AN EXTENDED FREQUENCY-DOMAIN PRONY METHOD FOR TRANSFER-FUNCTION PARAMETER-ESTIMATION

The estimation of transfer-function parameters, such as poles and zeros, is useful for characterizing and identifying electromagnetic scatterers. The conventional frequency-domain Prony's technique can estimate these parameters from sampled, frequency-domain data. However, it fails to estimate the true parameters when the sampled data contains contributions from out-of-band poles. In this paper, an extended frequency-domain Prony's technique is developed that circumvents this problem by adding polynomial terms to the standard, Prony pole series. This new technique is shown to be very effective for estimating the poles of transfer functions over very wide bandwidths, without the need for large numbers of simultaneous equations, even when the data are corrupted by noise.