This paper presents an efficient methodology based on empirical wavelet transform (EWT) to remove cross-terms from the Wigner–Ville distribution (WVD). An EWT-based filter bank method is suggested to remove the cross-terms that occur due to nonlinearity in modulation. The mean-square error-based filter bank bandwidth selection is done which has been applied for the boundaries selection in EWT. In this way, a signal-dependent adaptive boundary selection is performed. Thereafter, energy-based segmentation is applied in time domain to eliminate inter-cross-terms generated between components. Moreover, the WVD of all the components is added together to produce a complete cross-terms-free time–frequency distribution. The proposed method is compared with other existing methods, and normalized Rényi entropy measure is also computed for validating the performance.