When the conventional time frequency methods are applied to process multi component radar emitter signals, they have many cross terms, and cannot detect time domain parameters of each signal component and difficultly process signals in low signal to noise ratio. Aiming at these problems, a multi component radar emitter signal detection method based on S method (SM) was proposed. First, the SM time frequency distribution of signals was computed. Then, the instantaneous frequency and time of arrival and termination of each signal component was detected based on SM. Experimental results showed that the introduced approach can process linear and nonlinear frequency modulation signals, and has high time frequency resolution without disturbance of cross terms. The detection precisions in time domain and in frequency domain are more than 98.60% and 99.48%, respectively, and the detection ability is also strong in the low signal to noise ratio.
