An efficient accuracy improvement method for cable defect location based on instantaneous filtering in time-frequency domain.

• Extraction of distant and soft defect time–frequency distribution surrounded by interference. • Instantaneous filtering may help detect extremely weak impedance discontinuities. • The proposed method has better location accuracy compared with traditional Wigner-Ville distribution methods. Time-frequency domain reflectometry is a highly sensitive method to locate cable defect. However, locating a potential defect far from the cable head may be less accurate because of the signal amplitude attenuation and the interference parts. To solve the problem, this paper proposes an accuracy improvement method based on instantaneous filtering in time-frequency domain. The method extracts the frequency spectrum of the time-frequency signal, and then filters the spectrum and reconstructs the signal based on the difference between the signal and interference spectra, which can eliminate the interference and improve the location accuracy. In simulation, the location error of this method improves from 5.47 % to 0.57 %. In experiment, the proposed method reduces the location errors and magnifies the location peaks of the breakage defect, thermal aging defect, and ground faults. For the defects studied in this paper, the method improves the defect location accuracy and defect amplitude detectability of TFDR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]