The Weyl correspondence and time-frequency analysis

Describes the Weyl correspondence and its properties, showing how it gives a “window-independent” definition of time-frequency concentration for use in models in signal detection. The definition of concentration is justified by showing that it gives reasonable answers in certain intuitive cases. The Weyl correspondence expresses a linear transformation as a weighted superposition of time-frequency shifts of the signal, and then authors explain why this is not the same as “transforming” a signal into the time-frequency domain, multiplying by a weight in the transform domain and taking the inverse. The investigation into time-frequency concentration and the Weyl correspondence is justified by a new result. The authors show that convolving the Wigner distribution with a general smoothing function is equivalent to evaluating a weighted sum of spectrograms. This is a new interpretation of the process of smoothing the Wigner distribution to reduce cross-terms. It relates smoothing of the Wigner distribution to the “multiple window” technique pioneered by Thomson (1982)