ELECTRONOTES APPLICATION NOTE NO, 368 1016 Hanshaw Road Ithaca, NY 14850 December 2006 607-266-8492 INTERPOLATION WITH A MINIMUM NORM POLYNOMIAL INTERPOLATION — LINEAR AND (intfilft) PARABOLIC CASES We are familiar with many forms of signal interpolation, and we know that these are basically a low-pass filtering of a sequence of known samples. Fig. 1 shows a typical, simple case where the signal model is piecewise linear. a I \ I : |e Tet I t cil : TTT TTT Fig. 1 Piecewise Linear Interpolation by a factor of 5 In Fig. 1-the top shows a given sequence that has been zero-padded by a factor or 5 (that is to say, four zeros have been inserted between each original sample). ‘We want to replace these zeros by interpolated values, and the bottom view shows the case where the interpolated samples are assumed to be on straight lines between the known samples. The interpolation is done by the FIR filter that has the impulse response shown in the middle of Fig. 1. Note that the impulse response value are hin={1/5 2/5 3/5 4/5 5/5 4/5 3/5 2/5 1/5). These we can obtain in several ways — the easiest is to just ask the question: what is the impulse response of a AN-368 (1)linear interpolator. The answer is: the response of a linear interpolator to an impulse. Trick question — but it tells us exactly what to do [1,2]. We note two things about this linear interpolation. First, it involves only two consecutive samples. Secondly, the segments are (be definition) straight lines and thus generally have a discontinuous derivative at the original sample points. This leads us to worry a bit that the method may not be well suited for common signals that we suspect are more bandlimited (more rounded). For a more comfortable result, we might well consider frequency-domain bandlimited interpolation (which would be sinc interpolation in the time domain) instead of our linear segments (first- order polynomial interpolation). Intermediate cases may well be provided by time- domain interpolation with higher-order polynomials. This more general polynomial interpolation (Matlab’s intfilf) is very well studied [2], and we will next look at this, case of parabolic interpolation. Fig. 2 shows the case where we use parabolic rather than linear interpolation: z 1k i ITT ret Fig. 2 Parabolic Interpolation: ifilt(5,2,'lagrange’) in Matlab The result in Fig. 2 is a bit strange-looking. In particular, we note that the impulse response (middle of Fig. 2) is not as smooth as we might like. Note the large jump between the 5" and the 6 samples. Further, this is a longer impulse response AN-368 (2)(length 15) as compared to the linear case (length 9). By considering the output (bottom of Fig. 2) we might suppose we have done better than the linear case, but not as well as we might have hoped. Indeed, we will need to look at the frequency responses of these filters to see what intfilt accomplishes To see why the impulse response for this parabolic case has large jumps, we can look at the way it is derived, and for this, we consider Fig. 3. Fig. 3 Origin of the filter coefficients for parabolic interpolation In Fig. 3, we have an impulse at zero (with corresponding zero values at all other integers — specifically at -2, -1, 1, and 2 shown here), As we fit parabolas to each three consecutive points, most of these parabolas (for example, the one that has samples at -10, -9, and -8) are all zero. There are only three non-zero parabolas — the ones shown in Fig. 3. The first of these (dashed) has the impulse on the right, the second (solid) has it in the middle, and the third (dot-dash) has it on the left. As with any polynomial curve fitting, we will trust the result only close to the middle sample. Indeed, the parabola (running to infinity) is clearly unsuited if we stray far from the center. Accordingly, for interpolation by 5, we choose impulse response value at -1.4, -1.2, -1, -0.8, and -0.6 from the first parabola (shown as stars). The middle of the second parabola is sampled at -0.4, -0.2, 0, 0.2, and 0.4. The third parabola is sampled at 0.6, 0.8, 1, 1.2, and 1.4. This procedure essentially AN-368 (3)