A Quantitative Study of Pitfalls in the FFT

The effects of aliasing (including pseudoaliasing), picket-fence effect, and leakage in the fast Fourier transform (FFT) are presented. A computer program was written to perform the FFT analysis of known inputs. The program has the capability of detecting aliasing by calculating an "aliasing coefficient" (Q), and will increase the sampling frequency and the number of points in the input sequence if aliasing occurs. The term "pseudoaliasing" is a phenomenon which is similar to aliasing (or fold-over) but related to the effects of picket fence and leakage. The "leakage coefficient" (ri) is a quantitative measure of the deviation from the fundamental frequency component with respect to the sampling frequency, when the input sequence has only one frequency component.