Digital Filtering in the Frequency Domain
Time domain digital filtering, whether implemented using FIR or IIR techniques, has been very well documented in literature and been thoroughly used in many base band processor designs. However, with the advent of software defined radios as well as CPU support in more recent baseband processors, it has become possible and often desirable to filter signals in software rather than digital hardware. Whereas, time domain digital filtering can certainly be implemented in software as well, it becomes highly inefficient as the number of filter taps grows. Frequency domain filtering, using FFT and IFFT operations, is significantly more efficient and surprisingly easy to understand. This document introduces the reader to frequency domain filtering both in theory and in practice via a MatLab script.
The DFT of Finite-Length Time-Reversed Sequences
Recently I've been reading papers on underwater acoustic communications systems and this caused me to investigate the frequency-domain effects of time-reversal of time-domain sequences. I created this article because there is so little coverage of this topic in the literature of DSP.
Introduction to Real-Time Digital Signal Processing
Chapter 1 of the book: Real-Time Digital Signal Processing: Fundamentals, Implementations and Applications, 3rd Edition
Optimizing the Half-band Filters in Multistage Decimation and Interpolation
This article discusses a not so well-known rule regarding the filtering in multistage decimation and interpolation by an integer power of two.
Cascaded Integrator-Comb (CIC) Filter Introduction
In the classic paper, "An Economical Class of Digital Filters for Decimation and Interpolation", Hogenauer introduced an important class of digital filters called "Cascaded Integrator-Comb", or "CIC" for short (also sometimes called "Hogenauer filters"). Here, Matthew Donadio provides a more gentle introduction to the subject of CIC filters, geared specifically to the needs of practicing DSP designers.
The Risk In Using Frequency Domain Curves To Evaluate Digital Integrator Performance
This article shows the danger in evaluating the performance of a digital integration network based solely on its frequency response curve. If you plan on implementing a digital integrator in your signal processing work I recommend you continue reading this article.
Implementing Simultaneous Digital Differentiation, Hilbert Transformation, and Half-Band Filtering
Recently I've been thinking about digital differentiator and Hilbert transformer implementations and I've developed a processing scheme that may be of interest to the readers here on dsprelated.com.
Using the DFT as a Filter: Correcting a Misconception
I have read, in some of the literature of DSP, that when the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is used as a filter the process of performing a DFT causes an input signal's spectrum to be frequency translated down to zero Hz (DC). I can understand why someone might say that, but I challenge that statement as being incorrect. Here are my thoughts.
Correcting an Important Goertzel Filter Misconception
Correcting an Important Goertzel Filter Misconception
Understanding the 'Phasing Method' of Single Sideband Demodulation
There are four ways to demodulate a transmitted single sideband (SSB) signal. Those four methods are: synchronous detection, phasing method, Weaver method, and filtering method. Here we review synchronous detection in preparation for explaining, in detail, how the phasing method works. This blog contains lots of preliminary information, so if you're already familiar with SSB signals you might want to scroll down to the 'SSB DEMODULATION BY SYNCHRONOUS DETECTION' section.
Design IIR Bandpass Filters
In this post, I present a method to design Butterworth IIR bandpass filters. My previous post [1] covered lowpass IIR filter design, and provided a Matlab function to design them. Here, we'll do the same thing for IIR bandpass filters, with a Matlab function bp_synth.m
Design IIR Butterworth Filters Using 12 Lines of Code
While there are plenty of canned functions to design Butterworth IIR filters [1], it's instructive and not that complicated to design them from scratch. You can do it in 12 lines of Matlab code.
Algorithms, Architectures, and Applications for Compressive Video Sensing
The design of conventional sensors is based primarily on the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem, which states that a signal of bandwidth W Hz is fully determined by its discrete-time samples provided the sampling rate exceeds 2W samples per second. For discrete-time signals, the Shannon-Nyquist theorem has a very simple interpretation: the number of data samples must be at least as large as the dimensionality of the signal being sampled and recovered. This important result enables signal processing in the discrete-time domain without any loss of information. However, in an increasing number of applications, the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem dictates an unnecessary and often prohibitively high sampling rate. (See Box 1 for a derivation of the Nyquist rate of a time-varying scene.) As a motivating example, the high resolution of the image sensor hardware in modern cameras reflects the large amount of data sensed to capture an image. A 10-megapixel camera, in effect, takes 10 million measurements of the scene. Yet, almost immediately after acquisition, redundancies in the image are exploited to compress the acquired data significantly, often at compression ratios of 100:1 for visualization and even higher for detection and classification tasks. This example suggests immense wastage in the overall design of conventional cameras.
The Art of VA Filter Design
The book covers the theoretical and practical aspects of the virtual analog filter design in the music DSP context. Only a basic amount of DSP knowledge is assumed as a prerequisite. For digital musical instrument and effect developers.
Multirate Systems and Filter Banks
During the last two decades, multirate filter banks have found various applications in many different areas, such as speech coding, scrambling, adaptive signal processing, image compression, signal and image processing applications as well as transmission of several signals through the same channel. The main idea of using multirate filter banks is the ability of the system to separate in the frequency domain the signal under consideration into two or more signals or to compose two or more different signals into a single signal.
A Review of Physical and Perceptual Feature Extraction Techniques for Speech, Music and Environmental Sounds
Endowing machines with sensing capabilities similar to those of humans is a prevalent quest in engineering and computer science. In the pursuit of making computers sense their surroundings, a huge effort has been conducted to allow machines and computers to acquire, process, analyze and understand their environment in a human-like way. Focusing on the sense of hearing, the ability of computers to sense their acoustic environment as humans do goes by the name of machine hearing. To achieve this ambitious aim, the representation of the audio signal is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present an up-to-date review of the most relevant audio feature extraction techniques developed to analyze the most usual audio signals: speech, music and environmental sounds. Besides revisiting classic approaches for completeness, we include the latest advances in the field based on new domains of analysis together with novel bio-inspired proposals. These approaches are described following a taxonomy that organizes them according to their physical or perceptual basis, being subsequently divided depending on the domain of computation (time, frequency, wavelet, image-based, cepstral, or other domains). The description of the approaches is accompanied with recent examples of their application to machine hearing related problems.
Peak-to-Average Power Ratio and CCDF
Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) is often used to characterize digitally modulated signals. One example application is setting the level of the signal in a digital modulator. Knowing PAPR allows setting the average power to a level that is just low enough to minimize clipping.
Digital PLL's - Part 2
In Part 1, we found the time response of a 2nd order PLL with a proportional + integral (lead-lag) loop filter. Now let's look at this PLL in the Z-domain.
The Swiss Army Knife of Digital Networks
This article describes a general discrete-signal network that appears, in various forms, inside so many DSP applications.
Digital PLL's -- Part 1
We will use Matlab to model the DPLL in the time and frequency domains (Simulink is also a good tool for modeling a DPLL in the time domain). Part 1 discusses the time domain model; the frequency domain model will be covered in Part 2. The frequency domain model will allow us to calculate the loop filter parameters to give the desired bandwidth and damping, but it is a linear model and cannot predict acquisition behavior. The time domain model can be made almost identical to the gate-level system, and as such, is able to model acquisition.
The DFT Magnitude of a Real-valued Cosine Sequence
This article may seem a bit trivial to some readers here but, then again, it might be of some value to DSP beginners. It presents a mathematical proof of what is the magnitude of an N-point discrete Fourier transform (DFT) when the DFT's input is a real-valued sinusoidal sequence.
Method to Calculate the Inverse of a Complex Matrix using Real Matrix Inversion
This paper describes a simple method to calculate the invers of a complex matrix. The key element of the method is to use a matrix inversion, which is available and optimised for real numbers. Some actual libraries used for digital signal processing only provide highly optimised methods to calculate the inverse of a real matrix, whereas no solution for complex matrices are available, like in [1]. The presented algorithm is very easy to implement, while still much more efficient than for example the method presented in [2]. [1] Visual DSP++ 4.0 C/C++ Compiler and Library Manual for TigerSHARC Processors; Analog Devices; 2005. [2] W. Press, S.A. Teukolsky, W.T. Vetterling, B.R. Flannery; Numerical Recipes in C++, The art of scientific computing, Second Edition; p52 : “Complex Systems of Equations”;Cambridge University Press 2002.
OPTIMAL DESIGN OF DIGITAL EQUIVALENTS TO ANALOG FILTERS
The proposed optimal algorithm for the digitizing of analog filters is based on two existing filter design methods: the extended window design (EWD) and the matched–pole (MP) frequency sampling design. The latter is closely related to the filter design with iterative weighted least squares (WLS). The optimization is performed with an original MP design that yields an equiripple digitizing error. Then, a drastic reduction of the digitizing error is achieved through the introduction of a fractional time shift that minimizes the magnitude of the equiripple error within a given frequency interval. The optimal parameters thus obtained can be used to generate the EWD equations, together with a variable fractional delay output, as described in an earlier paper. Finally, in contrast to the WLS procedure, which relies on a “good guess” of the weighting function, the MP optimization is straightforward.
Auditory System for a Mobile Robot
The auditory system of living creatures provides useful information about the world, such as the location and interpretation of sound sources. For humans, it means to be able to focus one's attention on events, such as a phone ringing, a vehicle honking, a person taking, etc. For those who do not suffer from hearing impairments, it is hard to imagine a day without being able to hear, especially in a very dynamic and unpredictable world. Mobile robots would also benefit greatly from having auditory capabilities. In this thesis, we propose an artificial auditory system that gives a robot the ability to locate and track sounds, as well as to separate simultaneous sound sources and recognising simultaneous speech. We demonstrate that it is possible to implement these capabilities using an array of microphones, without trying to imitate the human auditory system. The sound source localisation and tracking algorithm uses a steered beamformer to locate sources, which are then tracked using a multi-source particle filter. Separation of simultaneous sound sources is achieved using a variant of the Geometric Source Separation (GSS) algorithm, combined with a multisource post-filter that further reduces noise, interference and reverberation. Speech recognition is performed on separated sources, either directly or by using Missing Feature Theory (MFT) to estimate the reliability of the speech features. The results obtained show that it is possible to track up to four simultaneous sound sources, even in noisy and reverberant environments. Real-time control of the robot following a sound source is also demonstrated. The sound source separation approach we propose is able to achieve a 13.7 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio compared to a single microphone when three speakers are present. In these conditions, the system demonstrates more than 80% accuracy on digit recognition, higher than most human listeners could obtain in our small case study when recognising only one of these sources. All these new capabilities will allow humans to interact more naturally with a mobile robot in real life settings.
Fractional Delay Farrow Filter
The Fractional Delay Farrow Filter is a digital filter that delays the discrete-time input signal by a fraction of the sample period. There are many applications where such a delay is necessary. As an example one can consider symbol synchronization in digital receivers, conversion between arbitrary sampling frequencies, echo cancellation, speech coding and speech synthesis, modeling of musical instruments, etc.
Zero-Order-Hold function as a model for DAConverters
The output of a digital to analog converter, short DAC, is a constant analog signal between two discrete samples. The DAC's output register retains its value from one sample up to the next sample. The network, which converts the binary value of the register into an analog voltage thus supplies a constant voltage and that leads to a stepped output signal. The analog smoothing filter connected at the output together with the frequency response of the DAC, modeled with a Zero-Order-Hold function, results in distortions. These are examined here and solutions to compensate for them are presented.
Design IIR Filters Using Cascaded Biquads
This article shows how to implement a Butterworth IIR lowpass filter as a cascade of second-order IIR filters, or biquads. We'll derive how to calculate the coefficients of the biquads and do some examples using a Matlab function biquad_synth provided in the Appendix. Although we'll be designing Butterworth filters, the approach applies to any all-pole lowpass filter (Chebyshev, Bessel, etc). As we'll see, the cascaded-biquad design is less sensitive to coefficient quantization than a single high-order IIR, particularly for lower cut-off frequencies.
Use Matlab Function pwelch to Find Power Spectral Density - or Do It Yourself
In this article, I'll present some examples to show how to use pwelch. You can also "do it yourself", i.e. compute spectra using the Matlab fft or other fft function. As examples, the appendix provides two demonstration mfiles; one computes the spectrum without DFT averaging, and the other computes the spectrum with DFT averaging.
Design IIR Bandpass Filters
In this post, I present a method to design Butterworth IIR bandpass filters. My previous post [1] covered lowpass IIR filter design, and provided a Matlab function to design them. Here, we'll do the same thing for IIR bandpass filters, with a Matlab function bp_synth.m
Design IIR Butterworth Filters Using 12 Lines of Code
While there are plenty of canned functions to design Butterworth IIR filters [1], it's instructive and not that complicated to design them from scratch. You can do it in 12 lines of Matlab code.






