HIGH ACCURACY FREQUENCY DETERMINATION FROM DISCRETE SPECTRA

Abstract

The problem of determining the characteristics of a sine wave from its discrete spectrum is considered. The nontriviality of the problem is caused basicly by a phenomenon called spectral leakage, that is, by the fact that the spectral envelope of a single sinusoid forms a bell-shaped curve, even in the ideal noiseless case. In the paper a simple and self-contained treatment of spectral leakage is presented and a computationally efficient frequency estimation method is derived, taking into consideration different types of time-domain windows.