Howtosignalprocessing
- What is zero padding?
- What is zero padded FFT?
- Why should I zero pad a signal before taking the Fourier transform?
- Why is zero padding needed?
What is zero padding?
Zero padding is a technique typically employed to make the size of the input sequence equal to a power of two. In zero padding, you add zeros to the end of the input sequence so that the total number of samples is equal to the next higher power of two.
What is zero padded FFT?
``Zero-padding'' means adding additional zeros to a sample of data (after the data has been windowed, if applicable). For example, you may have 1023 data points, but you might want to run a 1024 point FFT or even a 2048 point FFT.
Why should I zero pad a signal before taking the Fourier transform?
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.
Why is zero padding needed?
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.
