A Time-Frequency Characterization Framework for Signals Issued from Underwater Dispersive Environments

Time-frequency representations constitute the main tool for analysis of non-stationary signals arising from environmental systems. Recently, the interest for underwater dispersive channels appears since dispersivity phenomena act at very low frequencies which are well suited for long range underwater communication. In such a case, a main interest is to perform estimation of the impulse response of such channel for processing purposes. In this paper we introduce a time-frequency analysis tool that aims to extract the time-frequency components of the channel impulse response. This technique is based on the adaptive time-frequency filtering whose parameters are defined by a local chirp matching procedure. Tests provided for realistic scenarios illustrate the potential and the benefits of the proposed approach.