An Improved Hilbert-Huang Transform and its Application in Underwater Acoustic Signal Detection

The Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) has the advantage in dealing with non-stationary signals, for its data driving. However there are some limitations of the original HHT. For getting more benefits in frequency resolution, an improved HHT is applied in this paper. In the improved version, the instantaneous harmonic retrieval method is applied to calculate the instantaneous frequencies of the intrinsic mode functions, which overcomes the limitation of the Hilbert transform. The simulation result shows, with the improved HHT, we can get more benefits in frequency resolution than the original HHT. At the same time the experimental data prove the improved version is effective for underwater acoustic signal detection.