B-spline design of maximally flat and prolate spheroidal-type FIR filters

A digital FIR filter is described that offers excellent passband and stopband characteristics for general applications. Design formulae include parameters that adjust the magnitude response from one having characteristics like the maximally flat designs of Hermann (1971) and Kaiser (1975, 1979) to one having characteristics like the minimum-sidelobe energy approximations of Kaiser and Saramaki (1989). The impulse response coefficients are more straightforward to obtain than these filter designs while offering preferable response characteristics in many instances. Unlike FIR filters designed by window- or frequency-sampling methods, the filter coefficients are determined from the inverse Fourier transform in closed form once B-splines have been used to replace sharp transition edges of the magnitude response. Although the filters are developed in the frequency domain, a convergence window is identified in the convolution series and compared with windows of popular FIR filters. By means of example, adjustment of the transitional parameter is shown to produce a filter response that rivals the stopband attenuation and transition width of prolate spheroidal designs. The design technique is extended to create additional transitional filters from prototype window functions, such as the transitional Hann window filter. The filters are particularly suitable for precision filtering and reconstruction of sampled physiologic and acoustic signals common to the health sciences but will also be useful in other applications requiring low passband and stopband errors