DFT-Based Frequency Estimation of Multiple Sinusoids

Abstract

An accurate frequency estimation method of multi-component sinusoidal signal in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is proposed. The algorithm is implemented in the frequency domain and based on discrete Fourier transform (DFT). The maximum DFT spectral line and two Discrete-Time Fourier Transform (DTFT) samples located on the same side of the maximum DFT spectral line are used to estimate the frequency of a sinusoidal component. And this algorithm is utilized in both the coarse estimation and the fine estimation. Simulation results show that compared with the competing estimators, the presented method is closer to the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). And it is almost independent of the frequency displacement. The numerical complexity of the presented method is similar with the competing DFT-based algorithms.

Keywords

• DFT
• frequency estimation
• multiple sinusoids
• CRLB