A novel approach to extracting useful information from noisy TFDs using 2D local entropy measures

Abstract

Abstract The paper proposes a novel approach for extraction of useful information and blind source separation of signal components from noisy data in the time-frequency domain. The method is based on the local Rényi entropy calculated inside adaptive, data-driven 2D regions, the sizes of which are calculated utilizing the improved, relative intersection of confidence intervals (RICI) algorithm. One of the advantages of the proposed technique is that it does not require any prior knowledge on the signal, its components, or noise, but rather the processing is performed on the noisy signal mixtures. Also, it is shown that the method is robust to the selection of time-frequency distributions (TFDs). It has been tested for different signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs), both for synthetic and real-life data. When compared to fixed TFD thresholding, adaptive TFD thresholding based on RICI rule and the 1D entropy-based approach, the proposed adaptive method significantly increases classification accuracy (by up to 11.53%) and F1 score (by up to 7.91%). Hence, this adaptive, data-driven, entropy-based technique is an efficient tool for extracting useful information from noisy data in the time-frequency domain.

Keywords

• Rényi entropy
• Time-frequency distributions
• Relative intersection of confidence intervals
• Adaptive thresholding