Digital Filters for Instantaneous Frequency Estimation

TL;DR

This paper discusses digital filtering techniques for high-accuracy, low-latency frequency estimation of sinusoidal signals in noisy environments, emphasizing methods suitable for embedded systems and signals with polynomial phase.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes various digital filtering approaches for instantaneous frequency estimation, highlighting practical solutions for real-time applications with low complexity.

Findings

Recursive filtering methods improve estimation accuracy.

Long FFTs are computationally expensive for real-time systems.

Monte-Carlo simulations validate the effectiveness of proposed filters.

Abstract

This technical note is on digital filters for the high-fidelity estimation of a sinusoidal signal's frequency in the presence of additive noise. The complex noise is assumed to be white (i.e. uncorrelated) however it need not be Gaussian. The complex signal is assumed to be of (approximately) constant magnitude and (approximately) polynomial phase such as the chirps emitted by bats, whale songs, pulse-compression radars, and frequency-modulated (FM) radios, over sufficiently short timescales. Such digital signals may be found at the end of a sequence of analogue heterodyning (i.e. mixing and low-pass filtering), down to a bandwidth that is matched to an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC), followed by digital heterodyning and sample rate reduction (optional) to match the clock frequency of the processor. The spacing of the discrete frequency bins (in cycles per sample) produced by the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is equal to the reciprocal of the window length (in samples). However, a long FFT (for fine frequency resolution) has a high complexity and a long latency, which may be prohibitive in embedded closed-loop systems, and unnecessary when the channel only contains a single sinusoid. In such cases, and for signals of constant frequency, the conventional approach involves the (weighted) average of instantaneous phase differences. General, naive, optimal, and pragmatic (recursive), filtering solutions are discussed and analysed here using Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations.