Instantaneous frequency estimation of polynomial phase signals

Abstract

We develop a new multi-window time-frequency method for estimating the instantaneous frequency (IF) of constant amplitude polynomial FM signals in the presence of noise. The method is computationally simple, asymptotically unbiased for noise-free signals, and provides a signal to noise ratio (SNR) threshold improvement of about 3 dB over other estimators, including the cross-polynomial Wigner time-frequency method (X-PWVD), for quadratic and cubic FM signals.