The Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) is a particularly useful technique for analysing nonstationary signals and has been studied extensively in recent years. An algorithm has been proposed for computing WVD requiring only real operations, but involving division by sine and cosine factors. However, this causes numerical instabilities because of roundoff errors in finite length registers. The authors present a fast and numerically stable algorithm for computing the WVD. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is also derived and compared with existing algorithms. © IEE, 1996.