Time–frequency image enhancement based on interference suppression in Wigner–Ville distribution

• A new high resolution adaptive time–frequency distribution (TFD) is proposed.
• The proposed TFD adapts the direction of smoothing kernel on point by point basis.
• The proposed TFD outperforms other methods in terms of its ability to resolve close components.

This paper proposes a time–frequency (t–f) image enhancement method for suppressing interference terms in the Wigner–Ville distribution. The proposed technique adapts the direction of the smoothing kernel locally at each t–f point, so that the smoothing kernel remains aligned with the ridges of the auto-terms. This local alignment of the smoothing kernel reduces cross-terms without degrading the energy concentration of auto-terms. The results indicate that the proposed time–frequency distribution outperforms other methods in terms of its ability to resolve close signal components.