Instantaneous frequency estimation of polynomial FM signals using the peak of the PWVD: statistical performance in the presence of additive gaussian noise

The peak of the polynomial Wigner–Ville distribution (PWVD) has been recently proposed as an estimator of the instantaneous frequency (IF) for a monocomponent polynomial frequency modulated (FM) signal. In this paper, we evaluate the statistical performance of this estimator in the case of additive white Gaussian noise and provide an analytical expression for the variance. We show that for a given PWVD order, the estimator performance can be improved by a proper choice of the kernel coefficients in the PWVD. A performance comparison between the PWVD based IF estimator and another recently proposed one based on the high-order ambiguity function (HAF) is also provided. Simulation results show that for a signal-to-noise ratio larger than 3 dB, the proposed sixth-order PWVD outperforms the HAF in estimating the IF of a thirdor fourth-order polynomial phase signal, evaluated at the central point of the observation interval.