On the use of short-time fourier transform and synchrosqueezing-based demodulation for the retrieval of the modes of multicomponent signals

•In this paper, we compare synchrosqueezing-based demodulation algorithm and downsampled STFT for the purpose of reconstructing the modes of multicomponent signals.•We highlight that the quality of mode reconstruction depends on the frequency modulation of the modes for downsampled STFT and that this technique is prone to mode mixing therefore we proposed a variant which behaves much better regarding this aspect.•On the contrary, sycnhrosqueezing-based demodulation algorithm is not prone to mode mixing.•We have also investigated the importance of frequency resolution: with any of the studied methods, mode reconstruction of similar quality can be achieved using much less coefficients by considering a lower frequency resolution. The latter has thus to bexed depending on the distance between the different modes in the time-frequency plane. In this paper, our goal is to compare different recent time-frequency (TF) approaches to retrieve the modes of multicomponent signals (MCSs). While it is acknowledged that the synchrosqueezing transform (SST) improves the readability of the time-frequency representation (TFR) of the modes of MCSs, and that SST-based demodulation (DSST) is more efficient than SST itself for mode retrieval (MR), it is unclear whether DSST outperforms downsampled short-time Fourier transform (STFT) in that matter. The goal of the present paper is to answer this question and to propose a variant of DSST that reduces mode-mixing. The focus is put on the sensitivity of the different techniques to frequency modulation for the modes and frequency resolution.