III However, PTFT generally requires a huge computational complexity as it involves in multi-dimensional (MD) calculation. One of the primary objectives of this research project is to propose fast algorithms to calculate PTFTs efficiently. We have proposed a general class of fast algorithms for the computation of the PTFTs of complex-valued length-aPb input sequence, where a, band p are integers. The proposed algorithms provide the flexibility to support various input sequence lengths by setting the parameters of a, band p, and have regular computational structures for an easy implementation. Analysis and comparison on the computational complexity are also reported in terms of the numbers of complex additions and complex multiplications. It is verified that the computational complexity of the PTFTs is significantly reduced by using the proposed algorithms. Next, fast algorithms for the computation of the PTFTs of real-valued sequences are presented. Similar to the fast algorithms for complex-valued input sequences, the proposed algorithms can support various input sequence lengths by setting the parameters of a, band p, and have regular computational structures. Analysis and comparison on the computational complexity are made in terms of the numbers of real additions and real multiplications. With the conjugate symmetric property, the presented fast algorithms, with a = 3, 4 and 8, effectively reduce the computational complexity to be about one-half of that needed by the reported fast algorithms for complex-valued sequences. In many practical applications, real-time processing is required. Under these conditions, the software implementation may not be fast enough. To support high processing throughput, it is necessary to implement the fast algorithms in hardware. We propose a hardware-oriented radix-2 2 algorithm for PTFT of coefficients carry desirable information. For complex-valued PPSs, the PTFT serves as the MLE of the phase coefficients, and can be efficiently computed using the generalized class of fast algorithms presented in Chapter 4, which supports arbitrary order of PTFT with the dimension size being aPb, where a, P and b are positive integers. In practice, many applications inherently deal with real-valued signals. The natural signals such as speech, marine mammal sounds, heart rate etc. are realvalued. In image and audio watermarking schemes [36, 37], the real-valued chirp signals are embedded as watermark signals, where each chirp rate corresponds