Zeros of the Spectrogram of Colored Noise

We study the expected number of zeros of the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) with a Gaussian window for signals degraded by complex Gaussian colored noise. We provide an exact formula for this quantity and investigate its asymptotic behavior. From a computational perspective, we propose an algorithmic method to recover a smoothed power spectral density (PSD) directly from the spatial distribution of the transform’s zeros. Our results formalize the commonly-held heuristic that detection algorithms based on spectrogram zeros, though designed for white noise, also perform adequately under moderately colored noise.