The wider the shape, the more often the FFTs have to be done to satisfy the Nyquist sampling criteria. For a fixed segment length, the amount of overlap determines how often the FFTs are done (and vice versa). Also, the wider the shape of the filters, the fewer filters that are needed to span the input bandwidth. Eliminating unnecessary filters (i.e. decimation in frequency) is efficiently done by treating each weighted segment as a sequence of smaller blocks, and the FFT is performed on only the sum of the blocks. This has been referred to as weight overlap-add (WOLA) and weighted pre-sum FFT. (see ) A special case occurs when, by design, the length of the blocks is an integer multiple of the interval between FFTs. Then the FFT filter bank can be described in terms of one or more polyphase filter structures where the phases are recombined by an FFT instead of a simple summation. The number of blocks per segment is the impulse response length (or depth) of each filter. The computational efficiencies of the FFT and polyphase structures, on a general purpose processor, are identical. Synthesis (i.e. recombining the outputs of multiple receivers) is basically a matter of upsampling each one at a rate commensurate with the total bandwidth to be created, translating each channel to its new center frequency, and summing the streams of samples. In that context, the interpolation filter associated with upsampling is called synthesis filter. The net frequency response of each channel is the product of the synthesis filter with the frequency response of the filter bank (analysis filter). Ideally, the frequency responses of adjacent channels sum to a constant value at every frequency between the channel centers. That condition is known as perfect reconstruction. Filter banks as time–frequency distributions In time–frequency signal processing, a filter bank is a special quadratic time–frequency distribution (TFD) that represents the signal in a joint time–frequency domain. It is related to the Wigner–Ville distribution by a two-dimensional filtering that defines the class of quadratic (or bilinear) time–frequency distributions. The filter bank and the spectrogram are the two simplest ways of producing a quadratic TFD; they are in essence similar as one (the spectrogram) is obtained by dividing the time domain into slices and then taking a Fourier transform, while the other (the filter bank) is obtained by dividing the frequency domain in slices forming bandpass filters that