A method for estimating the instantaneous frequency of non-stationary heart sound signals

Practical signals such as speech, biomedical measurement and communications turn out to be extremely non-stationary and nonlinear time series. Traditional FFT-based power spectral analysis fails to deal with these transient signals. To provide more efficient way for investigating non-stationary and nonlinear signals with high time-frequency resolution and extract more information regarding the transient frequency features involved in the signals, a novel method based on the instantaneous frequency distribution is developed in this paper to provide the time-frequency distribution of the practical signals. The aim of this contribution is to explore the role that both empirical mode decomposition and Hilbert transform can be used to play in such practical signals. Both simulation and experimental results were presented and analyzed to demonstrate the power and effectiveness of the proposed new time-frequency distribution.