How to implement a FIR high pass filter in Python?

Question

First of all I asked this question in Stack Exchange and I am getting only concept related answers and not implementation oriented. So, my problem is I am trying to create high pass filter and I implemented using Python.

from numpy import cos, sin, pi, absolute, arange
from scipy.signal import kaiserord, lfilter, firwin, freqz, firwin2
from pylab import figure, clf, plot, xlabel, ylabel, xlim, ylim, title, grid, axes, show

# Nyquist rate.
nyq_rate = 48000 / 2
# Width of the roll-off region.
width = 500 / nyq_rate
# Attenuation in the stop band.
ripple_db = 12.0
num_of_taps, beta = kaiserord(ripple_db, width)
# Cut-off frequency.
cutoff_hz = 5000.0
# Estimate the filter coefficients.
if num_of_taps % 2 == 0:
    num_of_taps = num_of_taps + 1
taps = firwin(num_of_taps, cutoff_hz/nyq_rate, window=('kaiser', beta), pass_zero='highpass')
w, h = freqz(taps, worN=1024)
plot((w/pi)*nyq_rate, absolute(h), linewidth=2)
xlabel('Frequency (Hz)')
ylabel('Gain')
title('Frequency Response')
ylim(-0.05, 1.05)
grid(True)
show()

By looking at the frequency response I am not getting the stop band attenuation as expected. I want 12dB attenuation and I am not getting that. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Change the pass_zero argument of firwin to False. That argument must be a boolean (i.e. True or False). By setting it to False, you are selecting the behavior of the filter to be a high-pass filter (i.e. the filter does not pass the 0 frequency of the signal).

Here's a variation of your script. I've added horizontal dashed lines that show the desired attenuation in the stop band (cyan) and desired ripple bounds in the pass band (red) as determined by your choice of ripple_db. I also plot vertical dashed lines (green) to indicate the region of the transition from the stop band to the pass band.

import numpy as np
from scipy.signal import kaiserord, lfilter, firwin, freqz, firwin2
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Nyquist rate.
nyq_rate = 48000 / 2

# Width of the roll-off region.
width = 500 / nyq_rate

# Attenuation in the stop band.
ripple_db = 12.0

num_of_taps, beta = kaiserord(ripple_db, width)
if num_of_taps % 2 == 0:
    num_of_taps = num_of_taps + 1

# Cut-off frequency.
cutoff_hz = 5000.0

# Estimate the filter coefficients.
taps = firwin(num_of_taps, cutoff_hz/nyq_rate, window=('kaiser', beta), pass_zero=False)

w, h = freqz(taps, worN=4000)

plt.plot((w/np.pi)*nyq_rate, 20*np.log10(np.abs(h)), linewidth=2)

plt.axvline(cutoff_hz + width*nyq_rate, linestyle='--', linewidth=1, color='g')
plt.axvline(cutoff_hz - width*nyq_rate, linestyle='--', linewidth=1, color='g')
plt.axhline(-ripple_db, linestyle='--', linewidth=1, color='c')
delta = 10**(-ripple_db/20)
plt.axhline(20*np.log10(1 + delta), linestyle='--', linewidth=1, color='r')
plt.axhline(20*np.log10(1 - delta), linestyle='--', linewidth=1, color='r')

plt.xlabel('Frequency (Hz)')
plt.ylabel('Gain (dB)')
plt.title('Frequency Response')
plt.ylim(-40, 5)
plt.grid(True)
plt.show()

Here is the plot that it generates. If you look closely, you'll see that the frequency response is close to the corners of the region that defines the desired behavior of the filter.

Here's the plot when ripple_db is changed to 21: