Welch Autocorrelation Estimate

Since which is circular (or cyclic) correlation, we must use zero padding in each FFT in order to be able to compute the acyclic autocorrelation function as the inverse DFT of the Welch PSD estimate. There is no need to arrange the zero padding in zero-phase form, since all phase information is discarded when the magnitude squared operation is performed in the frequency domain.

The Welch autocorrelation estimate is biased. That is, as discussed in §5.6, it converges as to the true autocorrelation weighted by (a Bartlett window). The bias can be removed by simply dividing it out, as in (5.5).

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About the Author: 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.