What is an intuitive explanation of the FFT algorithm? Where does it cut corners/optimize? How does it take phase into account?
An FFT is just a way to speed up a DFT, from O(N*N) to O(NlogN) by factorizing a complex matrix transform. It actually does not cut corners, but is not only faster, but usually slightly more accurate than a DFT due to less opportunities for arithmetic rounding errors or quantization noise via less total operations.
For strictly real input, a DFT is just N correlations against a set of orthogonal sine waves and N correlations against a set of orthogonal cosine waves, over a range of frequencies from DC to the half the sample rate. (In complex form, the cosine correlations being the real part, and the sine correlations the imaginary component). Those correlations can all be performed by an N*N complex matrix multiply.
The phase is just the relationship (atan2()) of the cosine correlations (even portion), and sine wave correlations (odd portion), of the input waveform. e.g. a waveform perfectly symmetric around the DFT window center will have a phase of zero, and a waveform perfectly antisymmetric around the center will have a phase of pi or -pi. And any (non-pathological real) waveform can be decomposed into a pair of even and odd waveforms, and thus has some phase (via atan2()) of each sinusoidal component, referenced to the edges of the DFT window (or to the center, if you do an fftshift beforehand).
For complex input, there is a similar complex arithmetic formulation of all the above, using correlations against unit complex exponentials (instead of sines and cosines).
Related
I am quite new to Digital Signal Processing. I am trying to implement an anti-cogging algorithm in my PMSM control algorithm. I follow this [documentation].
I collected velocity data according to the angle. And I translated velocity data to the frequency domain with FFT. But last step, Acceleration Based Waveform Analysis, a calculated derivative of FFT outputs with respect to time. Outputs are frequency domain how could I calculate derivative of FFT outputs with respect to time, and why does it do this calculation?
"derivative of FFT outputs with respect to time" doesn't make any sense, so even though the notation used in the paper seems to say just that, I think we can understand it better by reading the text that says "the accelerations are
found by taking the time derivative of the FFT fitted speeds".
That makes perfect sense: The FFT of the velocity array is used to interpolate between samples, providing velocity as a continuous function of position. That continuous function is then differentiated at the appropriate position (j in the paper) to find the acceleration at every position i. I didn't read closely enough to find out how i and j are related.
In implementation, every FFT output for frequency f would be multiplied by fi (that is, the frequency times sqrt(-1), not i the position) to produce the FFT of the acceleration function, and then the FFT basis functions would be evaluated in their continuous form (using Math.sin and Math.cos) to produce an acceleration at any desired point.
I'm currently working on a program in C++ in which I am computing the time varying FFT of a wav file. I have a question regarding plotting the results of an FFT.
Say for example I have a 70 Hz signal that is produced by some instrument with certain harmonics. Even though I say this signal is 70 Hz, it's a real signal and I assume will have some randomness in which that 70Hz signal varies. Say I sample it for 1 second at a sample rate of 20kHz. I realize the sample period probably doesn't need to be 1 second, but bear with me.
Because I now have 20000 samples, when I compute the FFT. I will have 20000 or (19999) frequency bins. Let's also assume that my sample rate in conjunction some windowing techniques minimize spectral leakage.
My question then: Will the FFT still produce a relatively ideal impulse at 70Hz? Or will there 'appear to be' spectral leakage which is caused by the randomness the original signal? In otherwords, what does the FFT look like of a sinusoid whose frequency is a random variable?
Some of the more common modulation schemes will add sidebands that carry the information in the modulation. Depending on the amount and type of modulation with respect to the length of the FFT, the sidebands can either appear separate from the FFT peak, or just "fatten" a single peak.
Your spectrum will appear broadened and this happens in the real world. Look e.g for the Voight profile, which is a Lorentizan (the result of an ideal exponential decay) convolved with a Gaussian of a certain width, the width being determined by stochastic fluctuations, e.g. Doppler effect on molecules in a gas that is being probed by a narrow-band laser.
You will not get an 'ideal' frequency peak either way. The limit for the resolution of the FFT is one frequency bin, (frequency resolution being given by the inverse of the time vector length), but even that (as #xvan pointed out) is in general broadened by the window function. If your window is nonexistent, i.e. it is in fact a square window of the length of the time vector, then you'll get spectral peaks that are convolved with a sinc function, and thus broadened.
The best way to visualize this is to make a long vector and plot a spectrogram (often shown for audio signals) with enough resolution so you can see the individual variation. The FFT of the overall signal is then the projection of the moving peaks onto the vertical axis of the spectrogram. The FFT of a given time vector does not have any time resolution, but sums up all frequencies that happen during the time you FFT. So the spectrogram (often people simply use the STFT, short time fourier transform) has at any given time the 'full' resolution, i.e. narrow lineshape that you expect. The FFT of the full time vector shows the algebraic sum of all your lineshapes and therefore appears broadened.
To sum it up there are two separate effects:
a) broadening from the window function (as the commenters 1 and 2 pointed out)
b) broadening from the effect of frequency fluctuation that you are trying to simulate and that happens in real life (e.g. you sitting on a swing while receiving a radio signal).
Finally, note the significance of #xvan's comment : phi= phi(t). If the phase angle is time dependent then it has a derivative that is not zero. dphi/dt is a frequency shift, so your instantaneous frequency becomes f0 + dphi/dt.
I have some geographical trajectories sampled to analyze, and I calculated the histogram of data in spatial and temporal dimension, which yielded a time domain based feature for each spatial element. I want to perform a discrete FFT to transform the time domain based feature into frequency domain based feature (which I think maybe more robust), and then do some classification or clustering algorithms.
But I'm not sure using what descriptor as frequency domain based feature, since there are amplitude spectrum, power spectrum and phase spectrum of a signal and I've read some references but still got confused about the significance. And what distance (similarity) function should be used as measurement when performing learning algorithms on frequency domain based feature vector(Euclidean distance? Cosine distance? Gaussian function? Chi-kernel or something else?)
Hope someone give me a clue or some material that I can refer to, thanks~
Edit
Thanks to #DrKoch, I chose a spatial element with the largest L-1 norm and plotted its log power spectrum in python and it did show some prominent peaks, below is my code and the figure
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
sp = np.fft.fft(signal)
freq = np.fft.fftfreq(signal.shape[-1], d = 1.) # time sloth of histogram is 1 hour
plt.plot(freq, np.log10(np.abs(sp) ** 2))
plt.show()
And I have several trivial questions to ask to make sure I totally understand your suggestion:
In your second suggestion, you said "ignore all these values."
Do you mean the horizontal line represent the threshold and all values below it should be assigned to value zero?
"you may search for the two, three largest peaks and use their location and probably widths as 'Features' for further classification."
I'm a little bit confused about the meaning of "location" and "width", does "location" refer to the log value of power spectrum (y-axis) and "width" refer to the frequency (x-axis)? If so, how to combine them together as a feature vector and compare two feature vector of "a similar frequency and a similar widths" ?
Edit
I replaced np.fft.fft with np.fft.rfft to calculate the positive part and plot both power spectrum and log power spectrum.
code:
f, axarr = plt.subplot(2, sharex = True)
axarr[0].plot(freq, np.abs(sp) ** 2)
axarr[1].plot(freq, np.log10(np.abs(sp) ** 2))
plt.show()
figure:
Please correct me if I'm wrong:
I think I should keep the last four peaks in first figure with power = np.abs(sp) ** 2 and power[power < threshold] = 0 because the log power spectrum reduces the difference among each component. And then use the log spectrum of new power as feature vector to feed classifiers.
I also see some reference suggest applying a window function (e.g. Hamming window) before doing fft to avoid spectral leakage. My raw data is sampled every 5 ~ 15 seconds and I've applied a histogram on sampling time, is that method equivalent to apply a window function or I still need apply it on the histogram data?
Generally you should extract just a small number of "Features" out of the complete FFT spectrum.
First: Use the log power spec.
Complex numbers and Phase are useless in these circumstances, because they depend on where you start/stop your data acquisiton (among many other things)
Second: you will see a "Noise Level" e.g. most values are below a certain threshold, ignore all these values.
Third: If you are lucky, e.g. your data has some harmonic content (cycles, repetitions) you will see a few prominent Peaks.
If there are clear peaks, it is even easier to detect the noise: Everything between the peaks should be considered noise.
Now you may search for the two, three largest peaks and use their location and probably widths as "Features" for further classification.
Location is the x-value of the peak i.e. the 'frequency'. It says something how "fast" your cycles are in the input data.
If your cycles don't have constant frequency during the measuring intervall (or you use a window before caclculating the FFT), the peak will be broader than one bin. So this widths of the peak says something about the 'stability' of your cycles.
Based on this: Two patterns are similar if the biggest peaks of both hava a similar frequency and a similar widths, and so on.
EDIT
Very intersiting to see a logarithmic power spectrum of one of your examples.
Now its clear that your input contains a single harmonic (periodic, oscillating) component with a frequency (repetition rate, cycle-duration) of about f0=0.04.
(This is relative frquency, proprtional to the your sampling frequency, the inverse of the time beetween individual measurment points)
Its is not a pute sine-wave, but some "interesting" waveform. Such waveforms produce peaks at 1*f0, 2*f0, 3*f0 and so on.
(So using an FFT for further analysis turns out to be very good idea)
At this point you should produce spectra of several measurements and see what makes a similar measurement and how differ different measurements. What are the "important" features to distinguish your mesurements? Thinks to look out for:
Absolute amplitude: Height of the prominent (leftmost, highest) peaks.
Pitch (Main cycle rate, speed of changes): this is position of first peak, distance between consecutive peaks.
Exact Waveform: Relative amplitude of the first few peaks.
If your most important feature is absoulute amplitude, you're better off with calculating the RMS (root mean square) level of our input signal.
If pitch is important, you're better off with calculationg the ACF (auto-correlation function) of your input signal.
Don't focus on the leftmost peaks, these come from the high frequency components in your input and tend to vary as much as the noise floor.
Windows
For a high quality analyis it is importnat to apply a window to the input data before applying the FFT. This reduces the infulens of the "jump" between the end of your input vector ant the beginning of your input vector, because the FFT considers the input as a single cycle.
There are several popular windows which mark different choices of an unavoidable trade-off: Precision of a single peak vs. level of sidelobes:
You chose a "rectangular window" (equivalent to no window at all, just start/stop your measurement). This gives excellent precission of your peaks which now have a width of just one sample. Your sidelobes (the small peaks left and right of your main peaks) are at -21dB, very tolerable given your input data. In your case this is an excellent choice.
A Hanning window is a single cosine wave. It makes your peaks slightly broader but reduces side-lobe levels.
The Hammimg-Window (cosine-wave, slightly raised above 0.0) produces even broader peaks, but supresses side-lobes by -42 dB. This is a good choice if you expect further weak (but important) components between your main peaks or generally if you have complicated signals like speech, music and so on.
Edit: Scaling
Correct scaling of a spectrum is a complicated thing, because the values of the FFT lines depend on may things like sampling rate, lenght of FFT, window, and even implementation details of the FFT algorithm (there exist several different accepted conventions).
After all, the FFT should show the underlying conservation of energy. The RMS of the input signal should be the same as the RMS (Energy) of the spectrum.
On the other hand: if used for classification it is enough to maintain relative amplitudes. As long as the paramaters mentioned above do not change, the result can be used for classification without further scaling.
This may be a naive question, but I didn't find exact details in searching.
In FFT with window overlapping, after we've applied window functions to sequences of data set with overlapping and got the FFT results, how do we combine those FFT results for overlapping sequence?
Do we just add them together, treating those frequency domain results as non-overlapping parts?
Are magnitudes of these results in complex numbers frequency magnitudes?
Thank you.
For each FFT you typically calculate the magnitude of each complex output bin - this gives you a spectrum (magnitude versus frequency) for one window. The sequence of magnitude spectra for all time windows is effectively a 3D data set or graph - magnitude versus frequency versus time - which is typically plotted as a a spectrogram, waterfall or time varying 2D spectrum.
In the specific case where the data is statistically stationary and you just want to reduce the variance you can average the successive magnitude spectra - this is called ensemble averaging. Normally though for time-varying signals such as speech or music you would not want to do this.
How do i get frequency using FFT? What's the right procedure and codes?
Pitch detection typically involves measuring the interval between harmonics in the power spectrum. The power spectrum is obtained form the FFT by taking the magnitude of the first N/2 bins (sqrt(re^2 + im^2)). However there are more sophisticated techniques for pitch detection, such as cepstral analysis, where we take the FFT of the log of the power spectrum, in order to identify periodicity in the spectral peaks.
A sustained note of a musical instrument is a periodic signal, and our friend Fourier (the second "F" in "FFT") tells us that any periodic signal can be constructed by adding a set of sine waves (generally with different amplitudes, frequencies, and phases). The fundamental is the lowest frequency component and it corresponds to pitch; the remaining components are overtones and are multiples of the fundamental's frequency. It is the relative mixture of fundamental and overtones that determines timbre, or the character of an instrument. A clarinet and a trumpet playing in unison sound "in tune" because they share the same fundamental frequency, however, they are individually identifiable because of their differing timbre (overtone mixture).
For your problem, you could sample the trumpet over a time window, calculate the FFT (which decomposes the sequence of samples into its constituent digital frequencies), and then assert that the pitch is the frequency of the bin with the greatest magnitude. If you desire, this could then be trivially quantized to the nearest musical half step, like E flat. (Lookup FFT on Wikipedia if you don't understand the relationship between the sampling frequency and the resultant frequency bins, or if you don't understand the detriment of having too low a sampling frequency.) This will probably meet your needs because the fundamental component usually has greater energy than any other component. The longer the window, the greater the pitch accuracy because the bin centers will become more closely spaced in frequency. However, if the window is so long that the trumpet is changing its pitch appreciably over the duration of the window, then the technique's effectiveness will break down considerably.
DansTuner is my open source project to solve this problem. I am in fact a trumpet player. It has pitch detection code lifted from Audacity.
ia added this org.apache.commons.math.transform.FastFourierTransforme package to the project and its works perfectly
Here is a short blog article on non-parametric techniques to estimating the PSD (power spectral density) along with some more detailed links. This might get you started in estimating the PSD - and then finding the pitch.