DECONVOLUTION OF CAUSAL PULSE AND TRANSIENT DATA

Physical pulses and transients are causal functions of time, their values are zero before t = 0; the time at which they begin. Their measured waveform data are also causal. When deconvolution processing is applied to remove instrumentation errors and/or suppress the effects of noise, noncausal deconvolution methods may introduce unacceptable errors. The Nahman-Guillaume [1] automatic deconvolution method is modified to ensure that causality is maintained in the deconvolution result. The method may be applied to other deconvolution methods such as in [2]. Examples using the Nahman-Guillaume method are given which show the undesirable effects of noncausal methods and a means to eliminate such effects. © 1990 IEEE