An Improved Fine-Resolution Method for Frequency Estimation of Real-Valued Single-Tone Using Three DFT Samples

With respect to the frequency estimation of a real-valued single-tone, a direct frequency estimation method is proposed to acquire fine-resolution parameter by only utilizing three discrete Fourier transform (DFT) samples around the peak. Inspired by the Quinn, Rife and Candan methods, a novel Candan combined Quinn Rife estimator (CCQRE) is proposed, and the theoretical analysis of the corresponding MSE is also given. It has been verified that the proposed method is more robust to the interbin frequency and has better performance than these existed state-of-the-art methods. Both simulations and real data experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, the proposed methods are suitable for real-time applications due to the simplicity, efficiency and low computational burden.