A computationally efficient method is proposed to estimate the instantaneous frequency of multi-component signals for both mono-sensor and multi-sensor recordings. The proposed scheme adopts a well known connected component linking method and extends it for signals with intersecting components. For mono-sensor recordings, the proposed method exploits the direction of ridges estimated through a gradient-based approach to estimate the IFs for crossing components. For multi-sensor recordings, the spatial diversity provided by a uniform linear array of sensors is exploited. The proposed multi-sensor IF estimation algorithm is applied for the estimation of the direction of arrival (DOA) of signal emitting sources. It is demonstrated that the DOA estimation method proposed in this paper is superior to the adaptive directional time-frequency distribution based method in terms of computational efficiency and performance.

提出了一种计算有效的方法来估计单传感器和多传感器记录的多分量信号的瞬时频率。所提出的方案采用了众所周知的连接分量链接方法，并将其扩展为具有相交分量的信号。对于单传感器记录，提出的方法利用通过基于梯度的方法估计的脊的方向来估计交叉分量的IF。对于多传感器记录，利用了由传感器的均匀线性阵列提供的空间多样性。提出的多传感器中频估计算法被应用于信号发射源的到达方向（DOA）的估计。