A high-resolution quadratic time-frequency distribution for multicomponent signals analysis

Abstract

The paper introduces a new kernel for the design of a high resolution time-frequency distribution (TFD). We show that this distribution can solve problems that the Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) or the spectrogram cannot. In particular, the proposed distribution can resolve two close signals in the time-frequency domain that the two other distributions cannot. Moreover, we show that the proposed distribution is more accurate than the WVD and the spectrogram in the estimation of the instantaneous frequency of a stepped FM signal embedded in additive Gaussian noise. Synthetic and real data collected from real-world applications are shown to validate the proposed distribution.