Fast and Robust High Resolution Frequency Estimation of Damped Signals

Estimating frequencies of damped sinusoids is the underlying problem of many practical applications. Existing algorithms are often inaccurate for estimating frequencies from damped sinusoids since many of them are designed for undamped signals. In this paper we propose an algorithm to estimate frequencies of a sum of damped sinusoids. This algorithm combines the Gauss-Newton method with an exact formula for single-frequency estimation. As validated by extensive simulations, the proposed algorithm provides nearly optimal estimations of frequencies of damped sinusoids, and is much more efficient than others when the signal has a large number of samples.