Event-triggered sampling using signal extrema for instantaneous amplitude and instantaneous frequency estimation

•Analysis includes: zero-crossings (ZCs), level-crossings (LCs), and signal extrema.•For narrowband nonstationary signals in clean, and additive noise conditions.•Performance benefits when compared to traditional approaches.•Event-triggered sampling (ETS) can aid in improved analysis of nonstationary signals.

Event-triggered sampling (ETS) is a new approach towards efficient signal analysis. The goal of ETS need not be only signal reconstruction, but also direct estimation of desired information in the signal by skillful design of event. We show a promise of ETS approach towards better analysis of oscillatory non-stationary signals modeled by a time-varying sinusoid, when compared to existing uniform Nyquist-rate sampling based signal processing. We examine samples drawn using ETS, with events as zero-crossing (ZC), level-crossing (LC), and extrema, for additive in-band noise and jitter in detection instant. We find that extrema samples are robust, and also facilitate instantaneous amplitude (IA), and instantaneous frequency (IF) estimation in a time-varying sinusoid. The estimation is proposed solely using extrema samples, and a local polynomial regression based least-squares fitting approach. The proposed approach shows improvement, for noisy signals, over widely used analytic signal, energy separation, and ZC based approaches (which are based on uniform Nyquist-rate sampling based data-acquisition and processing). Further, extrema based ETS in general gives a sub-sampled representation (relative to Nyquist-rate) of a time-varying sinusoid. For the same data-set size captured with extrema based ETS, and uniform sampling, the former gives much better IA and IF estimation.

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