Kernel decomposition of time-frequency distributions

Bilinear time-frequency distributions (TFDs) offer improved time-frequency resolution over linear representations, but suffer from difficult interpretation, higher implementation cost, and the lack of associated low-cost signal synthesis algorithms. In the paper, the authors introduce some new tools for the interpretation and quantitative comparison of high-resolution TFDs. These tools are used in related work to define low-cost high-resolution TFDs and to define linear, low-cost signal synthesis algorithms associated with high-resolution TFDs. First, each real-valued TFD is associated with a self-adjoint linear operator ψ. The spectral representation of ψ expresses the TFD as a weighted sum of spectrograms (SPs). It is shown that the SP decomposition and Weyl correspondence do not yield useful interpretations for high-resolution TFDs due to the fact that ψ is not positive