Detection of chirp and other components in the time-frequency plane using the Hough and Radon transforms

We propose a novel approach to detect chirp (linear frequency modulated) components in multicomponent nonstationary signals in the time-frequency (TF) plane. The approach, based on the Hough and Radon transforms of TF distributions, can be used to detect chirp components with varying energy in unknown signal-to-noise ratio environments. In addition to detection of chirps, the proposed technique could also be used as a tool to evaluate the TF resolution provided by different TF analysis methods.