Conventional Fourier analysis can give only limited information about the dynamic characteristics of nonstationary signals. Instead, time-frequency analysis is widely used to investigate the nonstationary signal in detail. Several time-frequency analysis methods are compared for a typical acoustic emission burst generated during the impact between a ferrite ceramic and aluminum plate. This AE burst is inherently nonstationary and random containing many frequency contents, which leads to severe interference between cross terms in bilinear convolution type distributions. The smoothing and reassignment processes can improve the readability and resolution of the results. Spectrogram and scalogram of the AE burst are obtained and compared to get the characteristics information. Renyi entropies are computed for various bilinear time-frequency transforms to evaluate the randomness. These bilinear transforms are reassigned by using the improved algorithm in discrete computation.