Positive time-frequency distributions based on joint marginal constraints

This correspondence studies the formulation of members of the Cohen-Posch class of positive time-frequency energy distributions. Minimization of cross-entropy measures with respect to different priors and the case of no prior or maximum entropy were considered. It is concluded that, in general, the information provided by the classical marginal constraints is very limited, and thus, the final distribution heavily depends on the prior distribution. To overcome this limitation, joint time and frequency marginals are derived based on a “direction invariance” criterion on the time-frequency plane that are directly related to the fractional Fourier transform.