Estimating the parameters of exponentially damped sinusoids and pole-zero modeling in noise

We have presented techniques [1] - [6] based on linear prediction (LP) and singular value decomposition (SVD) for accurate estimation of closely spaced frequencies of sinusoidal signals in noise. In this note we extend these techniques to estimate the parameters of exponentially damped sinusoidal signals in noise. The estimation procedure presented here makes use of "backward prediction" in addition to SVD. First, the method is applied to data consisting of one and two exponentially damped sinusoids. The choice of one and two signal components facilitates the comparison of estimation error in pole damping factors and pole frequencies to the appropriate Cramer-Rao (CR) bounds and to traditional methods of linear prediction. Second, our method is applied to an example due to Steiglitz [8] in which the data consists of noisy values of the impulse response samples (composed of many exponentially damped sinusoids) of a linear system having both poles and zeros. The poles of the system are accurately determined by our method and the zeros are obtained subsequently, using Shanks' method.