Wavelets II - Vanishing Moments and Spectral Factorization
●1 commentIn the previous blog post I described the workings of the Fast Wavelet Transform (FWT) and how wavelets and filters are related. As promised, in this article we will see how to construct useful filters. Concretely, we will find a way to calculate...
The Power Spectrum
●2 commentsOften, when calculating the spectrum of a sampled signal, we are interested in relative powers, and we don't care about the absolute accuracy of the y axis. However, when the sampled signal represents an analog signal, we sometimes need an accurate picture of the analog signal's power in the frequency domain. This post shows how to calculate an accurate power spectrum.
New Comments System (please help me test it)
I thought it would take me a day or two to implement, it took almost two weeks...But here it is, the new comments systems for blogs, heavily inspired by the forum system I developed earlier this year. Which means that:You can easily add...
Wavelets I - From Filter Banks to the Dilation Equation
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts about wavelets, particularly about the Fast Wavelet Transform (FWT). The FWT is extremely useful in practice and also very interesting from a theoretical point of view. Of course there...
The Real Star of Star Trek
Unless you've been living under a rock recently, you're probably aware that this month is the 50-year anniversary of the original Star Trek show on American television. It's an anniversary worth noting, as did Time Magazine with their special...
An s-Plane to z-Plane Mapping Example
While surfing around the Internet recently I encountered the 's-plane to z-plane mapping' diagram shown in Figure 1. At first I thought the diagram was neat because it's a good example of the old English idiom: "A picture is worth a thousand...
Should DSP Undergraduate Students Study Z-transform Regions of Convergence?
●2 commentsNot long ago I presented my 3-day DSP class to a group of engineers at Tektronix Inc. in Beaverton Oregon [1]. After I finished covering my material on IIR filters' z-plane pole locations and filter stability, one of the Tektronix engineers asked...
Use DPLL to Lock Digital Oscillator to 1PPS Signal
Introduction There are occasions where it is desirable to lock a digital oscillator to an external time reference such as the 1PPS (One Pulse Per Second) signal output from a GPS receiver. One approach would be to synchronize a fixed frequency...
Implementing Impractical Digital Filters
This blog discusses a problematic situation that can arise when we try to implement certain digital filters. Occasionally in the literature of DSP we encounter impractical digital IIR filter block diagrams, and by impractical I mean block...
An Astounding Digital Filter Design Application
I've recently encountered a digital filter design application that astonished me with its design flexibility, capability, and ease of use. The software is called the " ASN Filter Designer." After experimenting with a demo version of...
An s-Plane to z-Plane Mapping Example
While surfing around the Internet recently I encountered the 's-plane to z-plane mapping' diagram shown in Figure 1. At first I thought the diagram was neat because it's a good example of the old English idiom: "A picture is worth a thousand...
Python scipy.signal IIR Filter Design
●2 commentsIntroduction The following is an introduction on how to design an infinite impulse response (IIR) filters using the Python scipy.signal package. This post, mainly, covers how to use the scipy.signal package and is not a thorough...
Canonic Signed Digit (CSD) Representation of Integers
●1 commentIn my last post I presented Matlab code to synthesize multiplierless FIR filters using Canonic Signed Digit (CSD) coefficients. I included a function dec2csd1.m (repeated here in Appendix A) to convert decimal integers to binary CSD...
Delay estimation by FFT
●3 commentsGiven x=sig(t) and y=ref(t), returns [c, ref(t+delta), delta)] = fitSignal(y, x);:Estimates and corrects delay and scaling factor between two signals Code snippet This article relates to the Matlab / Octave code snippet: Delay estimation with...
Adventures in Signal Processing with Python
Author’s note: This article was originally called Adventures in Signal Processing with Python (MATLAB? We don’t need no stinkin' MATLAB!) — the allusion to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has been removed, in deference to being...
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...
Pulse Shaping in Single-Carrier Communication Systems
●4 commentsSome common conceptual hurdles for beginning communications engineers have to do with "Pulse Shaping" or the closely-related, even synonymous, topics of "matched filtering", "Nyquist filtering", "Nyquist pulse", "pulse filtering", "spectral...
Sinusoidal Frequency Estimation Based on Time-Domain Samples
●6 commentsThe topic of estimating a noise-free real or complex sinusoid's frequency, based on fast Fourier transform (FFT) samples, has been presented in recent blogs here on dsprelated.com. For completeness, it's worth knowing that simple frequency estimation algorithms exist that do not require FFTs to be performed . Below I present three frequency estimation algorithms that use time-domain samples, and illustrate a very important principle regarding so called "exact" mathematically-derived DSP algorithms.
Wavelets II - Vanishing Moments and Spectral Factorization
●1 commentIn the previous blog post I described the workings of the Fast Wavelet Transform (FWT) and how wavelets and filters are related. As promised, in this article we will see how to construct useful filters. Concretely, we will find a way to calculate...
An Astounding Digital Filter Design Application
I've recently encountered a digital filter design application that astonished me with its design flexibility, capability, and ease of use. The software is called the " ASN Filter Designer." After experimenting with a demo version of...
