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Lossless Filters
To motivate the idea of paraunitary filters, let's first review some
properties of lossless filters, progressing from the simplest cases up
to paraunitary filter banks:
- A linear, time-invariant filter
is said to be
lossless (or
allpass) if it preserves signal
energy. That is, if the input signal is
, and the output
signal is
, then we have
In terms of the
signal norm
, this can be
expressed more succinctly as
Notice that only stable filters can be lossless since, otherwise,
. We further assume all filters are causal for
simplicity.
- It is straightforward to show that losslessness implies
That is, the frequency response must have magnitude 1 everywhere on
the unit circle in the
plane. Another way to express this is to
write
and this form generalizes to
over the entire the
plane.
- The paraconjugate of a transfer function may be defined as the
analytic continuation of the complex conjugate from the unit circle to
the whole
plane:
where
denotes complex conjugation of the
coefficients only of
and not the powers of
.
For example, if
, then
. We can
write, for example,
in which the conjugation of
serves to cancel the outer
conjugation.
We refrain from conjugating
in the definition of the paraconjugate
becase
is not analytic in the complex-variables sense.
Instead, we invert
, which is analytic, and which
reduces to complex conjugation on the unit circle.
The paraconjugate may be used to characterize allpass filters as
follows:
- A causal, stable, filter
is allpass if and only if
Note that this is equivalent to the previous result on the unit
circle since
To generalize lossless filters to the multi-input, multi-output (MIMO)
case, we must generalize conjugation to MIMO transfer function
matrices:
- A
transfer function matrix
is
said to be lossless
if it is stable and its frequency-response matrix
is
unitary. That is,
for all
, where
denotes the
identity
matrix, and
denotes the Hermitian transpose
(complex-conjugate transpose) of
:
- Note that
is a
matrix
product of a
times a
matrix. If
, then
the rank must be deficient. Therefore, we must have
.
(There must be at least as many outputs as there are inputs, but it's
ok to have extra outputs.)
- A lossless
transfer function matrix
is paraunitary,
i.e.,
Thus, every paraunitary matrix transfer function is unitary on
the unit circle for all
. Away from the unit circle,
paraunitary
is the unique analytic continuation of unitary
.
Previous:
ParaconjugationNext:
Lossless Filter Examples
written by Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at
Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.