An efficient algorithm for instantaneous frequency estimation of nonstationary multicomponent signals in low SNR

Abstract

A method for components instantaneous frequency (IF) estimation of multicomponent signals in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is proposed. The method combines a new proposed modification of a blind source separation (BSS) algorithm for components separation, with the improved adaptive IF estimation procedure based on the modified sliding pairwise intersection of confidence intervals (ICI) rule. The obtained results are compared to the multicomponent signal ICI-based IF estimation method for various window types and SNRs, showing the estimation accuracy improvement in terms of the mean squared error (MSE) by up to 23%. Furthermore, the highest improvement is achieved for low SNRs values, when many of the existing methods fail.