Accurate Damping Factor and Frequency Estimation for Damped Real-Valued Sinusoidal Signals

The interpolated discrete Fourier transform (IpDFT) is one of the most popular techniques to estimate the parameters of a damped real-valued sinusoidal signal (DRSS). However, its accuracy is affected by strong noise presence and short observation windows. To this end, this letter proposes a novel two-point IpDFT method, called I2pZDFT, for the parameter estimation of a DRSS. The proposed I2pZDFT uses the zero-padding technique to increase the sampling rate in the frequency domain. The conjugate symmetry and the parity of the zero-padded signal are utilized to eliminate the influence of the spectral leakage. Simulation results highlight that the proposed I2pZDFT outperforms the existing IpDFT-based methods in terms of noise immunity, especially in the case of observation windows as short as 0.5–1 cycles.