How is autocorrelation calculated in DSP?
The autocorrelation appears in applications such as communications (matched filtering), signal modeling (normal equations), and pattern recognition (template matching). x(l − k)x(l) = rx(−k) where in the second equality we made the substitution l = n + k.
How to detect periodicity in a signal?
For exact periodicity you may simply try to find given data as substring of data repeated twice. For non exact periodicity of real, noisy signal time domain and frequency domain methods may be used. Time domain one is self correlation.