Beyond Time Frequency Analysis: Energy Densities in One and Many Dimensions

Abstract

Given a unitary operator A representing a physical quantity of interest, we employ concepts from group representation theory to define two natural signal energy densities for A. The first is invariant to A and proves useful when the effect of A is to be ignored; the second is covariant to A and measures the "A" content of signals. The construction is quite general and is also easily extended to the multi-operator case, which generalizes previously derived joint densities such as the time-frequency and time-scale distributions