A Synchrosqueezing Transform based Instantaneous Frequency Estimator

Instantaneous frequency is an important concept in signal processing. The instantaneous frequency estimated by the conventional Hilbert transform is susceptible to noise; even little noise will greatly influence the accuracy of estimation. We propose a robust method to estimate instantaneous frequency. A promising time-frequency analysis tool, called the synchrosqueezing transform, is applied in the proposed method. Based on the proposed filtering scheme, we can determine the distribution of the effective signal and then calculate the instantaneous frequency. Compared with the conventional extraction method based on Hilbert transform, the test results of synthetic signal and real data show that the proposed method can significantly improve the robustness and precision of instantaneous frequency estimation.