ABSTRACT
This chapter is exclusively devoted for a detailed analysis of the windowed Fourier transforms. Most importantly, it presents a survey for analyzing the nature of diverse types of window functions frequently employed in the literature and applications. Besides the fundamental notion of windowed Fourier transform, the chapter aims to study the recent ramifications including the windowed fractional Fourier transform, windowed linear canonical transform, windowed special affine Fourier transform and windowed quadratic-phase Fourier transform. The chapter concludes with the much recent notion of directional windowed Fourier transform, which opens up a new research prospect in the context of windowed Fourier transforms. Proposed by R.W. Hamming, an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications, the Hamming window has proved to be a nice alternative to the Hanning window by adjoining some additional parameters to it.
