Fibonacci trick

I'm working on a video, tying the Fibonacci sequence into the general subject of difference equations.

Here's a fun trick: take any two consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, say 34 and 55.  Now negate one and use them as the seed for the Fibonacci sequence, larger magnitude first, i.e.

$-55, 34, \cdots$

Carry it out, and you'll eventually get the Fibonacci sequence, or it's negative:

$-55, 34, -21, 13, -8, 5, -3, 2, -1, 1, 0, 1, 1 \cdots$

This is NOT a general property of difference...

Harmonic Notch Filter

My basement is covered with power lines and florescent lights which makes collecting ECG and EEG data  rather difficult due to the 60 cycle hum.  I found the following notch filter to work very well at eliminating the background signal without effecting the highly amplified signals I was looking for.

The notch filter is based on the a transfer function with the form $$H(z)=\frac{1}{2}(1+A(z))$$ where A(z) is an all pass filter. The original paper [1] describes a method to...

Multimedia Processing with FFMPEG

November 16, 2015

FFMPEG is a set of libraries and a command line tool for encoding and decoding audio and video in many different formats. It is a free software project for manipulating/processing multimedia data. Many open source media players are based on FFMPEG libraries.

FFMPEG is developed under Linux but it can be compiled under most operating systems including Mac OS, Microsoft Windows. For more details about FFMPEG please refer

Understanding and Implementing the Sliding DFT

Introduction

In many applications the detection or processing of signals in the frequency domain offers an advantage over performing the same task in the time-domain.   Sometimes the advantage is just a simpler or more conceptually straightforward algorithm, and often the largest barrier to working in the frequency domain is the complexity or latency involved in the Fast Fourier Transform computation.   If the frequency-domain data must be updated frequently in a...

Introduction

Many DSP problems have close ties with the analog world. For example, a switched-mode audio power amplifier uses a digital control loop to open and close power transistors driving an analog filter. There are commercial tools for digital-analog cosimulation: Simulink comes to mind, and mainstream EDA vendors support VHDL-AMS or Verilog-A in their...

A Complex Variable Detective Story – A Disconnect Between Theory and Implementation

October 14, 2014

Recently I was in the middle of a pencil-and-paper analysis of a digital 5-tap FIR filter having complex-valued coefficients and I encountered a surprising and thought-provoking problem. So that you can avoid the algebra difficulty I encountered, please read on.

A Surprising Algebra Puzzle

I wanted to derive the H(ω) equation for the frequency response of my FIR digital filter whose complex coefficients were h0, h1, h2, h3, and h4. I could then test the validity of my H(ω)...

The Number 9, Not So Magic After All

This blog is not about signal processing. Rather, it discusses an interesting topic in number theory, the magic of the number 9. As such, this blog is for people who are charmed by the behavior and properties of numbers.

For decades I've thought the number 9 had tricky, almost magical, qualities. Many people feel the same way. I have a book on number theory, whose chapter 8 is titled "Digits — and the Magic of 9", that discusses all sorts of interesting mathematical characteristics of the...

Specifying the Maximum Amplifier Noise When Driving an ADC

I recently learned an interesting rule of thumb regarding the use of an amplifier to drive the input of an analog to digital converter (ADC). The rule of thumb describes how to specify the maximum allowable noise power of the amplifier [1].

The Problem Here's the situation for an ADC whose maximum analog input voltage range is –VRef to +VRef. If we drive an ADC's analog input with an sine wave whose peak amplitude is VP = VRef, the ADC's output signal to noise ratio is maximized. We'll...

A Remarkable Bit of DFT Trivia

I recently noticed a rather peculiar example of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) trivia; an unexpected coincidence regarding the scalloping loss of the DFT. Here's the story.

DFT SCALLOPING LOSS As you know, if we perform an N-point DFT on N real-valued time-domain samples of a discrete sine wave, whose frequency is an integer multiple of fs/N (fs is the sample rate in Hz), the peak magnitude of the sine wave's positive-frequency spectral component will be

where A is the peak amplitude...

Computing Translated Frequencies in Digitizing and Downsampling Analog Bandpass Signals

October 31, 20131 comment

In digital signal processing (DSP) we're all familiar with the processes of bandpass sampling an analog bandpass signal and downsampling a digital bandpass signal. The overall spectral behavior of those operations are well-documented. However, mathematical expressions for computing the translated frequency of individual spectral components, after bandpass sampling or downsampling, are not available in the standard DSP textbooks. The following three sections explain how to compute the...

The Number 9, Not So Magic After All

This blog is not about signal processing. Rather, it discusses an interesting topic in number theory, the magic of the number 9. As such, this blog is for people who are charmed by the behavior and properties of numbers.

For decades I've thought the number 9 had tricky, almost magical, qualities. Many people feel the same way. I have a book on number theory, whose chapter 8 is titled "Digits — and the Magic of 9", that discusses all sorts of interesting mathematical characteristics of the...

Computing Large DFTs Using Small FFTs

It is possible to compute N-point discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) using radix-2 fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) whose sizes are less than N. For example, let's say the largest size FFT software routine you have available is a 1024-point FFT. With the following trick you can combine the results of multiple 1024-point FFTs to compute DFTs whose sizes are greater than 1024.

The simplest form of this idea is computing an N-point DFT using two N/2-point FFT operations. Here's how the trick...

How Discrete Signal Interpolation Improves D/A Conversion

May 28, 20121 comment

Earlier this year, for the Linear Audio magazine, published in the Netherlands whose subscribers are technically-skilled hi-fi audio enthusiasts, I wrote an article on the fundamentals of interpolation as it's used to improve the performance of analog-to-digital conversion. Perhaps that article will be of some value to the subscribers of dsprelated.com. Here's what I wrote:

We encounter the process of digital-to-analog...

TCP/IP interface (Matlab/Octave)

Communicate with measurement instruments via Ethernet (no-toolbox-Matlab or Octave)

Purpose

Measurement automation is digital signal processing in a wider sense: Getting a digital signal from an analog world usually involves some measurement instruments, for example a spectrum analyzer. Modern instruments, and also many off-the-shelf prototyping boards such as FPGA cards [1] or microcontrollers [2] are able to communicate via Ethernet. Here, I provide some basic mex-functions (compiled C...

Introduction

Many DSP problems have close ties with the analog world. For example, a switched-mode audio power amplifier uses a digital control loop to open and close power transistors driving an analog filter. There are commercial tools for digital-analog cosimulation: Simulink comes to mind, and mainstream EDA vendors support VHDL-AMS or Verilog-A in their...

Spectral Flipping Around Signal Center Frequency

Most of us are familiar with the process of flipping the spectrum (spectral inversion) of a real signal by multiplying that signal's time samples by (-1)n. In that process the center of spectral rotation is fs/4, where fs is the signal's sample rate in Hz. In this blog we discuss a different kind of spectral flipping process.

Consider the situation where we need to flip the X(f) spectrum in Figure 1(a) to obtain the desired Y(f) spectrum shown in Figure 1(b). Notice that the center of...

Take Control of Noise with Spectral Averaging

Most engineers have seen the moment-to-moment fluctuations that are common with instantaneous measurements of a supposedly steady spectrum. You can see these fluctuations in magnitude and phase for each frequency bin of your spectrogram. Although major variations are certainly reason for concern, recall that we don’t live in an ideal, noise-free world. After verifying the integrity of your measurement setup by checking connections, sensors, wiring, and the like, you might conclude that the...

Setting the 3-dB Cutoff Frequency of an Exponential Averager

This blog discusses two ways to determine an exponential averager's weighting factor so that the averager has a given 3-dB cutoff frequency. Here we assume the reader is familiar with exponential averaging lowpass filters, also called a "leaky integrators", to reduce noise fluctuations that contaminate constant-amplitude signal measurements. Exponential averagers are useful because they allow us to implement lowpass filtering at a low computational workload per output sample.

Figure 1 shows...