Robust time-frequency analysis of newborn EEG seizure corrupted by impulsive artefacts

The newborn EEG seizure is a nonstationary signal. The time-varying nature of the newborn EEG seizure can be characterized by time-frequency representations (TFRs) such as quadratic time-frequency distributions. The underlying time-frequency signatures of newborn EEG seizure, however, can be severely masked by short-time and high amplitude (STHA), or impulsive, artefacts. This type of artefact can be modelled as heavy-tailed noise. Robust time-frequency distributions (RTFDs) have been proposed as methods for TFRs which are robust to heavy-tailed noise. In this paper, we investigate the use of RTFDs for representing the underlying time-frequency characteristics of newborn EEG seizure in the presence of STHA artefacts.