Parameter Blind Estimation of Frequency-Hopping Signal Based on Time–Frequency Diagram Modification

Abstract To effectively estimate the parameters of the multiple frequency-hopping signals, a blind parameter estimation method based on time–frequency diagram modification is proposed. Firstly, the observed signal is transformed to the time–frequency domain, using short time Fourier transform with overlapping windows. Then an energy detection method based on adaptive threshold is used to modify the time–frequency diagram, and the parameters of the frequency-hopping signals are finally obtained from the modified spectrogram. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the method proposed can get a clear time–frequency diagram at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and its accuracy of parameter estimated is higher than that of previous methods. When SNR is −10 dB, estimation errors of frequency, hopping time and hop duration is 0.0002, 0.0008 and 0.0013, respectively, which are about 1–2 orders of magnitude lower over the previous method.