Use of time-frequency representation for time delay estimation of non stationary multicomponent signals

In this paper, we propose three methods for the TOA and TDOA estimation, based on the Choi William Distribution (CWD), and suitable for single as well as multicomponent non stationary signals. The CWD exhibits some very interesting properties, which are exploited for the TOA estimation and which are discussed in the paper; moreover, it turns out to be almost insensitive to even large amounts of noise. The proposed methods are validated by means of numerical examples, which point out their effectiveness in terms of mean value and standard deviation of the estimated TDOA's.