Filter (signal processing)

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In signal processing, a filter is a device or process that removes some unwanted components or features from a signal. Filtering is a class of signal processing, the defining feature of filters being the complete or partial suppression of some aspect of the signal. Most often, this means removing some frequencies or frequency bands. However, filters do not exclusively act in the frequency domain; especially in the field of image processing many other targets for filtering exist. Correlations can be removed for certain frequency components and not for others without having to act in the frequency domain. Filters are widely used in electronics and telecommunication, in radio, television, audio recording, radar, control systems, music synthesis, image processing, and computer graphics.

Signal processing is a subfield of mathematics, information and electrical engineering that concerns the analysis, synthesis, and modification of signals, which are broadly defined as functions conveying "information about the behavior or attributes of some phenomenon", such as sound, images, and biological measurements. For example, signal processing techniques are used to improve signal transmission fidelity, storage efficiency, and subjective quality, and to emphasize or detect components of interest in a measured signal.

Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency, which emphasizes the contrast to spatial frequency and angular frequency. The period is the duration of time of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency. For example: if a newborn baby's heart beats at a frequency of 120 times a minute, its period—the time interval between beats—is half a second. Frequency is an important parameter used in science and engineering to specify the rate of oscillatory and vibratory phenomena, such as mechanical vibrations, audio signals (sound), radio waves, and light.

In electronics, control systems engineering, and statistics, the frequency domain refers to the analysis of mathematical functions or signals with respect to frequency, rather than time. Put simply, a time-domain graph shows how a signal changes over time, whereas a frequency-domain graph shows how much of the signal lies within each given frequency band over a range of frequencies. A frequency-domain representation can also include information on the phase shift that must be applied to each sinusoid in order to be able to recombine the frequency components to recover the original time signal.

Contents

There are many different bases of classifying filters and these overlap in many different ways; there is no simple hierarchical classification. Filters may be:

Linear filters process time-varying input signals to produce output signals, subject to the constraint of linearity. This results from systems composed solely of components classified as having a linear response. Most filters implemented in analog electronics, in digital signal processing, or in mechanical systems are classified as causal, time invariant, and linear signal processing filters.

A time-variant system is a system that is not time invariant (TIV). Roughly speaking, its output characteristics depend explicitly upon time. In other words, a system in which certain quantities governing the system's behavior change with time, so that the system will respond differently to the same input at different times.

A time-invariant (TIV) system has a time-dependent system function that is not a direct function of time. Such systems are regarded as a class of systems in the field of system analysis. The time-dependent system function is a function of the time-dependent input function. If this function depends only indirectly on the time-domain, then that is a system that would be considered time-invariant. Conversely, any direct dependence on the time-domain of the system function could be considered as a "time-varying system".

Linear continuous-time filters

Linear continuous-time circuit is perhaps the most common meaning for filter in the signal processing world, and simply "filter" is often taken to be synonymous. These circuits are generally designed to remove certain frequencies and allow others to pass. Circuits that perform this function are generally linear in their response, or at least approximately so. Any nonlinearity would potentially result in the output signal containing frequency components not present in the input signal.

Filter design is the process of designing a signal processing filter that satisfies a set of requirements, some of which are contradictory. The purpose is to find a realization of the filter that meets each of the requirements to a sufficient degree to make it useful.

The modern design methodology for linear continuous-time filters is called network synthesis. Some important filter families designed in this way are:

Network synthesis is a method of designing signal processing filters. It has produced several important classes of filter including the Butterworth filter, the Chebyshev filter and the Elliptic filter. It was originally intended to be applied to the design of passive linear analogue filters but its results can also be applied to implementations in active filters and digital filters. The essence of the method is to obtain the component values of the filter from a given rational function representing the desired transfer function.

Chebyshev filters are analog or digital filters having a steeper roll-off and more passband ripple or stopband ripple than Butterworth filters. Chebyshev filters have the property that they minimize the error between the idealized and the actual filter characteristic over the range of the filter, but with ripples in the passband. This type of filter is named after Pafnuty Chebyshev because its mathematical characteristics are derived from Chebyshev polynomials. The type I Chebyshev filters are called usually as just "Chebyshev filters", the type II ones are usually called as "inverse Chebyshev filters".

The Butterworth filter is a type of signal processing filter designed to have a frequency response as flat as possible in the passband. It is also referred to as a maximally flat magnitude filter. It was first described in 1930 by the British engineer and physicist Stephen Butterworth in his paper entitled "On the Theory of Filter Amplifiers".

In electronics and signal processing, a Bessel filter is a type of analog linear filter with a maximally flat group/phase delay, which preserves the wave shape of filtered signals in the passband. Bessel filters are often used in audio crossover systems.

The difference between these filter families is that they all use a different polynomial function to approximate to the ideal filter response. This results in each having a different transfer function.

In engineering, a transfer function of an electronic or control system component is a mathematical function which theoretically models the device's output for each possible input. In its simplest form, this function is a two-dimensional graph of an independent scalar input versus the dependent scalar output, called a transfer curve or characteristic curve. Transfer functions for components are used to design and analyze systems assembled from components, particularly using the block diagram technique, in electronics and control theory.

Another older, less-used methodology is the image parameter method. Filters designed by this methodology are archaically called "wave filters". Some important filters designed by this method are:

Terminology

Some terms used to describe and classify linear filters:

• The frequency response can be classified into a number of different bandforms describing which frequency bands the filter passes (the passband) and which it rejects (the stopband):
• Low-pass filter   low frequencies are passed, high frequencies are attenuated.
• High-pass filter   high frequencies are passed, low frequencies are attenuated.
• Band-pass filter   only frequencies in a frequency band are passed.
• Band-stop filter or band-reject filter  only frequencies in a frequency band are attenuated.
• Notch filter   rejects just one specific frequency - an extreme band-stop filter.
• Comb filter   has multiple regularly spaced narrow passbands giving the bandform the appearance of a comb.
• All-pass filter   all frequencies are passed, but the phase of the output is modified.
• Cutoff frequency is the frequency beyond which the filter will not pass signals. It is usually measured at a specific attenuation such as 3 dB.
• Roll-off is the rate at which attenuation increases beyond the cut-off frequency.
• Transition band, the (usually narrow) band of frequencies between a passband and stopband.
• Ripple is the variation of the filter's insertion loss in the passband.
• The order of a filter is the degree of the approximating polynomial and in passive filters corresponds to the number of elements required to build it. Increasing order increases roll-off and brings the filter closer to the ideal response.

One important application of filters is in telecommunication. Many telecommunication systems use frequency-division multiplexing, where the system designers divide a wide frequency band into many narrower frequency bands called "slots" or "channels", and each stream of information is allocated one of those channels. The people who design the filters at each transmitter and each receiver try to balance passing the desired signal through as accurately as possible, keeping interference to and from other cooperating transmitters and noise sources outside the system as low as possible, at reasonable cost.

Multilevel and multiphase digital modulation systems require filters that have flat phase delay—are linear phase in the passband—to preserve pulse integrity in the time domain, [1] giving less intersymbol interference than other kinds of filters.

On the other hand, analog audio systems using analog transmission can tolerate much larger ripples in phase delay, and so designers of such systems often deliberately sacrifice linear phase to get filters that are better in other ways—better stop-band rejection, lower passband amplitude ripple, lower cost, etc.

Technologies

Filters can be built in a number of different technologies. The same transfer function can be realised in several different ways, that is the mathematical properties of the filter are the same but the physical properties are quite different. Often the components in different technologies are directly analogous to each other and fulfill the same role in their respective filters. For instance, the resistors, inductors and capacitors of electronics correspond respectively to dampers, masses and springs in mechanics. Likewise, there are corresponding components in distributed element filters.

• Electronic filters were originally entirely passive consisting of resistance, inductance and capacitance. Active technology makes design easier and opens up new possibilities in filter specifications.
• Digital filters operate on signals represented in digital form. The essence of a digital filter is that it directly implements a mathematical algorithm, corresponding to the desired filter transfer function, in its programming or microcode.
• Mechanical filters are built out of mechanical components. In the vast majority of cases they are used to process an electronic signal and transducers are provided to convert this to and from a mechanical vibration. However, examples do exist of filters that have been designed for operation entirely in the mechanical domain.
• Distributed element filters are constructed out of components made from small pieces of transmission line or other distributed elements. There are structures in distributed element filters that directly correspond to the lumped elements of electronic filters, and others that are unique to this class of technology.
• Waveguide filters consist of waveguide components or components inserted in the waveguide. Waveguides are a class of transmission line and many structures of distributed element filters, for instance the stub, can also be implemented in waveguides.
• Optical filters were originally developed for purposes other than signal processing such as lighting and photography. With the rise of optical fiber technology, however, optical filters increasingly find signal processing applications and signal processing filter terminology, such as longpass and shortpass, are entering the field.
• Transversal filter, or delay line filter, works by summing copies of the input after various time delays. This can be implemented with various technologies including analog delay lines, active circuitry, CCD delay lines, or entirely in the digital domain.

Digital filters

Digital signal processing allows the inexpensive construction of a wide variety of filters. The signal is sampled and an analog-to-digital converter turns the signal into a stream of numbers. A computer program running on a CPU or a specialized DSP (or less often running on a hardware implementation of the algorithm) calculates an output number stream. This output can be converted to a signal by passing it through a digital-to-analog converter. There are problems with noise introduced by the conversions, but these can be controlled and limited for many useful filters. Due to the sampling involved, the input signal must be of limited frequency content or aliasing will occur.

Quartz filters and piezoelectrics

In the late 1930s, engineers realized that small mechanical systems made of rigid materials such as quartz would acoustically resonate at radio frequencies, i.e. from audible frequencies (sound) up to several hundred megahertz. Some early resonators were made of steel, but quartz quickly became favored. The biggest advantage of quartz is that it is piezoelectric. This means that quartz resonators can directly convert their own mechanical motion into electrical signals. Quartz also has a very low coefficient of thermal expansion which means that quartz resonators can produce stable frequencies over a wide temperature range. Quartz crystal filters have much higher quality factors than LCR filters. When higher stabilities are required, the crystals and their driving circuits may be mounted in a "crystal oven" to control the temperature. For very narrow band filters, sometimes several crystals are operated in series.

A large number of crystals can be collapsed into a single component, by mounting comb-shaped evaporations of metal on a quartz crystal. In this scheme, a "tapped delay line" reinforces the desired frequencies as the sound waves flow across the surface of the quartz crystal. The tapped delay line has become a general scheme of making high-Q filters in many different ways.

SAW filters

SAW (surface acoustic wave) filters are electromechanical devices commonly used in radio frequency applications. Electrical signals are converted to a mechanical wave in a device constructed of a piezoelectric crystal or ceramic; this wave is delayed as it propagates across the device, before being converted back to an electrical signal by further electrodes. The delayed outputs are recombined to produce a direct analog implementation of a finite impulse response filter. This hybrid filtering technique is also found in an analog sampled filter. SAW filters are limited to frequencies up to 3 GHz. The filters were developed by Professor Ted Paige and others. [2]

BAW filters

BAW (bulk acoustic wave) filters are electromechanical devices. BAW filters can implement ladder or lattice filters. BAW filters typically operate at frequencies from around 2 to around 16 GHz, and may be smaller or thinner than equivalent SAW filters. Two main variants of BAW filters are making their way into devices: thin-film bulk acoustic resonator or FBAR and solid mounted bulk acoustic resonators.

Garnet filters

Another method of filtering, at microwave frequencies from 800 MHz to about 5 GHz, is to use a synthetic single crystal yttrium iron garnet sphere made of a chemical combination of yttrium and iron (YIGF, or yttrium iron garnet filter). The garnet sits on a strip of metal driven by a transistor, and a small loop antenna touches the top of the sphere. An electromagnet changes the frequency that the garnet will pass. The advantage of this method is that the garnet can be tuned over a very wide frequency by varying the strength of the magnetic field.

Atomic filters

For even higher frequencies and greater precision, the vibrations of atoms must be used. Atomic clocks use caesium masers as ultra-high Q filters to stabilize their primary oscillators. Another method, used at high, fixed frequencies with very weak radio signals, is to use a ruby maser tapped delay line.

The transfer function

The transfer function of a filter is most often defined in the domain of the complex frequencies. The back and forth passage to/from this domain is operated by the Laplace transform and its inverse (therefore, here below, the term "input signal" shall be understood as "the Laplace transform of" (the time representation of) the input signal, and so on).

The transfer function ${\displaystyle \ H(s)}$ of a filter is the ratio of the output signal ${\displaystyle \ Y(s)}$ to that of the input signal ${\displaystyle \ X(s)}$ as a function of the complex frequency ${\displaystyle \ s}$:

${\displaystyle \ H(s)={\frac {Y(s)}{X(s)}}}$

with ${\displaystyle \ s=\sigma +j\omega }$.

The transfer function of all linear time-invariant filters generally share certain characteristics:

• For filters which are constructed of discrete components, their transfer function must be the ratio of two polynomials in ${\displaystyle \ s}$, i.e. a rational function of ${\displaystyle \ s}$. The order of the transfer function will be the highest power of ${\displaystyle \ s}$ encountered in either the numerator or the denominator.
• The polynomials of the transfer function will all have real coefficients. Therefore, the poles and zeroes of the transfer function will either be real or occur in complex conjugate pairs.
• Since the filters are assumed to be stable, the real part of all poles (i.e. zeroes of the denominator) will be negative, i.e. they will lie in the left half-plane in complex frequency space.

Distributed element filters do not, in general, produce rational functions but can often approximate to them.

The proper construction of a transfer function involves the Laplace transform, and therefore it is needed to assume null initial conditions, because

${\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}\left\{{\frac {df}{dt}}\right\}=s\cdot {\mathcal {L}}\left\{f(t)\right\}-f(0),}$

And when f(0)=0 we can get rid of the constants and use the usual expression

${\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}\left\{{\frac {df}{dt}}\right\}=s\cdot {\mathcal {L}}\left\{f(t)\right\}}$

An alternative to transfer functions is to give the behavior of the filter as a convolution. The convolution theorem, which holds for Laplace transforms, guarantees equivalence with transfer functions.

Classification

Filters may be specified by family and bandform. A filter's family is specified by the approximating polynomial used and each leads to certain characteristics of the transfer function of the filter. Some common filter families and their particular characteristics are:

Each family of filters can be specified to a particular order. The higher the order, the more the filter will approach the "ideal" filter; but also the longer the impulse response is and the longer the latency will be. An ideal filter has full transmission in the pass band, complete attenuation in the stop band, and an abrupt transition between the two bands, but this filter has infinite order (i.e., the response cannot be expressed as a linear differential equation with a finite sum) and infinite latency (i.e., its compact support in the Fourier transform forces its time response to be ever lasting).

Here is an image comparing Butterworth, Chebyshev, and elliptic filters. The filters in this illustration are all fifth-order low-pass filters. The particular implementation  analog or digital, passive or active  makes no difference; their output would be the same.

As is clear from the image, elliptic filters are sharper than all the others, but they show ripples on the whole bandwidth.

Any family can be used to implement a particular bandform of which frequencies are transmitted, and which, outside the passband, are more or less attenuated. The transfer function completely specifies the behavior of a linear filter, but not the particular technology used to implement it. In other words, there are a number of different ways of achieving a particular transfer function when designing a circuit. A particular bandform of filter can be obtained by transformation of a prototype filter of that family.

Impedance matching

Impedance matching structures invariably take on the form of a filter, that is, a network of non-dissipative elements. For instance, in a passive electronics implementation, it would likely take the form of a ladder topology of inductors and capacitors. The design of matching networks shares much in common with filters and the design invariably will have a filtering action as an incidental consequence. Although the prime purpose of a matching network is not to filter, it is often the case that both functions are combined in the same circuit. The need for impedance matching does not arise while signals are in the digital domain.

Similar comments can be made regarding power dividers and directional couplers. When implemented in a distributed element format, these devices can take the form of a distributed element filter. There are four ports to be matched and widening the bandwidth requires filter-like structures to achieve this. The inverse is also true: distributed element filters can take the form of coupled lines.

Related Research Articles

Bandwidth is the difference between the upper and lower frequencies in a continuous band of frequencies. It is typically measured in hertz, and depending on context, may specifically refer to passband bandwidth or baseband bandwidth. Passband bandwidth is the difference between the upper and lower cutoff frequencies of, for example, a band-pass filter, a communication channel, or a signal spectrum. Baseband bandwidth applies to a low-pass filter or baseband signal; the bandwidth is equal to its upper cutoff frequency.

In physics and electrical engineering, a cutoff frequency, corner frequency, or break frequency is a boundary in a system's frequency response at which energy flowing through the system begins to be reduced rather than passing through.

In signal processing, a digital filter is a system that performs mathematical operations on a sampled, discrete-time signal to reduce or enhance certain aspects of that signal. This is in contrast to the other major type of electronic filter, the analog filter, which is an electronic circuit operating on continuous-time analog signals.

A low-pass filter (LPF) is a filter that passes signals with a frequency lower than a selected cutoff frequency and attenuates signals with frequencies higher than the cutoff frequency. The exact frequency response of the filter depends on the filter design. The filter is sometimes called a high-cut filter, or treble-cut filter in audio applications. A low-pass filter is the complement of a high-pass filter.

A band-pass filter, also bandpass filter or BPF, is a device that passes frequencies within a certain range and rejects (attenuates) frequencies outside that range.

In signal processing, a sinc filter is an idealized filter that removes all frequency components above a given cutoff frequency, without affecting lower frequencies, and has linear phase response. The filter's impulse response is a sinc function in the time domain, and its frequency response is a rectangular function.

An audio filter is a frequency dependent amplifier circuit, working in the audio frequency range, 0 Hz to beyond 20 kHz. Audio filters can amplify (boost), pass or attenuate (cut) some frequency ranges. Many types of filters exist for different audio applications including hi-fi stereo systems, musical synthesizers, sound effects, sound reinforcement systems, instrument amplifiers and virtual reality systems.

In signal processing, a finite impulse response (FIR) filter is a filter whose impulse response is of finite duration, because it settles to zero in finite time. This is in contrast to infinite impulse response (IIR) filters, which may have internal feedback and may continue to respond indefinitely.

An active filter is a type of analog circuit implementing an electronic filter using active components, typically an amplifier. Amplifiers included in a filter design can be used to improve the cost, performance and predictability of a filter.

Infinite impulse response (IIR) is a property applying to many linear time-invariant systems. Common examples of linear time-invariant systems are most electronic and digital filters. Systems with this property are known as IIR systems or IIR filters, and are distinguished by having an impulse response which does not become exactly zero past a certain point, but continues indefinitely. This is in contrast to a finite impulse response (FIR) in which the impulse response h(t) does become exactly zero at times t > T for some finite T, thus being of finite duration.

Electronic filters are circuits which perform signal processing functions, specifically to remove unwanted frequency components from the signal, to enhance wanted ones, or both. Electronic filters can be:

The transition band, also called the skirt, is a range of frequencies that allows a transition between a passband and a stopband of a signal processing filter. The transition band is defined by a passband and a stopband cutoff frequency or corner frequency.

Electronic filter topology defines electronic filter circuits without taking note of the values of the components used but only the manner in which those components are connected.

Prototype filters are electronic filter designs that are used as a template to produce a modified filter design for a particular application. They are an example of a nondimensionalised design from which the desired filter can be scaled or transformed. They are most often seen in regard to electronic filters and especially linear analogue passive filters. However, in principle, the method can be applied to any kind of linear filter or signal processing, including mechanical, acoustic and optical filters.

In signal processing, particularly digital image processing, ringing artifacts are artifacts that appear as spurious signals near sharp transitions in a signal. Visually, they appear as bands or "ghosts" near edges; audibly, they appear as "echos" near transients, particularly sounds from percussion instruments; most noticeable are the pre-echos. The term "ringing" is because the output signal oscillates at a fading rate around a sharp transition in the input, similar to a bell after being struck. As with other artifacts, their minimization is a criterion in filter design.

References

1. Richard Markell. '"Better than Bessel" Linear Phase Filters for Data Communications'. 1994. p. 3.
2. Ash, Eric A; E. Peter Raynes (December 2009). "Edward George Sydney Paige. 18 July 1930 — 20 February 2004" (PDF). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 55: 185–200. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2009.0009.
• Miroslav D. Lutovac, Dejan V. Tošić, Brian Lawrence Evans, Filter Design for Signal Processing Using MATLAB and Mathematica, Miroslav Lutovac, 2001 ISBN   0201361302.
• B. A. Shenoi, Introduction to Digital Signal Processing and Filter Design, John Wiley & Sons, 2005 ISBN   0471656380.
• L. D. Paarmann, Design and Analysis of Analog Filters: A Signal Processing Perspective, Springer, 2001 ISBN   0792373731.
• J.S.Chitode, Digital Signal Processing, Technical Publications, 2009 ISBN   8184316461.
• Leland B. Jackson, Digital Filters and Signal Processing, Springer, 1996 ISBN   079239559X.