Highly Accurate and Noise-Robust Phase Delay Estimation using Multitaper Reassignment

The recently developed Phase-Scaled Reassignment (PSR) can estimate phase-difference between two oscillating transient signals with high accuracy. However, in low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) the performance of commonly applied reassignment techniques is known to deteriorate. In order to reduce variance in low SNR, we propose a multitaper PSR (mtPSR) method for phase-difference estimation between Gaussian transient signals. Three possible variations of this method are investigated and evaluated, mtPSR1, mtPSR2, and mtPSR3. All three variations are shown to outperform state-of-the-art methods and improve estimation accuracy in low SNR. The mtPSR1 is superior in terms of computational efficiency while the mtPSR3 achieves the highest accuracy. The mtPSR technique is also shown to be robust to model assumptions. An example of phase delay estimates of the electrical signals measured from the brain reveals promising results.