A Novel Method for Signal Energy Measurement

This paper presents a method to measure the energy in a signal without the use of an analog-to-digital converter. This is especially useful for inexpensive microprocessor-based systems where a large number of multiply operations proves too time consuming. The approach is based on counting the number of pulses from the output of a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) whose control voltage is the square of the input signal. The validity of this approach has been demonstrated in the measurement of the energy in the acoustic envelope of isolated words spoken in French.