Instantaneous frequency estimation by group delay attractors and instantaneous frequency attractors

Instantaneous frequency attractors (IFAs), obtained from the phase of a time-frequency representation, have been introduced for instantaneous frequency (IF) estimation. In this paper, another kind of attractors called group delay attractors (GDAs) are proposed to improve the IFA-based method. The GDAs can reveal IFs which cannot be estimated from the IFAs. Simulation results show that the IF estimation method based on both the GDAs and IFAs outperforms the well-known estimation method, i.e. ridge detection. Also, it is shown that the proposed method creates much less spurious IFs than the IFA-based method in noisy environments.