Public Domain Fourier Transform Library for Common Lisp October 7th, 2009
Patrick Stein

In response to my recent post about genetically selecting cosine waves for image approximation, several reddit commentors said that I should just have taken the Fourier transform, kept the largest 100 coefficients and did the inverse Fourier transform. [I haven’t run the RMS calculation on the result yet, but visually, it looks pretty nice with my test image. More details on that in a later post.]

The Lisp code that I used in that article didn’t actually use Fast Fourier Transforms. To test the commentors’ claims, I needed an FFT library in Lisp. I searched around a bit and found an FFI (Foreign Function Interface) wrapper around the FFTW library. After fiddling with that library and the wrapper for about two hours, I bailed on it and wrote my own Fast Fourier Transform library entirely in Lisp.

More information as well as links to getting the code are here: nklein / Software / CL-FFT.

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