An application of system identification in metrology

Metrology is advancing by development of new measurement techniques and corresponding hardware. A given measurement technique, however, has fundamental speed and precision limitations. In order to overcome the hardware limitations, we develop signal processing methods based on the prior knowledge that the measurement process dynamics is linear time-invariant.Our approach is to model the measurement process as a step response of a dynamical system, where the input step level is the quantity of interest. The solution proposed is an algorithm that does real-time processing of the sensor's measurements. It is shown that when the measurement process dynamics is known, the input estimation problem is equivalent to state estimation. Otherwise, the input estimation problem can be solved as a system identification problem. The main underlying assumption is that the measured quantity is constant and the measurement process is a low-order linear time-invariant system. The methods are validated and compared on applications of temperature and weight measurement.