Towards a theory of information processing on the time-frequency plane

摘要

Information processing theory aims to quantify how well signals encode information and how well systems process information. Time-frequency distributions have been used to represent the energy distribution of time-varying signals for the past twenty years. There has been a lot of research on various properties of these representations. However, there is a general lack of quantitative analysis in describing the amount of information encoded into a time-frequency distribution. This paper aims to quantify how well time-frequency distributions represent information by using information-theoretic distance measures. Different distance measures, such as Kullback-Leibler distance, Renyi distance, will be adapted to the time-frequency plane. Their performance in quantifying the information in a given signal will be compared. A sensitivity analysis for different distance measures will be carried out to assess their robustness under perturbation. Different example signals will be considered for illustrating the information processing in time-frequency distributions.