# Spectral leakage

The Fourier transform of a function of time, s(t), is a complex-valued function of frequency, S(f), often referred to as a frequency spectrum. Any linear time-invariant operation on s(t) produces a new spectrum of the form H(f)•S(f), which changes the relative magnitudes and/or angles (phase) of the non-zero values of S(f). Any other type of operation creates new frequency components that may be referred to as spectral leakage in the broadest sense. Sampling, for instance, produces leakage, which we call aliases of the original spectral component. For Fourier transform purposes, sampling is modeled as a product between s(t) and a Dirac comb function. The spectrum of a product is the convolution between S(f) and another function, which inevitably creates the new frequency components. But the term 'leakage' usually refers to the effect of windowing, which is the product of s(t) with a different kind of function, the window function. Window functions happen to have finite duration, but that is not necessary to create leakage. Multiplication by a time-variant function is sufficient.

Windowing a sinusoid causes spectral leakage, even if the sinusoid has an integer number of cycles within a rectangular window. The leakage is evident in the 2nd row, blue trace. It is the same amount as the red trace, which represents a slightly higher frequency that does not have an integer number of cycles. When the sinusoid is sampled and windowed, its discrete-time Fourier transform also suffers from the same leakage pattern. But when the DTFT is only sampled, at a certain interval, it is possible (depending on your point of view) to: (1) avoid the leakage, or (2) create the illusion of no leakage. For the case of the blue sinusoid (3rd row of plots, right-hand side), those samples are the outputs of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). The red sinusoid DTFT (4th row) has the same interval of zero-crossings, but the DFT samples fall in-between them, and the leakage is revealed.

Leakage caused by a window function is most easily characterized by its effect on a sinusoidal s(t) function, whose unwindowed Fourier transform is zero for all but one frequency. The customary frequency of choice is 0 Hz, because the windowed Fourier transform is simply the Fourier transform of the window function itself:

${\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}\{w(t)\cdot \underbrace {\cos(2\pi 0t)} _{1}\}={\mathcal {F}}\{w(t)\}.}$

## Discrete-time functions

When both sampling and windowing are applied to s(t), in either order, the leakage caused by windowing is a relatively localized spreading of frequency components, with often a blurring effect, whereas the aliasing caused by sampling is a periodic repetition of the entire blurred spectrum.