Spectral Leakage

Publish Date: Sep 06, 2006

When you use the DFT/FFT to find the frequency content of a signal, it is inherently assumed that the data that you have is a
single period of a periodically repeating waveform. This is shown in the following figure.The first period shown is the one
sampled. The waveform corresponding to this period is then repeated in time to produce the periodic waveform.
Periodic Extension

As seen in the previous figure, because of the assumption of periodicity of the waveform, discontinuities between successive
periods will occur. This happens when you sample a noninteger number of cycles such as 7.5. These artificial discontinuities
turn up as very high frequencies in the spectrum of the signal, frequencies that were not present in the original signal. These
frequencies could be much higher than the Nyquist frequency, and will be aliased somewhere between 0 and fs/2. The
spectrum you get by using an FFT therefore will not be the actual spectrum of the original signal, but will be a smeared
version. It appears as if the energy at one frequency has leaked out into all the other frequencies. This phenomenon is known
as spectral leakage.
The following figure shows a sine wave sampled from a NI 5102 oscilloscope and its corresponding FFT amplitude spectrum
in decibels. The time-domain waveform has an integer number of cycles (namely 10), so the assumption of periodicity does
not create any discontinuities.

No Spectral Leakage
In the figure below, you see the spectral representation when you sample a noninteger number of cycles of the time waveform
(namely 10.5). The periodic extension of this signal creates a discontinuity similar to periodic extension figure. Notice how the
energy is now spread over a wide range of frequencies, so the relative height difference between the fft peak amplitude and
the neighboring bins is reduced. This smearing of the energy is spectral leakage.

Spectral Leakage