,

AN INTRODUCTION TO TIME-FREQUENCY METHODS APPLIED

TO BIOMEDICAL SIGNALS

J H Dripps

Introduction

In the early 1980s all fetal monitor manufacturers introduced correlation for e&mathg fetal
heart rate from Doppler ultrasound.
Following that,I began investigating frequency domain solutions to the same problem and
developed techniques based on the Fast Fourier Transform 0.
When I compare my results
with time domain monitors I find them very similar. Under good conditions both techniques
produce usable results for about 97% of the time. The other 3% are rubbish.
I now think that neither approach is optimal. Doppler ultrasound often displays nonstationarities due to small changes in the position of the patient or the transducer. Neither
autocorrelation nor its Fourier transform, the power spectrum are defined for non-stationary
signals. That 3% minimum fail rate could be a lot worse!
The time has come to consider joint time-frequency analysis (JTFA). In this approach the time
domain signal is mapped from one dimension to two dimensions, time and frequency [I]. This
is intuitively sensible for signals like Doppler ultrasound that consist of multiple short bursts of
oscillation at different times and frequencies.
Other signals which are 'natural' for time-frequency transformation are speech signals, seismic
signals and the radar and sonar equivalents of medical ultrasound. Not only signals may
benefit. Time series analysis is carried out on derived variables such as heart rate in an effort
to detect periodicities. This is normally done using FFTs followed by analysis of power levels
in different frequency bands. Again, I feel that JTFA would give a clearer picture of the true
joint temporal and spectral behaviour of these time series.
Signal Processing ,Transformations and Limitations of the FFT

The purpose of signal processing is to perform transformations on signals to make some aspect
of them more easy to detect and quanti@. One of the most widely used transformations is the
FFT.However, it has its disadvantages. The main drawback of the FFT is that it 'hides' timing
information. This is illustrated in Fig. 1 which shows a waveform which steps through a
number of discrete frequencies in time. This is similar to a frequency hopping spread spectrum
signal and is clearer for tutorial purposes than a real biomedical signal.

J.H.Dripps is with the Signals and Systems Group at the Electrical Engineering Dept,
The University of Edinburgh

3 1997 The Institution of ElectricalEngineers.

'rinted and published by the IEE. Savoy Place, London WCPR OBL, UK.

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The signal is shown in the horizontal time domain window below the main time-frequency
domain window and consists of 3 cycles of a 12 Hz sinewave which hops to 36 Hz for 9
cycles, 24 Hz for 6 cycles and 48 Hz for 12 cycles. Thus the signal stays on a given frequency
for 0.25 seconds before hopping to the next frequency. The sample rate is 1kHz with 1/8
subband filtering. The signal total duration is 1 second and the frequency display is from O H z
to 60 Hz. The FFT spectrum of the whole signal is shown in the small vertical window to the
right of the main window. The problem with the FFT is obvious from this FFT window.
There is no clue as to the time sequential nature of the 4 components.

Joint Time-Frequency Domain Transforms General Characteristics

The main window in Fig. 1 shows the resuit of applying the time-frequency transform
technique known as the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT). What is of interest here is the
general characteristics of this time-frequency display. Notice how the signal is well located in
time and frequency. We can clearly see the non-stationarities in the signal. Since biomedical
signals are often non-statioxq then this facility to see the non-stationarities allows us to
preserve much temporal information.
We haven't got 'something for nothing' though. In the case of the STFT,many short,
overlapping FFTs have been performed and we have suffered a sigmficant increase in the
amount of data we need to store and to manipulate at the next stage (the post-processing stage).
For example, take the application in which I am interested, that of fetal heart Doppler
backscatter processing to estimate heart rate. With present time or frequency domain
techniques, the heart rate estimation process is carried out on a one dimensional signal - the
autocorrelation function or the power spectnun. In the time-frequency domain we are faced
with a two dimensional search. However, with modem hardware, this may be an acceptable
price to pay for a better product.
We will now look at six of the most commonly used time-frequency transforms
The STFT Spectrogram

This is the conventional FFT vrith short block length ,sliding along with full or partial overlap.
The performance of the STFT in terms of simultaneous time-frequency resolution is modest
compared with the other algorihns below. However, it is a lot quicker to compute and it has
the dependability of the FFT. In fact its more dependable as you are less likely to come to a
wrong conclusion from the STFT of a signal than you are from the FIT, where you cannot see
the time information. Fig. 1 shows the STET of the test signal as described above. Block
length was 64 here and the data was Hanning windowed. The most important parameter here
is the block length. If you make it too short you will improve time resolution at the expense of
frequency resolution. If you make it too long then you w
ill improve frequency resolution at the
expense of time resolution.
The Gabor Spectrogram (Also known as the Time Frequency Distribution Series)

This tecbque arises from the Gabor's work on optimum signal shaping for efficient data
transmission back in the 1940s. The Gabor time-frequency coefficients are the amplitudes of
sine/cosine waveforms like those of the FFT except that they have gaussian shaped envelopes.

The coefficients form a 2-Dmatrix of equally spaced points in the time-frequency plane. The
Gabor transform has an integer order parameter. When the order is zero, it is like the STFT
and as the order increases time-frequency resolution improves and the Gabor spectrogram
converges to the Wiper-Ville spectrogram with all its cross-product term problems (see
below). Order 3 is a good compromise between resolution and spurious terms. Fig. 2 shows
the order 3 Gabor spectrogram for the test signal.
Bilinear Algorithms - The W i p e r -Ville, Choi-Williams and Cone Shaped Distributions.
These are three of the best known transforms from the large, more general class of bilinear
transform also known as Cohen's class. Of the three,the Wigner-Ville is the easiest to
compute, but it suffers badly from cross products. The Choi-Williams is more computationally
intensive than the Wigner-Ville as it adds an extra parameter U which controls the degree of
smoothing in the spectrogram. This reduces the spurious terms which tend to oscillate rapidly,
going alternately positive and negative in a local region of the time-space plane. The cone
shaped distribution also uses an exponential weightmg term with parameter a to introduce
smoothing in an attempt to control spurious terms. Figs. 3 and 4 respectively show the Choiwilliams and cone shaped distribution spectrogtams for the test signal. In both cases their
parameter, a = 1.
The Adaptive Spectrogram
The adaptive algorithm is a development of the Gabor transform in that it uses Gussian shaped
basis functions to represent the signal, but, unlike the Gabor transform it does not force them to
be centred on a fixed time - frequency grid. The adaptive algorithm places the Gaussian basis
functions adaptively, adjusting their variance and position in the time-frequency plane to best
model the signal. The adaptive spectrogram offers the best time-frequency resolution of all the
above algorithms and it does not cause cross-term interference. It is well suited to the analysis
of quasi-stationary signals.

Conclusions
Time-frequency analysis preserves time and frequency mfomtion for non-stationary signals.
The Wigner-Ville, Choi-Williams and Cone Shaped distributions (all part of Cohen's class) all
produce 'crossproduct' terms which are not in the origmal signal. The Gabor spectrogram also
suffers increasingly from spurious terms as its integer order parameter, D, increases. Only the
STFT, and the adaptive algorithm don't suffer from cross products. The STFT is by far the
quickest to compute but has the poorest time-frequency resolution of all the above JTFA
techniques. Ref. [ 11 is an excellent introduction to the subject and to its applications.
References
[I] S. Qian and D.Chen "Joint Time-Frequency Analysis" - Methods and Applications, Pub.
Prentice- Hall,1996. ISBN 0-13-254384-2.

Figures

In the figures overleaf all displays are linear.

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Figure 1 't', 'f and It-f views of the 4 tone stepping test signal. The
spectrogram is fiom a 64 pt sliding STFT with a Hanning window.

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Figure 2 3rd order Gabor spectrogram (D = 3)

Figure 3 Choi-Williams spectrogram (a= 1)

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Figure 4 Cone shaped spectrogram (a= 1)

Figure 5 STFT again but using 32 point F F k

(Better time but poorer fiequency resolution than Fig.1)

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