Windows

Why Use Windows?

In both digital filter design and spectral estimation, the choice of a windowing function can play an important role in determining the quality of overall results. The main role of the window is to damp out the effects of the Gibbs phenomenon that results from truncation of an infinite series.

Available Window Functions

Window	Function
Bartlett-Hann window	barthannwin
Bartlett window	bartlett
Blackman window	blackman
Blackman-Harris window	blackmanharris
Bohman window	bohmanwin
Chebyshev window	chebwin
Flat Top window	flattopwin
Gaussian window	gausswin
Hamming window	hamming
Hann window	hann
Kaiser window	kaiser
Nuttall's Blackman-Harris window	nuttallwin
Parzen (de la Vallée-Poussin) window	parzenwin
Rectangular window	rectwin
Tapered cosine window	tukeywin
Triangular window	triang

Graphical User Interface Tools

Two graphical user interface tools are provided for working with windows in the Signal Processing Toolbox™ product:

• Window Designer app

• Window Visualization Tool (WVTool)

Refer to the reference pages for detailed information.

Basic Shapes

The basic window is the rectangular window, a vector of ones of the appropriate length. A rectangular window of length 50 is

n = 50;
w = rectwin(n);

Signal Processing Toolbox stores windows in column vectors by convention, so an equivalent expression is

w = ones(50,1);

To use the Window Designer app to create this window, type

windowDesigner

The app opens with a default Hamming window. To visualize the rectangular window, set Type = Rectangular and Length = 50 in the Current Window Information panel and then press Apply.

The Bartlett (or triangular) window is the convolution of two rectangular windows. The functions bartlett and triang compute similar triangular windows, with three important differences. The bartlett function always returns a window with two zeros on the ends of the sequence, so that for n odd, the center section of bartlett(n+2) is equivalent to triang(n):

Bartlett = bartlett(7);
isequal(Bartlett(2:end-1),triang(5))

ans =
     1

For n even, bartlett is still the convolution of two rectangular sequences. There is no standard definition for the triangular window for n even; the slopes of the line segments of the triang result are slightly steeper than those of bartlett in this case:

w = bartlett(8); 
[w(2:7) triang(6)]

You can see the difference between odd and even Bartlett windows in Window Designer.

The final difference between the Bartlett and triangular windows is evident in the Fourier transforms of these functions. The Fourier transform of a Bartlett window is negative for n even. The Fourier transform of a triangular window, however, is always nonnegative.

The following figure, which plots the zero-phase responses of 8-point Bartlett and Triangular windows, illustrates the difference.

zerophase(bartlett(8))
hold on
zerophase(triang(8))
legend('Bartlett','Triangular')
axis([0.3 1 -0.2 0.5])

This difference can be important when choosing a window for some spectral estimation techniques, such as the Blackman-Tukey method. Blackman-Tukey forms the spectral estimate by calculating the Fourier transform of the autocorrelation sequence. The resulting estimate might be negative at some frequencies if the window's Fourier transform is negative.