Are there ways to reduce the smearing of zero-padding interpolated data?

1. Does zero padding reduce spectral leakage?
2. How do you reduce spectral leakage?
3. How does zero padding increase frequency resolution?
4. Does zero padding affect FFT?

Does zero padding reduce spectral leakage?

Zero-padding a signal does not reveal more information about the spectrum, but it only interpolates between the frequency bins that would occur when no zero-padding is applied. In particular, zero-padding does not increase the spectral resolution.

How do you reduce spectral leakage?

We have seen that spectral leakage is reduced by tapering the digital signal by a window function before the DFT takes place. A generalization of this technique is the short-time discrete Fourier transform (STDFT).

How does zero padding increase frequency resolution?

Zero padding enables you to obtain more accurate amplitude estimates of resolvable signal components. On the other hand, zero padding does not improve the spectral (frequency) resolution of the DFT. The resolution is determined by the number of samples and the sample rate.

Does zero padding affect FFT?

Zero padding allows one to use a longer FFT, which will produce a longer FFT result vector. A longer FFT result has more frequency bins that are more closely spaced in frequency.