Signal Metrics

The mean of a signal $x$ stored in a matlab row- or column-vector x can be computed in matlab as

mu = sum(x)/N

or by using the built-in function mean(). If x is a 2D matrix containing N elements, then we need mu = sum(sum(x))/N or mu = mean(mean(x)), since sum computes a sum along ``dimension 1'' (which is along columns for matrices), and mean is implemented in terms of sum. For 3D matrices, mu = mean(mean(mean(x))), etc. For a higher dimensional matrices x, ``flattening'' it into a long column-vector x(:) is the more concise form:

N = prod(size(x))
mu = sum(x(:))/N

or

mu = x(:).' * ones(N,1)/N

The above constructs work whether x is a row-vector, column-vector, or matrix, because x(:) returns a concatenation of all columns of x into one long column-vector. Note the use of .' to obtain non-conjugating vector transposition in the second form. N = prod(size(x)) is the number of elements of x. If x is a row- or column-vector, then length(x) gives the number of elements. For matrices, length() returns the greater of the number of rows or columns.^I.1