Chuyn

Nng Cao X L S Tn Hiu - Special Topics on ADSP

Chapter 2:
Noise and Distortion in terms
of signals
Lectured by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Thuong Le-Tien
February 2015

 Noise can be defined as an unwanted signal that inteferences

with the communication or measurement of another signal.
The sources of noise a re many, and vary from low to ultra
high frequency
Noise and distortion are the main limiting factors in
communication and measurement systems

1. INTRODUCTION
Depending on its source, noise can be classified as
a. Acoustic noise: moving cars, air conditioners, computer fans,
traffic, people talking, wind, rain, etc.
b. Electromagnetic noise: present in all frequencies, particular at
the radio frequencies.
c. Electrostatic noise: by presence of a voltage with/without
current flow. Fluorescent lighting is one of the more common
sources of this electrostatic noise
d. Channel distortion, echo and fading: due to non-ideal characteristic
of communication channels. Radio channels scuh as cellular
phone operators, radio networks, etc.
e. Processing noise: results from the analog/digital signal processing,
e.g. quantization noise, lost data packets in data communications, etc.

Depending on its frequencies or time characteristics, a noise

Process can be classified as:
a. Narrowband noise: such as 50/60z from electricity supply
b. White noise: purely random noise, flat power spectrum in
all frequencies.
c. Band-limited white noise: flat spectrum, limited BW cover
limited spectrum of devices or signal interest
d. Colored noise: non-white noise or any wideband noise, non-flat
shape of spectrum, e.g. pink noise, brown noise,
autoregressive noise
e. Impulsive noise: short-duration pulses of random amplitude
and duration.
f. Transient noise pulses: relatively long duration noise pulses.

2. WHITE NOISE

White noise

The constant power spectrum

Autocorrelation

Spectrum

The spectrum of band-limited white noise

Ts is the sampling period, and when Nyquist sampling rate

Then the auto-corrrelation function is a delta function

3. COLORED NOISE
Refered to broad band noise with a non-white spectrum
Examples: most audio noise, moving car noise, computer fan noise,
electric drill noise. Two classic colored noise are pink and brown noise

4. IMPULSES NOISE
Short duration on/off noise: switching noise

5. TRANSIENT NOISE PULSES

Short sharp initial pulse followed by decaying low-frequency oscillations

A typical scratch pulse waveform in the figure exhibits two distinct regions

6. THERMAL NOISE
Referred as Johnson noise
For a metallic resistor, the mean square value of the instantaneous
Voltage due to the thermal noise is

T is absolute temperature in Kelvin degree, B is bandwidth

The spectral density of thermal noise

7. SHOT NOISE
A shot noise arose from the analysis of random variations in the
emission of electron from the cathode of a vacuum tube
Consider an electric current as the flow of discrete electric charges.
If the charges act independently of each other the fluctuating
current is given

B is measurement Bandwidth

8. ELECTROMAGNETIC NOISE
Every electrical devices that generates, consumes or transmits power
is a potential source of electromagnetic noise and interference for
other systems. The common sources of electromagnetic noise are
transformers, radio and television transmitters, mobile phones,
Microwave transmitters, ac power lines, oscillators, electrical storms

9. CHANNEL DISTORTION

There are two main manifestation distortion:

Magnitude and phase distortion

10. MODELING NOISE

The objective of modeling is to characterize the structures and
the patterns in a signal or a noise process

The figure is an example of the spectra of car noise recorded

from a BMW and Volvo. The noise in a car is nostationary, varied
and may include the following sources:

10.1. Additive white Gaussian noise model (AWGN)

In communication theory, it is assumed that the noise is a stationary
AWGN process.
10.2 Hidden Markov model for noise (HMM)
Most noise process a re non-stationary, e.g. the statistical parameters
of the noise, such as mean, variance and power spectrum, vary with
Time. Non stationary processes may be modeled using the HMM

(a) An impulse noise sequence, (b) A binary state model of impulse noise
An Hidden Markov Model is essentially a finite state Markov chain of

stationary sub-processes
Note that a stationary noise process can be modeled by a single state HMM
A non-stationary noise, a multi state HMM can model the time variations
of the noise process with a finite number of stationary states.
For non-Gaussian noise, a mixture Gaussian density model can be used to
model the space of the noise within each state.
In general, the number of states per model and number of mixtures per
state required to accurately model a noise process depends on the nonstationary character of the noise.