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I performed an FFT with some zero padding and would like to transform it back to time domain. When I plot the signal it looks wrong. Is it because of the padding used in the FFT? How can I make it right? here is my code for doing the IFFT:

NFFT=4301;
AvIFFT = ifft(FFTavg.dat,NFFT);
plot(real(AvIFFT))

And I get this plot: enter image description here

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

ps: I have asked this question on matworks but no success as yet.

EDIT:

As suggested in the comment and answer below, I tried fftshift:

NFFT = 4301;
FFTshifted = fftshift(FFTavg.dat);
AvIFFT  = ifftshift(FFTshifted,NFFT);   
plot(real(AvIFFT))

Here is the plot:

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ look up the MATLAB function fftshift(). $\endgroup$ – robert bristow-johnson Jan 2 '16 at 4:21
  • $\begingroup$ have you tried fftshift() yet? $\endgroup$ – robert bristow-johnson Jan 2 '16 at 17:19
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    $\begingroup$ what does it do to your time-domain plot? $\endgroup$ – robert bristow-johnson Jan 3 '16 at 4:31
  • $\begingroup$ As I do ifft that should be the time-domain plot, right? $\endgroup$ – user3406207 Jan 3 '16 at 6:01
  • $\begingroup$ apply to this: NFFT=4301; AvIFFT = ifft(FFTavg.dat,NFFT); before this: plot(real(AvIFFT)) $\endgroup$ – robert bristow-johnson Jan 3 '16 at 6:02
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user3406207: I'm not sure what you're trying to do because I don't know the meaning of your words "wrong" and "right." But we can say, if you perform time-domain zero padding on an original unpadded $x1[n]$ input sequence you'll produce some longer-length $x2[n]$ sequence. The $X2[m]$ fft of your $x2[n]$ sequence will be an interpolated version of (more freq-domain samples than) the $X1[m]$ fft of your $x1[n]$ sequence. And, of course, the inverse fft of $X2[m]$ will be $x2[n]$ and the inverse FFT of $X1[m]$ will be $x1[n]$. I hope that helps. (By the way, you were smart to plot just the real part of your inverse fft.)

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The plot is correct. You have to remember that with the DFT the time domain is also periodic, so the left side of the plot represents time $t=0$ and the far right side represents time $t<0$. If you use fftshift the plot will look as you'd expect except that the middle of your plot will reresent time $t=0$.

Saw the edits you made to your code - I think you be skipping the first fftshift. I always use fftshift - I can't recall the difference between fftshift and ifftshift. See example below. Actually I think there is an error in your new code - it should be ifft rather than ifftshift.

NFFT = 4301;
AvIFFT  = ifft(FFTavg.dat,NFFT);   
plot(real(fftshift(AvIFFT)))
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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you. I tried to use fftshift() above. As this fft is the result of an average, I cannot check with initial signal. Is it normal that it is very symmetric like this? Or did I make an error in the code? $\endgroup$ – user3406207 Jan 3 '16 at 4:12
  • $\begingroup$ Well, it depends on what your original time series is, so I can't say. You really need to show what the original time series is, even if it is averaged. You should look at the ifft of FFTavg.dat without any interpolation - your interpolated result should appear similar but interpolated i.e. a higher time sampling. $\endgroup$ – David Jan 4 '16 at 14:19
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the advice. I will try to average the time series and compare. $\endgroup$ – user3406207 Jan 5 '16 at 3:37
  • $\begingroup$ @user3406207 For your FFTavg.dat are the complex valued FFTs averaged or is it their magnitudes or something else? $\endgroup$ – David Jan 5 '16 at 16:06
  • $\begingroup$ This is how I averaged the ffts of my time series: Y(:,i) = fft(dat1(i),Padding); avg = sum(abs(Y),2)/size(Y,2); FFTavg.dat = avg; $\endgroup$ – user3406207 Jan 6 '16 at 6:04

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