Correlation is a weighted moving average:
One signal provides the weighting function.
The diagram shows how a single point of the correlation function is calculated:
- first, one signal is shifted with respect to the other
- the amount of the shift is the position of the correlation function point to be calculated
- each element of one signal is multiplied by the corresponding element of the other
- the area under the resulting curve is integrated
Correlation requires a lot of calculations. If one signal is of length M and the other is of length N, then we need (N * M) multiplications, to calculate the whole correlation function.
Note that really, we want to multiply and then accumulate the result - this is typical of DSP operations and is called a 'multiply/accumulate' operation. It is the reason that DSP processors can do multiplications and additions in parallel.
