Application of Gabor–Wigner transform to inspect high-impedance fault-generated signals

•The method facilitates the inspection of high-impedance fault-generated signals.•A Gabor–Wigner transform is used to explore the signals generated by high-impedance faults.•This approach is useful to detect non-stationary signals.

The Gabor–Wigner transform was adopted in this study to explore the electric signals generated by high-impedance faults (HIFs). This method excels at detecting non-stationary signals and featuring high resolutions, while the effects of cross-term problem of Wigner distribution can be meanwhile decreased. To confirm the feasibility of this method, the approach was tested under different scenarios with comparisons to practical waveforms. Test results support the practicality of the method for the inspection of high-impedance fault-generated signals.