A new method for estimating the instantaneous frequency based on maximum likelihood

A brief comparison of several methods to estimate the instantaneous frequency (IF) is carried out taking into consideration computational complexity, bias, and variance. A new method to estimate the IF is then proposed for high signal-to-noise ratio applications. The new method was derived based on the derivative of the phase of the analytic signal and on the assumption that the modulation varies linearly with time. When compared to other methods of similar computational complexity, the proposed method presented smaller bias for a fixed window length and smaller variance for a given acceptable bias threshold.