MATLAB: Medfreq with delta-F threshold

medfreq

I am using the medfreq function to extract fast freq changes (few ms) in a sinewave signal. The function seems to work pretty well and better than "tfridge" (less artifacts), "sst" (faster) and instfreq (less artifacts).
however, when the source causes the signal to change in amplitude and no freq changes are present, it is when my problem starts. If one would imagine a spectrogram rapresentation of this: the signal would be a constant line, with some fast peaks occurring here and there (chirps). Using the medfreq function these are nicely detected.
Changes in amplitude are caused by movements in the signal source and cause the spectrogram trace to have gaps. In absence of freq modulations (chirps), the medfreq function detects a lot of noise – in correspondence of those gaps.
This suggests me that the medfreq function works "point to point", otherwise the gaps would be detected as "sinks" in the medfreq trace (but I could be wrong). Is there a way to impose a fixed range of freq in which the median is searched ? or somehow make it so that gaps in the main freq component are not creating artifacts which would be confused for chirps ?

Best Answer

From what I can tell your sinusoid is around ~895 Hz and has fairly clean second and third harmonics. So I took that as the starting point. The approach is to bandpass about each of the harmonics, mix down, filter and reconstruct the instantaneous frequency; if you divide each of the harmonics by its order, the overlaid results have reasonable agreement.
Anyways, this should hopefully get you started.
load seg1
Fs = 20e3;
%  carrier
Fc = 895;
% choose 100 Hz (one-sided) bandwidth about carrier
bw = 100;
% attempt FM demodulation about carrier
[Finst1, Tinst] = instfreq_bb(seg1, Fs, Fc, bw);
[Finst2, Tinst] = instfreq_bb(seg1, Fs, 2*Fc, bw);
[Finst3, Tinst] = instfreq_bb(seg1, Fs, 3*Fc, bw);
% superimpose 
plot(Tinst,[Finst1(:) Finst2(:)/2 Finst3(:)/3 (Finst1(:)+Finst2(:)/2+Finst3(:)/3)/3])
ylabel('Freq');
xlabel('Time');
legend('1st','2nd / 2','3rd / 3','average')
function [Finst, Tinst] = instfreq_bb(xx, Fs, Fc, bw)
%spectrogram(xx,kaiser(1024,10),1000,1024,20e3,'yaxis','power')
% pre-filter about carrier
x = bandpass(xx, Fc+[-bw bw], Fs, 'Steepness',.5);
%spectrogram(x,kaiser(1024,10),1000,1024,20e3,'yaxis','power')
t = (0:numel(x)-1)./Fs;
% mix down
z = complex(x .* cos(-2*pi*Fc*t), ...
            x .* sin(-2*pi*Fc*t));
% filter
bb = lowpass(z,bw,Fs,'Steepness',0.99);
%spectrogram(bb,kaiser(1024,10),1000,1024,20e3,'yaxis','power','centered')
% fetch instantaneous frequency from angular component.
Finst = angle(bb(2:end).*conj(bb(1:end-1))).*Fs/(2*pi)+Fc;
% fetch weighted time.
Tinst = t(1:end-1)+t(2)/2;
end
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