 5 and Section 6, a lower frame bound is constructed for two particular cases, namely, the partition of the time--frequency plane in stripes, and the replacement of frame elements in a compact region of the coefficient domain. Finally, Section 7 presents numerical examples for these cases.