COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF EXPONENTIAL WINDOW FUNCTION FOR DESIGNING OF FIR FILTERS

Abstract

Filters are very commonly found in everyday life and include examples such as water filters for water purification, mosquito nets that filter out bugs, bouncers at bars filtering the incoming guests according to age (and other criteria), and air filters found in air conditioners that we are sometimes a bit too lazy to change/clean periodically. Filters have two uses: signal separation and signal restoration. Signal separation is needed when a signal has been contaminated with interference, noise, or other signals. For example, imagine a device for measuring the electrical activity of a baby's heart (EKG) while still in the womb. The raw signal will likely be corrupted by the breathing and heartbeat of the mother. A filter might be used to separate these signals so that they can be individually analyzed. Signal restoration is used when a signal has been distorted in some way. For example, an audio recording made with poor equipment may be filtered to better represent the sound as it actually occurred [1, 2]. The main goal of this work is to study the exponential  window function and analyze a digital low pass FIR filter using the same in MATLAB. Properties of window functions is studied and frequeny domain responses of  window functions is obtained. Then FIR filter is designed using widow design method and its characteristics have also been studied in frequency domain. The performace comparison between LPFs designed using other well known windows like Kaiser, Exponential, Cosh and modified kaiser window is done and it has been intuitively shown that for a given order and transition width, the filter designed using Exponential window provides the worse minimum stop band attenuation but better far end attenuation than filter designed by well known Kaiser Window.