Asymmetric windows are of increasing interest to researchers because of the nonlinear and adjustable phase response, as well as alterable time delay. Short-time phase distortion can provide an essential improvement in speech coding, and also has better performance in speech recognition. The merits of asymmetric windows in the aspect of spectral behaviors have an important function in frequency component detection and parameter estimation. In this paper, the phase response of windows were further studied, and the phase characteristics of symmetric and asymmetric windows are described. The relationship between the barycenter of windows in the time domain, and the phase characteristic at the center of the main lobe in the frequency domain, was established. In light of the relationship, an improved version of the asymmetric window-based frequency estimation algorithm was proposed. The improved algorithm has advantages of straightforward implementation and computational efficiency. The numeric simulation results also indicate that the improved approach is more robust than the traditional method against additive random noise.