Distortion Reduction in Fractional Delay Filters

As the digital version of a continuous-time delay, the concept of fractional delay (FD) is exploited to approximate a desired delay that is not a multiple of the sampling interval. However, in FD filters, there is always a severe distortion at the beginning of delayed signals, referred to as head distortion. This letter identifies the cause of head distortion and proposes a solution to this problem for reducing the overall distortion in FD filters. For the purpose of performance evaluation, relative root-mean-square (RMS) error is formulated as a metric to quantify the overall difference between the frequency-domain response of an FD filter and the ideal one. Moreover, illustrative numerical results on the proposed scheme applied in FD filters with classical sinc, Farrow and Lagrange interpolation substantiate the validity and feasibility of our solution.