Instantaneous frequency of an arbitrary signal

Abstract

This paper defines the non-negative pointwise instantaneous frequency (pIF) and pointwise instantaneous amplitude (pIA) of an arbitrary time signal to be the circular frequency and radius of curvature of the signal’s instantaneous trajectory on the complex plane consisting of the signal and its conjugate part from the Hilbert transform. One analytical and three computational methods are derived to prove and validate this concept. The analytical method is derived based on the definition of pIF and circle fitting. A five-point frequency tracking method is developed to eliminate the incapability of the original four-point Teager–Kaiser algorithm (TKA) for obtaining pIF of signals with moving averages. A three-point conjugate-pair decomposition (CPD) method is derived based on circle fitting using a pair of conjugate harmonic functions for frequency tracking. Moreover, the Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) uses the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to sift a signal’s instantaneous dynamic component from its sectional moving average (sMA) as the first intrinsic mode function, and then Hilbert transform is used to compute the first IMF’s frequency and amplitude as the sectional instantaneous frequency (sIF) and sectional instantaneous amplitude (sIA). Because finite difference is used in the five-point TKA, its accuracy is easily destroyed by noise. On the other hand, because CPD uses a constant and a pair of windowed regular harmonics to fit data points and estimate pIF and pIA, noise filtering is an implicit capability of CPD and its accuracy increases with the number of processed data points. Numerical simulations confirm that pIF and pIA are non-negative and physically meaningful and can be used for frequency tracking and accurate characterization of complex signals. However, sIF and sIA from HHT are more useful for system identification because the IMFs sifted by EMD often correspond to actual vibration modes.