The Short Time Fourier Transform, STFT

Three representations of the same signal:

I Sound: Yes
I Two graphical representations: time signal e time-frequency
representation
Fourier Series: basic idea
Each periodic function, with period T, can be written as the ’sum’
of sinusoids with periods dividing T.
+∞   X+∞  
X 2kπ 2kπ
f (x) = a0 + ak cos x + bk sin x
T T
k=1 k=1
Euler’s formula

e iθ = cos θ + i sin θ
e iθ + e −iθ
cos θ =
2
e iθ − e −iθ
sin θ =
2i
+∞   X +∞  
X 2kπ 2kπ
f (x) = a0 + ak cos x + bk sin x
T T
k=1 k=1
+∞
X 2kπ
f (x) = Ck e i T
x

k=−∞

Ck are complex numbers.

The Fourier Transform of a discrete signal
I f = (f (tk ))k=0,...,N−1 , time representation.
tk = (k − 1)∆, where ∆ is a positive number.
I Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT):

DFT (f ) = (fˆk )k=0,...,N−1

I The (fˆk )k=0,...,N−1 satisfy

N−1
X −2kiπ
fˆk = tp e N

p=0

and are, in general, complex numbers.

I The meaning of the (fˆk )k=0,...,N−1 is given by the Inverse
Discrete Fourier Transform (IDFT)
N−1
1 X ˆ i 2kπ p
f (tp ) = fk e N
N
k=0
Some Fourier Transform examples
STFT: Short Time Fourier Transform
To get the STFT of a signal, we apply the Fourier Transform to
short time signal segments. In general there can be an overlap
between the signal segments.

The result is a sequence of Fourier Transforms, one for each

segment.
In the discrete case, as each transfor is a vector, the STFT is a 2-D.
In the case of a real signal, the number of frequencies is (FFT size
+1)/2 +1.. The number of segments where we apply the DFT
(the STFT time dimension) is approximately the L/(FFT size -
Overlap), where L is the length of the time-signal. Therefore, there
is an important reduction in the time dimension whene we apply
the STFT.
 The color represent
the STFT absolut value of each frequency component: blue is the
hights value, followed by the green and then yellow.
In the image above, the vertical axis represents the frequencies and
the horizontal axis represents time.
In the STFT image the horizontal dimension was amplified to
coincide with the corresponding dimension of the original signal.