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Algebra's Laws of Powers and Roots: Handle With Care

Rick Lyons September 25, 202319 comments

Recently, for entertainment, I tried to solve a puzzling algebra problem featured on YouTube [1]. In due course I learned that algebra’s $$(a^x)^y=a^{xy}\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad\qquad(1)$$

Law of Powers identity is not always valid (not always true) if variable a is real and exponents x and y are complex-valued.

The fact that Eq. (1) can’t reliably be used with complex x and y exponents surprised me. And then I thought, “Humm, …what other of algebra’s identities may also...


A Fast Guaranteed-Stable Sliding DFT Algorithm

Rick Lyons June 15, 202321 comments

This blog presents a most computationally-efficient guaranteed-stable real-time sliding discrete Fourier transform (SDFT) algorithm. The phrase “real-time” means the network computes one spectral output sample, equal to a single-bin output of an N‑point discrete Fourier transform (DFT), for each input signal sample.

Proposed Guaranteed Stable SDFT

My proposed guaranteed stable SDFT, whose development is given in [1], is shown in Figure 1(a). The output sequence Xk(n) is an N-point...


A New Contender in the Quadrature Oscillator Race

Rick Lyons September 24, 20227 comments

This blog advocates a relatively new and interesting quadrature oscillator developed by A. David Levine in 2009 and independently by Martin Vicanek in 2015 [1]. That oscillator is shown in Figure 1.

The time domain equations describing the Figure 1 oscillator are

     w(n) =...


A DSP Quiz Question

Rick Lyons December 5, 202112 comments

Here's a DSP Quiz Question that I hope you find mildly interesting

BACKGROUND

Due to the periodic natures an N-point discrete Fourier transform (DFT) sequence and that sequence’s inverse DFT, it is occasionally reasonable to graphically plot either of those sequences as a 3-dimensional (3D) circular plot. For example, Figure 1(a) shows a length-32 x(n) sequence with its 3D circular plot given in Figure 1(b).

HERE'S THE QUIZ QUESTION:

I was reading a paper by an audio DSP engineer where the...

An Efficient Full-Band Sliding DFT Spectrum Analyzer

Rick Lyons April 1, 20217 comments

In this blog I present two computationally efficient full-band discrete Fourier transform (DFT) networks that compute the 0th bin and all the positive-frequency bin outputs for an N-point DFT in real-time on a sample-by-sample basis.

An Even-N Spectrum Analyzer

The full-band sliding DFT (SDFT) spectrum analyzer network, where the DFT size N is an even integer, is shown in Figure 1(a). The x[n] input sequence is restricted to be real-only valued samples. Notice that the only real parts of...


A Simpler Goertzel Algorithm

Rick Lyons February 4, 2021

In this blog I propose a Goertzel algorithm that is simpler than the version of the Goertzel algorithm that is traditionally presented DSP textbooks. Below I very briefly describe the DSP textbook version of the Goertzel algorithm followed by a description of my proposed simpler algorithm.

The Traditional DSP Textbook Goertzel Algorithm

The so-called Goertzel algorithm is used to efficiently compute a single mth-bin sample of an N-point discrete Fourier transform (DFT) [1-4]. The...


60-Hz Noise and Baseline Drift Reduction in ECG Signal Processing

Rick Lyons January 23, 20216 comments

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are obtained by monitoring the electrical activity of the human heart for medical diagnostic purposes [1]. This blog describes a very efficient digital filter used to reduce both 60 Hz AC power line noise and unwanted signal baseline drift that often contaminate ECG signals.

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We'll first describe the ECG noise reduction filter and then examine the filter's performance in a real-world ECG signal filtering example.Proposed ECG Noise Reduction Digital...


A Fast Real-Time Trapezoidal Rule Integrator

Rick Lyons June 13, 20204 comments

This blog presents a computationally-efficient network for computing real‑time discrete integration using the Trapezoidal Rule.

Background

While studying what is called "N-sample Romberg integration" I noticed that such an integration process requires the computation of many individual smaller‑sized integrations using the Trapezoidal Rule integration method [1]. My goal was to create a computationally‑fast real‑time Trapezoidal Rule integration network to increase the processing...


A Beginner's Guide To Cascaded Integrator-Comb (CIC) Filters

Rick Lyons March 26, 202060 comments

This blog discusses the behavior, mathematics, and implementation of cascaded integrator-comb filters.

Cascaded integrator-comb (CIC) digital filters are computationally-efficient implementations of narrowband lowpass filters, and are often embedded in hardware implementations of decimation, interpolation, and delta-sigma converter filtering.

After describing a few applications of CIC filters, this blog introduces their structure and behavior, presents the frequency-domain...


The DFT of Finite-Length Time-Reversed Sequences

Rick Lyons December 20, 201910 comments

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 blog because there is so little coverage of this topic in the literature of DSP.

This blog reviews the two types of time-reversal of finite-length sequences and summarizes their discrete Fourier transform (DFT) frequency-domain characteristics.

The Two Types of Time-Reversal in DSP

...

A Quadrature Signals Tutorial: Complex, But Not Complicated

Rick Lyons April 12, 201365 comments

Introduction Quadrature signals are based on the notion of complex numbers and perhaps no other topic causes more heartache for newcomers to DSP than these numbers and their strange terminology of j operator, complex, imaginary, real, and orthogonal. If you're a little unsure of the physical meaning of complex numbers and the j = √-1 operator, don't feel bad because you're in good company. Why even Karl Gauss, one the world's greatest mathematicians, called the j-operator the "shadow of...


Sum of Two Equal-Frequency Sinusoids

Rick Lyons September 4, 20147 comments

Some time ago I reviewed the manuscript of a book being considered by the IEEE Press publisher for possible publication. In that manuscript the author presented the following equation:

Being unfamiliar with Eq. (1), and being my paranoid self, I wondered if that equation is indeed correct. Not finding a stock trigonometric identity in my favorite math reference book to verify Eq. (1), I modeled both sides of the equation using software. Sure enough, Eq. (1) is not correct. So then I...


Understanding the 'Phasing Method' of Single Sideband Demodulation

Rick Lyons August 8, 201230 comments

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'...


A Beginner's Guide To Cascaded Integrator-Comb (CIC) Filters

Rick Lyons March 26, 202060 comments

This blog discusses the behavior, mathematics, and implementation of cascaded integrator-comb filters.

Cascaded integrator-comb (CIC) digital filters are computationally-efficient implementations of narrowband lowpass filters, and are often embedded in hardware implementations of decimation, interpolation, and delta-sigma converter filtering.

After describing a few applications of CIC filters, this blog introduces their structure and behavior, presents the frequency-domain...


Computing FFT Twiddle Factors

Rick Lyons August 8, 201019 comments

Some days ago I read a post on the comp.dsp newsgroup and, if I understood the poster's words, it seemed that the poster would benefit from knowing how to compute the twiddle factors of a radix-2 fast Fourier transform (FFT).

Then, later it occurred to me that it might be useful for this blog's readers to be aware of algorithms for computing FFT twiddle factors. So,... what follows are two algorithms showing how to compute the individual twiddle factors of an N-point decimation-in-frequency...


Digital Envelope Detection: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Rick Lyons April 3, 201622 comments

Recently I've been thinking about the process of envelope detection. Tutorial information on this topic is readily available but that information is spread out over a number of DSP textbooks and many Internet web sites. The purpose of this blog is to summarize various digital envelope detection methods in one place.

Here I focus on envelope detection as it is applied to an amplitude-fluctuating sinusoidal signal where the positive-amplitude fluctuations (the sinusoid's envelope)...


Four Ways to Compute an Inverse FFT Using the Forward FFT Algorithm

Rick Lyons July 7, 20151 comment

If you need to compute inverse fast Fourier transforms (inverse FFTs) but you only have forward FFT software (or forward FFT FPGA cores) available to you, below are four ways to solve your problem.

Preliminaries To define what we're thinking about here, an N-point forward FFT and an N-point inverse FFT are described by:

$$ Forward \ FFT \rightarrow X(m) = \sum_{n=0}^{N-1} x(n)e^{-j2\pi nm/N} \tag{1} $$ $$ Inverse \ FFT \rightarrow x(n) = {1 \over N} \sum_{m=0}^{N-1}...

The DFT Magnitude of a Real-valued Cosine Sequence

Rick Lyons June 17, 201410 comments

This blog 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.

To be specific, if we perform an N-point DFT on N real-valued time-domain samples of a discrete cosine wave, having exactly integer k cycles over N time samples, the peak magnitude of the cosine wave's...


Free DSP Books on the Internet

Rick Lyons February 23, 200824 comments

While surfing the "net" I have occasionally encountered signal processing books whose chapters could be downloaded to my computer. I started keeping a list of those books and, over the years, that list has grown to over forty books. Perhaps the list will be of interest to you.

Please know, all of the listed books are copyrighted. The copyright holders have graciously provided their books free of charge for downloading for individual use, but multiple copies must not be made or printed. As...


FFT Interpolation Based on FFT Samples: A Detective Story With a Surprise Ending

Rick Lyons April 16, 201841 comments

This blog presents several interesting things I recently learned regarding the estimation of a spectral value located at a frequency lying between previously computed FFT spectral samples. My curiosity about this FFT interpolation process was triggered by reading a spectrum analysis paper written by three astronomers [1].

My fixation on one equation in that paper led to the creation of this blog.

Background

The notion of FFT interpolation is straightforward to describe. That is, for example,...