A Characterization of Sparse Nonstationary Gabor Expansions

We investigate the problem of constructing sparse time-frequency representations with flexible frequency resolution, studying the theory of nonstationary Gabor frames in the framework of decomposition spaces. Given a painless nonstationary Gabor frame, we construct a compatible decomposition space and prove that the nonstationary Gabor frame forms a Banach frame for the decomposition space. Furthermore, we show that the decomposition space norm can be completely characterized by a sparseness condition on the frame coefficients and we prove an upper bound on the approximation error occurring when thresholding the frame coefficients for signals belonging to the decomposition space.