Evaluation of various FFT methods for single tone detection and frequency estimation

The periodogram, implemented using the fast Fourier transform (FFT), is widely used for the detection and frequency measurement of single tones. This paper evaluates the detection and frequency estimation performance of the periodogram and its variants, such as the Welch and Bartlett methods and the polyphase-FFT. Performance results for the detection and frequency estimation performance of the periodogram and its variants are presented and compared. The standard periodogram generally gives the best detection performance and the minimum mean square frequency error for a fixed length of signal data. However, if the FFT length is fixed the Welch method gives the best performance.