Time-frequency representation of multicomponent chirp signals

Abstract This work deals with the analysis of chirp signals by means of time-frequency representation. We propose a chirp adapted time-frequency representation (CA) in which the interferences are significantly reduced. This method is applied to the analysis of acoustic echoes of a sphere target. Comparison of the results to other types of time-frequency distribution of the Cohen's class shows that the identification of the signal features with CA representation is clearer than with other types of bilinear time-frequency distributions.