This paper presents a new simple and accurate frequency estimator of a sinusoidal signal based on the signal autocorrelation function (ACF). Such an estimator was termed as the reformed covariance for half-length autocorrelation (RC-HLA). The designed estimator was compared with frequency estimators well-known from the literature, such as the modified covariance for half-length autocorrelation (MC-HLA), reformed Pisarenko harmonic decomposition for half-length autocorrelation(RPHD-HLA), modified Pisarenko harmonic decomposition for half-length autocorrelation (MPHD-HLA), zero-crossing (ZC), and iterative interpolated DFT (IpDFT-IR) estimators. We determined the samples of the ACF of a sinusoidal signal disturbed by Gaussian noise (simulations studies) and the samples of the ACF of a sinusoidal voltage(experimental studies), calculated estimators based on the obtained samples, and computed the mean squared error(MSE) to compare the estimators. The errorswere juxtaposed with the Cramér–Rao lower bound (CRLB). The research results have shown that the proposed estimator is one of the most accurate, especially for SNR > 25 dB. Then the RC-HLA estimator errors are comparable to the MPHD-HLA estimator errors. However, the biggest advantage of the developed estimator is the ability to quickly and accurately determine the frequency based on samples collected from no more than five signal periods. In this case, the RC-HLA estimator is the most accurate of the estimators tested.
The zero attraction affine projection algorithm (ZA-APA) achieves better performance in terms of convergence rate and steady state error than standard APA when the system is sparse. It uses l1 norm penalty to exploit sparsity of the channel. The performance of ZA-APA depends on the value of zero attractor controller. Moreover a fixed attractor controller is not suitable for varying sparsity environment. This paper proposes an optimal adaptive zero attractor controller based on Mean Square Deviation (MSD) error to work in variable sparsity environment. Experiments were conducted to prove the suitability of the proposed algorithm for identification of unknown variable sparse system.