`scipy.signal._spectral_py:stft`

source: /scipy/signal/_spectral_py.py :1431

Signature

   def     stft (    x    ,    fs    =  1.0   ,    window    =  hann_periodic   ,    nperseg    =  256   ,    noverlap    =  None   ,    nfft    =  None   ,    detrend    =  False   ,    return_onesided    =  True   ,    boundary    =  zeros   ,    padded    =  True   ,    axis    =  -1   ,    scaling    =  spectrum     )

Summary

Compute the Short Time Fourier Transform (legacy function).

Extended Summary

STFTs can be used as a way of quantifying the change of a nonstationary signal's frequency and phase content over time.

Parameters

x : array_like: Time series of measurement values
fs : float, optional: Sampling frequency of the x time series. Defaults to 1.0.
window : str or tuple or array_like, optional: Desired window to use. If window is a string or tuple, it is passed to get_window to generate the window values, which are DFT-even by default. See get_window for a list of windows and required parameters. If window is array_like it will be used directly as the window and its length must be nperseg. Defaults to a periodic Hann window.
nperseg : int, optional: Length of each segment. Defaults to 256.
noverlap : int, optional: Number of points to overlap between segments. If None, noverlap = nperseg // 2. Defaults to None. When specified, the COLA constraint must be met (see Notes below).
nfft : int, optional: Length of the FFT used, if a zero padded FFT is desired. If None, the FFT length is nperseg. Defaults to None.
detrend : str or function or `False`, optional: Specifies how to detrend each segment. If detrend is a string, it is passed as the type argument to the detrend function. If it is a function, it takes a segment and returns a detrended segment. If detrend is False, no detrending is done. Defaults to False.
return_onesided : bool, optional: If True, return a one-sided spectrum for real data. If False return a two-sided spectrum. Defaults to True, but for complex data, a two-sided spectrum is always returned.
boundary : str or None, optional: Specifies whether the input signal is extended at both ends, and how to generate the new values, in order to center the first windowed segment on the first input point. This has the benefit of enabling reconstruction of the first input point when the employed window function starts at zero. Valid options are ['even', 'odd', 'constant', 'zeros', None]. Defaults to 'zeros', for zero padding extension. I.e. [1, 2, 3, 4] is extended to [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 0] for nperseg=3.
padded : bool, optional: Specifies whether the input signal is zero-padded at the end to make the signal fit exactly into an integer number of window segments, so that all of the signal is included in the output. Defaults to True. Padding occurs after boundary extension, if boundary is not None, and padded is True, as is the default.
axis : int, optional: Axis along which the STFT is computed; the default is over the last axis (i.e. axis=-1).
scaling: {'spectrum', 'psd'}: The default 'spectrum' scaling allows each frequency line of Zxx to be interpreted as a magnitude spectrum. The 'psd' option scales each line to a power spectral density - it allows to calculate the signal's energy by numerically integrating over abs(Zxx)**2.
versionadded 1.9.0

Returns

f : ndarray: Array of sample frequencies.
t : ndarray: Array of segment times.
Zxx : ndarray: STFT of x. By default, the last axis of Zxx corresponds to the segment times.

Notes

In order to enable inversion of an STFT via the inverse STFT in istft, the signal windowing must obey the constraint of "Nonzero OverLap Add" (NOLA), and the input signal must have complete windowing coverage (i.e. (x.shape[axis] - nperseg) % (nperseg-noverlap) == 0). The padded argument may be used to accomplish this.

Given a time-domain signal $x [n]$ , a window $w [n]$ , and a hop size $H$ = nperseg - noverlap, the windowed frame at time index $t$ is given by

x_{t} [n] = x [n] w [n - t H]

The overlap-add (OLA) reconstruction equation is given by

x [n] = \frac{\sum _{t} x _{t} [ n ] w [ n - t H ]}{\sum _{t} w ^{2} [ n - t H ]}

The NOLA constraint ensures that every normalization term that appears in the denominator of the OLA reconstruction equation is nonzero. Whether a choice of window, nperseg, and noverlap satisfy this constraint can be tested with check_NOLA.

Array API Standard Support

stft is not in-scope for support of Python Array API Standard compatible backends other than NumPy.

See dev-arrayapi for more information.

Examples

import numpy as np
from scipy import signal
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
rng = np.random.default_rng()

✓

Generate a test signal, a 2 Vrms sine wave whose frequency is slowly modulated around 3kHz, corrupted by white noise of exponentially decreasing magnitude sampled at 10 kHz.

fs = 10e3
N = 1e5
amp = 2 * np.sqrt(2)
noise_power = 0.01 * fs / 2
time = np.arange(N) / float(fs)
mod = 500*np.cos(2*np.pi*0.25*time)
carrier = amp * np.sin(2*np.pi*3e3*time + mod)
noise = rng.normal(scale=np.sqrt(noise_power),
                   size=time.shape)
noise *= np.exp(-time/5)
x = carrier + noise

✓

Compute and plot the STFT's magnitude.

f, t, Zxx = signal.stft(x, fs, nperseg=1000)

✓

plt.pcolormesh(t, f, np.abs(Zxx), vmin=0, vmax=amp, shading='gouraud')
plt.title('STFT Magnitude')
plt.ylabel('Frequency [Hz]')
plt.xlabel('Time [sec]')

✗

plt.show()

✓

Compare the energy of the signal `x` with the energy of its STFT:

E_x = sum(x**2) / fs  # Energy of x
f, t, Zxx = signal.stft(x, fs, nperseg=1000, return_onesided=False,
                        scaling='psd')
df, dt = f[1] - f[0], t[1] - t[0]
E_Zxx = sum(np.sum(Zxx.real**2 + Zxx.imag**2, axis=0) * df) * dt

✓

np.isclose(E_x, E_Zxx, rtol=1e-2)

✗

Aliases

scipy.signal.stft

Referenced by

This package

release:0.19.0-notes