A Comparison of Beat Frequency Estimation Methods for Large Ring Laser

Abstract

Autoregressive (AR2) technique has always been used to estimate frequency of the output signal from Large ring laser. However, the acquisition rate is not at near real time which is the requirement and noise level still challenge the process resulting to errors in the final estimation. A research was done to compare the Autoregressive (AR2) with the counterparts such as Pisarenko, Quinn, Hilbert and Phase looking for a better technique that will estimate the frequency at near real time to minimize errors. Secondary data from G and C – II ring laser were used during the comparison between the techniques and Autoregressive (AR2). Results shows that, the output characteristics from the counterpart does not depict the oscillations of the Earth rotation as expected contrast to that of Autoregressive (AR2) which does. Moreover, there were much deviation from the expected true value for the techniques contrast to that of AR2 which is very minimum. On the other hand, when the C – II data were used, it was observed that both techniques resemble on their output characteristics though AR2 was still better in the acquisition rate expect for Hilbert transform which does not resemble with others. Following the scope of this paper, Autoregressive (AR2) technique still emerge as a favorite frequency estimation technique contrast to the four counterparts due to its robustness, high acquisition rate as well as low noise level.