A real-time time-frequency based instantaneous frequency estimator

Commonly used time-frequency representations, like the short-time Fourier transform, the Wigner distribution and the higher order polynomial distributions, estimate the instantaneous frequency at the middle of the time-interval used in the analysis. For real time applications, like for example in radar signal processing, where the target parameters are estimated in the same way as the instantaneous frequency, the delay of a half of the considered interval may be unacceptable. Here, we propose a distribution that inherently estimates the instantaneous frequency at the end of the considered time interval. With a presented procedure for on-line implementation it can outperform other time-frequency representations for real time instantaneous frequency estimation.