dsp processors interview questions
chegu.balaji said:
chickoos said:
Does "zero padding" improve FFT resolution?
Answer: No, because resolution is determined by the length of
observation interval, and zero padding does not increase this
length
Refer
http://home.eng.iastate.edu/~julied/classes/ee524/LectureNotes/l5.pdf
I did see on page 8/20 where he said it does not improve the resolution.
I will have to respectfully disagree. Zero-padding does indeed improve the frequency resolution. The DFT/FFT are "samples" of the DTFT at discrete frequencies. We get more samples (higher resolution) to the true DTFT by zero-padding. There are limitations which cannot be overcome by zero-padding, and you might put these in the category of accuracy, discrimination (of two closely spaced peaks), noise immunity, etc. But there is no doubt in my mind that zero-padding can improve the frequency resolution and the ability to separate peaks.
Page 8 of 50 at the top shows a rectangular window with zero-padding. The zero-padding does NOT change the blue envelope, but it does change the red samples of that envelope. When we time-multiply a sinusoid by the singal, we get frequency convolution. What we end up with is a scaled replica of the window DFT centered on the frequency of the sinusoid. (And if we have two sinusoids, then we end up with two scaled replica's which may overlap). The overall blue shape (representative of leakage) does not change. But the red samples become close together as we zero pad which certainly should improve our ability to see what is going on.
Note that zero-padding does not add any new information. We could in theory reconstruct/interpolate values of the DTFT between bins from the unpadded DFT a number of of other ways (which are failrly computationaly intensive).
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http://home.comcast.net/~electricpete/edaboard/ZeroPadDemoR2.doc
At the above link, I have prepared a Matlab demo that I believe shows an improvement in resolution associated with zero-padding.
There are two closely spaced sinusoids at frequencies f1 and f2:
f1 = 8.96*binwidth = 8.96 hz
f2 = 10.27*binwidth = 10.27 hz
These can clearly be distinguished in the zero-padded spectral plots 4 and 8, but not in the original non-padded spectral plots 2 and 6.
Easier direct comparision is shown on plots 9 and 10:
Plot 9 – superimposes plots 2/4 (no window with/without padding)
Plot 10 – superimposes plots 6/8 (Hanning window with/without padding)
If sure looks like an improvement in resolution to me. The leakage is not eliminated or reduced, but we have more detail (more samples along the DTFT curve) to discern what the underlying pattern is.
One thing that didn't quite make sense to me as I was preparing the writeup is why the apparent frequency of the two peaks is pushed farther apart than actual in the WINDOWED zero-padded spectrum (plot 8_) as compared to the NON-windowed zero-padded spectrum (plot 4) as I discussed in the "overview" section of my linked document. After thinking awhile, I think the answer might be buried in the phase relationships which are not shown on the plots.