Novel Frequency Estimation by Interpolation Using Fourier Coefficients

A novel algorithm for estimating the frequency of a single complex sinusoid in complex white Gaussian noise is proposed. The proposed discrete Fourier transform based algorithm performs a frequency interpolation on the results of an N point complex Fourier transform very well with a novel residue frequency discriminator. Simulation results are included to demonstrate that the estimator is unbiased and approaches the Cramer-Rao bound uniformly over the frequency estimation range. The algorithm has low computational complexity and is well suited for real time applications