Hybrid linear/quadratic time-frequency attributes

We present an efficient method for robustly calculating time-frequency attributes of a signal, including instantaneous mean frequency, bandwidth, kurtosis, and other moments. Most current attribute estimation techniques involve a costly intermediate step of computing a (highly oversampled) two-dimensonal (2-D) quadratic time-frequency representation (TFR), which is then collapsed to the one-dimensonal (1-D) attribute. Using the principles of hybrid linear/quadratic time-frequency analysis (time-frequency distribution series), we propose computing attributes as nonlinear combinations of the (slightly oversampled) linear Gabor coefficients of the signal. The method is both computationally efficient and accurate; it performs as well as the best techniques based on adaptive TFRs. To illustrate, we calculate an attribute of a seismic cross section