Application of Wigner-Ville distribution to measurements on transient signals

This paper deals with an application of the Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) and with usual digital-processing techniques, such as the short-time Fourier transform (STFT), used in dedicated instrumentation for measuring nonstationary signals. The processed real signals are made analytic by means of Hilbert transformations; then suitable implementations of the windowed STFT and of the pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution (PWVD) in the time domain have been performed. Particularly, the fast Hartley transform (FHT) is used to evaluate the PWVD in the real domain. Furthermore, the use of an efficient interpolation algorithm and of a suitable flat-top windowing function is proposed in order to give accurate real-time frequency and amplitude measurements, respectively. With this aim, a dedicated digital system was set up, which uses the LabVIEW software to create virtual instruments (VI), suitable to process the data sequences. Finally, applications of the suggested techniques in analyzing noisy data were also investigated