An MDCT domain three-point interpolation-based low-complexity frequency estimator

Signal frequency estimation is a problem of significance in many applications including audio signal processing. Compressed domain audio frequency estimators that directly use the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) coefficients are suitable for low-complexity audio applications. A new frequency estimation approach, which can obtain the estimated value from a simple combination of three MDCT coefficients, is proposed herein. It exploits the underlying relation among adjacent MDCT values and provides a general form of this type of estimators. The estimator manifests obvious computational advantages over other MDCT domain estimators and is suitable for high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions.