Zero-padding in STFT

1. What is the point of zero padding?
2. What does zero padding do in FFT?
3. Does zero padding reduce spectral leakage?
4. What is the effect of zero padding in frequency domain?

What is the point of 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 does zero padding do in 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.

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.

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”.