Guaranteed-Stable Sliding DFT Algorithm With Minimal Computational Requirements

Abstract

The discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is the most widely used technique for determining the frequency spectra of digital signals. However, in the sliding transform scenario where the transform window is shifted one sample at a time and the transform process is repeated, the use of DFT becomes difficult due to its heavy computational burden. This paper proposes an optimal sliding DFT (oSDFT) algorithm that achieves both the lowest computational requirement and the highest computational accuracy among existing sliding DFT algorithms. The proposed oSDFT algorithm directly computes the DFT bins of the shifted window by simply adding (or subtracting) the bins of a previous window and an updating vector. We show that the updating vector can be efficiently computed with a low complexity in the sliding transform scenario. Our simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing sliding DFT algorithms in terms of computational accuracy and processing time.