The Wigner–Ville Distribution and Time–Frequency Signal Analysis

Abstract

Although time–frequency analysis of signals had its origin almost 50 years ago, there has been major development of the time–frequency distributions approach in the last two decades. The basic idea of the method is to develop a joint function of time and frequency, known as a time–frequency distribution, that can describe the energy density of a signal simultaneously in both time and frequency. In principle, the time–frequency distributions characterize phenomena in a two-dimensional time–frequency plane. Basically, there are two kinds of time–frequency representations. One is the quadratic method covering the time–frequency distributions, and the other is the linear approach including the Gabor transform, the Zak transform, and the wavelet transform analysis.