HIGH-ACCURACY, LOW-DISTORTION TIME-FREQUENCY ANALYSIS OF SIGNALS USING ROTATED-WINDOW SPECTROGRAMS

A speech processing and analysis apparatus and method for generating a time-frequency distribution of a speech signal combines a set of spectrograms with varying window lengths and orientations to provide a parameter-less time-frequency distribution having good joint time and frequency resolution at all angular orientations. The analysis window of a spectrogram is rotated relative to the frequency components of the signal by preprocessing using a Fractional Fourier Transform to form rotated window spectrograms. In particular, to form the rotated window spectrogram, the signal is initially pre-processed using a Fractional Fourier Transform of angle .alpha., the spectrogram time-frequency distribution of the pre-processed signal is then computed using analysis window h(t) and then rotated by angle -.alpha.. The geometric mean of a set of rotated window spectrograms, which are indexed by both the analysis window length and the angular orientation of the window relative to the signal's time-frequency features, is then computed to form a combination of rotated window spectrograms.