FPGA-based hardware processing unit for time-frequency representation of a signal through Wigner-Ville distribution

In some applications, it is necessary to use a time-frequency representation (TFR) for showing the energy density distribution of the frequency components through time. The Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) is a quadratic TFR, which has been recently of great interest for researchers, due to its independence from the kind or size of the window chosen, and its inherent suitability for analyzing non-stationary signals. However, the WVD computational complexity makes it extremely time-consuming processes. In this work, a generic FPGA-based portable architecture for calculating the WVD and the corresponding ambiguity function is proposed. To assess the effectiveness and performance of the proposed generic hardware architecture different study cases are considered. Obtained results demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of the proposed FPGA-based, reconfigurable architecture for real-time computation of WVD.