Causality in signal processing

Often, signal processing theorems give a non-causal filter. For example, see the following paper:

M. Unser, A. Aldroubi, and M. Eden,
B-spline Signal Processing: Part II---Efficient Design and Applications,
Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on , vol.41, no.2, pp.834-848, Feb 1993

A non-causal filter as above is no problem in image processing. However, in a real time system, in particular, in a feedback loop, non-causality should cause a problem of implementation. The simplest way to avoid this is truncation of the non-causal part of the filter impulse response, say, {f(n): n<0}. This absolutely degrades the filter performance, and the second simplest is to truncate {f(n): n<-N} (often with a window) and shift the residual by N.

Recently, much more sophisticated methods are proposed, via constraint least squares, which is related to H² optimization:

M. Unser and M. Eden,
FIR approximations of inverse filters and perfect reconstruction filter banks,
Signal Processing, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 163-174, 1994.

and via H^∞ optimization:

M. Nagahara and Y. Yamamoto,
H∞ optimal approximation for causal spline interpolation,
Signal Processing, Vol. 91, No. 2, pp. 176-184, 2011.

As I mentioned in a previous entry that H^∞ optimization leads to robustness against signal uncertainty. If you like robustness (or if you don't like risk-taking behavior), then you must choose H^∞! You can use MATLAB codes for the H^∞ design here.