Comparison of delayless digital filtering algorithms and their application to multi-sensor signal processing

In the phase of industry digitalization, data are collected from many sensors and signal processing techniques play a crucial role. Data preprocessing is a fundamental step in the analysis of measurements, and a first step before applying machine learning. To reduce the influence of distortions from signals, selective digital filtering is applied to minimize or remove unwanted components. Standard software and hardware digital filtering algorithms introduce a delay, which has to be compensated for to avoid destroying signal associations. The delay from filtering becomes more crucial when the analysis involves measurements from multiple sensors, therefore in this paper we provide an overview and comparison of existing digital filtering methods with an application based on real-life marine examples. In addition, the design of special-purpose filters is a complex process and for preprocessing data from many sources, the application of digital filtering in the time domain can have a high numerical cost. For this reason we describe discrete Fourier transformation digital filtering as a tool for efficient sensor data preprocessing, which does not introduce a time delay and has low numerical cost. The discrete Fourier transformation digital filtering has a simpler implementation and does not require expert-level filter design knowledge, which is beneficial for practitioners from various disciplines. Finally, we exemplify and show the application of the methods on real signals from marine systems.