Modified Cohen-Lee time-frequency distributions and instantaneous bandwidth of multicomponent signals

Cohen (1989, 1995) has introduced and extensively studied and developed the concept of the instantaneous bandwidth of a signal. Specifically, instantaneous bandwidth is interpreted as the spread in frequency about the instantaneous frequency, which is itself interpreted as the average frequency at each time. This view stems from a joint time-frequency distribution (TFD) analysis of the signal, where instantaneous frequency and instantaneous bandwidth are taken to be the first two conditional spectral moments, respectively, of the distribution. However, the traditional definition of instantaneous frequency, namely, as the derivative of the phase of the signal, is not consistent with this interpretation, and new definitions have therefore been proposed previously. We show that similar problems arise with the Cohen-Lee (1988, 1989) instantaneous bandwidth of a signal and propose a new formulation for the instantaneous bandwidth that is consistent with its interpretation as the conditional standard deviation in frequency of a TFD. We give the kernel constraints for a distribution to yield this new result, which is a modification of the kernel proposed by Cohen and Lee. These new kernel constraints yield a modified Cohen-Lee TFD whose first two conditional moments are interpretable as the average frequency and bandwidth at each time, respectively.