A key characteristic of a nonstationary signal, when analyzed in the time-frequency domain, is the signal complexity, quantified as the number of components in the signal. This paper describes a method for the estimation of this number of components of a signal using the short-term Rényi entropy of its time-frequency distribution (TFD). We focus on the characteristics of TFDs that make them suitable for such a task. The performance of the proposed algorithm is studied with respect to the parameters of the S-method TFD, which combines the virtues of both the spectrogram and the Wigner-Ville distribution. Once the optimal parameters of the TFD have been determined, the applicability of the method in the analysis of signals in low SNRs and real life signals is assessedScopu
