Optimal design of symmetric fractional delay filter using firefly algorithm

A fractional delay filter is used to increase the accuracy, preciseness, time synchronization, and stability of signal processing system. However, designing a fractional delay filter for a specified delay, without affecting spectral characteristics of the signal is challenging because of nondifferentiability and multimodal nature of its objective function. In this paper, a more accurate design technique has been proposed for designing fractional delay filters, based on a recently developed firefly algorithm and its improved version. The designed filters offer variable fractional delay. A novel symmetric structure of implementation has been used to design filters. The efficacy of the proposed technique is evaluated by considering a filter design example. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with the other exiting algorithm. The comparative analysis of finite impulse response (FIR) fractional delay filter design proves that the proposed algorithm has a smaller design error and an implementation complexity than the other reported existing algorithms. In addition to this, the designed FIR fractional delay filter is implemented on Xilinx Virtex-7 for experimental validation.