Nonlinear filter

Article summary

In signal processing, a nonlinear filter is a filter whose output is not a linear function of its input. That is, if the filter outputs signals and for two input signals and separately, but does not always output when the input is a linear combination . Both continuous-domain and discrete-domain filters may be nonlinear. A simple example of the former would be an electrical device whose output voltage at any moment is the square of the input voltage ; or which is the input clipped to a fixed range , namely . An important example of the latter is the running-median filter, such that every output sample is the median of the last three input samples . Like linear filters, nonlinear filters may be shift invariant or not. Non-linear filters have many applications, especially in the removal of certain types of noise that are not additive. For example, the median filter is widely used to remove spike noise — that affects only a small percentage of the samples, possibly by very large amounts. Indeed, all radio receivers use non-linear filters to convert kilo- to gigahertz signals to the audio frequency range; and all digital signal processing depends on non-linear filters (analog-to-digital converters) to transform analog signals to binary numbers.…

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