This work aims at exploring a general framework embedding techniques from classifiers, Time–Frequency Distributions (TFD) and dissimilarity measures for epileptic seizures detection. The proposed approach consists firstly in computing dissimilarities between TFD of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and secondly in using them to define a decision rule. Compared to the existing approaches, the proposed one uses entire TFD of EEG signals and does not require arbitrary feature extraction. Several dissimilarity measures and TFDs have been compared to select the most appropriate for EEG signals. Classifiers, such as Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Linear Discriminate Analysis (LDA) and k-Nearest Neighbours (k-NN), have been combined with the proposed approach. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, 13 different classification problems (including 2, 3 and 5-class) pertaining to five types of EEG signals have been used. The comparison between results obtained with the proposed approach and results reported in the literature with the same database of epileptic EEG signals demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach for seizure detection. Experimental results show that this approach has achieved highest accuracy in the most studied classification problems. A high value of 98% is achieved for the 5-class problem. Further, in most classification problems with 2 and 3-class, it also yields a satisfactory accuracy of approximately 100%. The robustness of the proposed approach is evaluated with the addition of noise to the EEG signals at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The experimental results show that this approach has a good classification accuracy at low SNRs.