Reformulation of Pisarenko harmonic decomposition method for single-tone frequency estimation

Based on the linear prediction (LP) property of sinusoidal signals, a closed-form unbiased frequency estimator for a real sinusoid in white noise is proposed. The frequency estimator, which is derived by minimizing a constrained least squares cost function, can be considered as a reformulation of the well known Pisarenko harmonic decomposer (PHD). Online computation of the frequency estimate can be achieved in a very simple manner, and its variance is derived. Computer simulations are included to corroborate the theoretical development and to contrast the estimator performance with the PHD, maximum likelihood, and LP-based methods as well as Crame´r-Rao lower bound.