Expand description
RealFFT: Real-to-complex FFT and complex-to-real iFFT based on RustFFT
This library is a wrapper for RustFFT that enables performing FFT of real-valued data. The API is designed to be as similar as possible to RustFFT.
Using this library instead of RustFFT directly avoids the need of converting real-valued data to complex before performing a FFT. If the length is even, it also enables faster computations by using a complex FFT of half the length. It then packs a 2N long real vector into an N long complex vector, which is transformed using a standard FFT. The FFT result is then post-processed to give only the first half of the complex spectrum, as an N+1 long complex vector.
The iFFT goes through the same steps backwards, to transform an N+1 long complex spectrum to a 2N long real result.
The speed increase compared to just converting the input to a 2N long complex vector and using a 2N long FFT depends on the length of the input data. The largest improvements are for long FFTs and for lengths over around 1000 elements there is an improvement of about a factor 2. The difference shrinks for shorter lengths, and around 30 elements there is no longer any difference.
Why use real-to-complex FFT?
Using a complex-to-complex FFT
A simple way to get the FFT of a real valued vector is to convert it to complex, and using a complex-to-complex FFT.
Let’s assume x
is a 6 element long real vector:
x = [x0r, x1r, x2r, x3r, x4r, x5r]
We now convert x
to complex by adding an imaginary part with value zero. Using the notation (xNr, xNi)
for the complex value xN
, this becomes:
x_c = [(x0r, 0), (x1r, 0), (x2r, 0), (x3r, 0), (x4r, 0), (x5r, 0)]
Performing a normal complex FFT, the result of FFT(x_c)
is:
FFT(x_c) = [(X0r, X0i), (X1r, X1i), (X2r, X2i), (X3r, X3i), (X4r, X4i), (X5r, X5i)]
But because our x_c
is real-valued (all imaginary parts are zero), some of this becomes redundant:
FFT(x_c) = [(X0r, 0), (X1r, X1i), (X2r, X2i), (X3r, 0), (X2r, -X2i), (X1r, -X1i)]
The last two values are the complex conjugates of X1
and X2
. Additionally, X0i
and X3i
are zero.
As we can see, the output contains 6 independent values, and the rest is redundant.
But it still takes time for the FFT to calculate the redundant values.
Converting the input data to complex also takes a little bit of time.
If the length of x
instead had been 7, result would have been:
FFT(x_c) = [(X0r, 0), (X1r, X1i), (X2r, X2i), (X3r, X3i), (X3r, -X3i), (X2r, -X2i), (X1r, -X1i)]
The result is similar, but this time there is no zero at X3i
. Also in this case we got the same number of independent values as we started with.
Real-to-complex
Using a real-to-complex FFT removes the need for converting the input data to complex. It also avoids calculating the redundant output values.
The result for 6 elements is:
RealFFT(x) = [(X0r, 0), (X1r, X1i), (X2r, X2i), (X3r, 0)]
The result for 7 elements is:
RealFFT(x) = [(X0r, 0), (X1r, X1i), (X2r, X2i), (X3r, X3i)]
This is the data layout output by the real-to-complex FFT, and the one expected as input to the complex-to-real iFFT.
Scaling
RealFFT matches the behaviour of RustFFT and does not normalize the output of either FFT of iFFT. To get normalized results, each element must be scaled by 1/sqrt(length)
. If the processing involves both an FFT and an iFFT step, it is advisable to merge the two normalization steps to a single, by scaling by 1/length
.
Documentation
The full documentation can be generated by rustdoc. To generate and view it run:
cargo doc --open
Benchmarks
To run a set of benchmarks comparing real-to-complex FFT with standard complex-to-complex, type:
cargo bench
The results are printed while running, and are compiled into an html report containing much more details.
To view, open target/criterion/report/index.html
in a browser.
Example
Transform a vector, and then inverse transform the result.
use realfft::RealFftPlanner;
use rustfft::num_complex::Complex;
use rustfft::num_traits::Zero;
let length = 256;
// make a planner
let mut real_planner = RealFftPlanner::<f64>::new();
// create a FFT
let r2c = real_planner.plan_fft_forward(length);
// make input and output vectors
let mut indata = r2c.make_input_vec();
let mut spectrum = r2c.make_output_vec();
// Are they the length we expect?
assert_eq!(indata.len(), length);
assert_eq!(spectrum.len(), length/2+1);
// Forward transform the input data
r2c.process(&mut indata, &mut spectrum).unwrap();
// create an iFFT and an output vector
let c2r = real_planner.plan_fft_inverse(length);
let mut outdata = c2r.make_output_vec();
assert_eq!(outdata.len(), length);
c2r.process(&mut spectrum, &mut outdata).unwrap();
Versions
- 3.0.2: Fix confusing typos in errors about scratch length.
- 3.0.1: More helpful error messages, fix confusing typos.
- 3.0.0: Improved error reporting.
- 2.0.1: Minor bugfix.
- 2.0.0: Update RustFFT to 6.0.0 and num-complex to 0.4.0.
- 1.1.0: Add missing Sync+Send.
- 1.0.0: First version with new api.
Compatibility
The realfft
crate requires rustc version 1.37 or newer.
Re-exports
pub use rustfft::num_complex;
pub use rustfft::num_traits;