RMS an array

Hello-

I posted on here a couple of weeks ago and your tips helped a great deal but today I have another problem that I'm finding rather vexing, I have an array of ints from a wave file and I'd like to perform RMS on it, this would be easy if I were to do the entire array however the window size for the RMS is dynamic depending on the bit width of the wave file. I've got some psudeo code that I think would work (if I could work out how to implement it):

for(int i = 0; i <= array.size(); i++){
runningWindowCount = array[i];
runningWindowCount += array[i+1];
runningWindowCount += array[i+2];
runningWindowCount += array[i+3];
runningWindowCount += array[i+4]; // do this the amount required by the bit width
windowCountAverage = runningWindowCount / bitWidth;
RMSArray.push_back(sqrt(windowCountAverage));
}

now this should work right? however its possibly the least elegant piece of code ever plus it doesn't deal with a different bit width. any tips on how I could make this better? or make it work if it doesn't already?

thanks.

Code:

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for(int i = 0; i <= array.size(); i++){
runningWindowCount = array[i];
runningWindowCount += array[i+1];
runningWindowCount += array[i+2];
runningWindowCount += array[i+3];
runningWindowCount += array[i+4];

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You are overwriting the boundaries of the array in that loop. Look at the value of your loop counter and how you are using it inside the loop.

For a simple case, what if the array had 2 elements? When i == 0, you are writing to array[0], array[1], array[2], array[3], and array[4]. The ones in red are invalid.

Regards,

Paul McKenzie

Is RMS referring to Root Mean Square? If so, you should multiply each element by itself before summing them. I.e. runningWindowCount = array[i] * array[i]

From you question, I believe you are calculating an array of RMS value within a sliding window and its width is determined by bitWidth. Here's something I quickly put together without checking with a compiler.

Code:

---

for(int i = 0; i < array.size() - bitWidth; ++i) // Looping till array.size() - bitWidth to avoid running beyond the array for calculating the mean of squares.
{
  double runningWindowCount = 0.0;

  // Sum and loop through the sliding window within the size of bitWidth
  for(int j = 0; j < bitWidth; ++j)
  {
    runningWindowCount += array[i+j] * array[i+j];
  }

  windowsCountAverage = runningWindowCount/bitWidth;
  RMSArray.push_back(sqrt(windowCountAverage));
}

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by dommmm

now this should work right? however its possibly the least elegant piece of code ever plus it doesn't deal with a different bit width. any tips on how I could make this better? or make it work if it doesn't already?

---

There's a massive performance gain lying around in the second for loop. In each iteration of the outer loop you are using (bitWidth - 1) of the same elements for your average. Therefore, keeping a sum of squares and updating this in each loop will reduce the complexity from O(n * bitWidth) to O(n).

I would still advice though, that you first make sure you have the algorithm correct before you begin with such optimizations.