Avoiding padding during FFT calculation

1. Why zero padding is needed in FFT?
2. What does padding do to FFT?
3. What is the effect of zero padding in frequency domain?

Why zero padding is needed in FFT?

In addition to making the total number of samples a power of two so that faster computation is made possible by using the fast Fourier transform (FFT), zero padding can lead to an interpolated FFT result, which can produce a higher display resolution.

What does padding do to 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.

What is the effect of zero padding in frequency domain?

In this case, we can say “zero padding in the frequency domain results in an increased sampling rate in the time domain”.