Polyphase View of the STFT

As a familiar special case, set

$$\bold{E}(z) = \bold{W}_N^\ast$$

where $\bold{W}_N^\ast$ is the DFT matrix:

$$\bold{W}_N^\ast[kn] = \left[e^{-j2\pi kn/N}\right]$$

The inverse of this polyphase matrix is then simply the inverse DFT matrix:

$$\bold{R}(z) = \frac{1}{N}\bold{W}_N$$

Thus, the STFT (with rectangular window) is the simple special case of a perfect reconstruction filter bank for which the polyphase matrix is constant. It is also unitary; therefore, the STFT is an orthogonal filter bank.

The channel analysis and synthesis filters are, respectively,

$$\begin{eqnarray*} H_k(z) &=& H_0(zW_N^k)\\ [0.1in] F_k(z) &=& F_0(zW_N^{-k}) \end{eqnarray*}$$

where $W_N\isdef e^{-j2\pi/N}$ , and

$$F_0(z)=H_0(z)=\sum_{n=0}^{N-1}z^{-n}\;\longleftrightarrow\;[1,1,\ldots,1]$$

corresponding to the rectangular window.

Figure 10.26: Polyphase representation of the STFT with a rectangular window.

Looking again at the polyphase representation of the $N$ -channel filter bank with hop size $R$ , $\bold{E}(z)=\bold{W}_N^\ast$ , $\bold{R}(z)=\bold{W}_N$ , $R$ dividing $N$ , we have the system shown in Fig.10.26. Following the same analysis as in §10.4.1 leads to the following conclusion:

$$\zbox {\hbox{The polyphase representation is an \emph{overlap-add} representation.}}$$

Our analysis showed that the STFT using a rectangular window is a perfect reconstruction filter bank for all integer hop sizes in the set $R\in\{N,N/2,N/3,\ldots,N/N\}$ . The same type of analysis can be applied to the STFT using the other windows we've studied, including Portnoff windows.