Nonlinear IF Estimation Based on the Pseudo WVD Adapted Using the Improved Sliding Pairwise ICI Rule

A method for the instantaneous frequency (IF) estimation of a monocomponent nonlinear frequency modulated (FM) signal based on the pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution (PWVD) with an adaptive window width is presented. In order to improve the IF estimation accuracy, the original sliding pair-wise intersection of confidence intervals (SPICI) rule has been modified. An additional criterion for a proper window width selection is introduced, which takes into account the amount of overlap between the current and the previous confidence interval relative to the current interval length. The presented results show that the proposed method outperforms the original SPICI-based method by up to 42% in terms of the mean absolute error and up to 73% in terms of the mean squared error. It is also less sensitive to the window widths set selection than the original method.