Abstract: Time-frequency signal analysis is a hot research topic in signal processing domain at present. A number of time-frequency distributions have been developed and used to analyze time-frequency signal. The linear canonical transform with multi-parameter is a powerful time-frequency analysis tool. It is the generalization of the Fourier transform and the fractional Fourier transform. In this paper, the relations between the linear canonical transform and time-frequency distributions are obtained. Based on these relations, a novel method for time-frequency signal separation is proposed. This method is very effective to separate components from a time-frequency signal, whose components interact in the time and the frequency domains and does not overlapped with each other in the time-frequency plane.The simulation results illustrate the validity and practicability of the proposed method.