Tomographic time-frequency analysis and its application toward time-varying filtering and adaptive kernel design for multicomponent linear-FM signals

Since line integrals through the Wigner spectrum can be calculated by dechirping, calculation of the Wigner spectrum may be viewed as a tomographic reconstruction problem. In the paper, the authors show that all time-frequency transforms of Cohen´s class may be achieved by simple changes in backprojection reconstruction filtering. The resolution/cross-term tradeoff that occurs in time-frequency kernel selection is shown to be analogous to the resolution-ringing tradeoff that occurs in computed tomography (CT). “Ideal” reconstruction using a purely differentiating backprojection filter yields the Wigner distribution, whereas low-pass differentiating filters produce cross-term suppressing distributions such as the spectrogram or the Born-Jordan distribution. It is also demonstrated how this analogy can be exploited to “tune” the reconstruction filtering (or time-frequency kernel) to improve the ringing/resolution tradeoff. Some properties of the projection domain, which is also known as the Radon-Wigner transform, are characterized, including the response to signal delays or frequency shifts and projection masking or convolution. Last, time-varying filtering by shift-varying convolution in the Radon-Wigner domain is shown to yield superior results to its analogous Cohen´s class adaptive transform (shift-invariant convolution) for the multicomponent, linear-FM signals that are investigated