2015 Second International Conference on Advances in Computing and Communication Engineering
Design of FIR Filter using Biogeography Based
Optimization
Mandeep Kaur Urvinder Singh
Chandigarh University, Gharuan Chandigarh University, Gharuan
Mohali, India Mohali, India
er.mandeep14@gmail.com urvinders@gmail.com
Abstract—Digital signal processing (DSP) systems require
filters to fulfill their needs for particular frequency
characteristics. This paper presents designing and optimization
of digital finite impulse response (FIR) highpass filter.
Optimization is a process to bring out the best result for an
objective function. BBO is the algorithm which is based on the
biogeography of organisms in a habitat. The algorithm has
certain modified variants such as BBO with chaos, enhanced
BBO, blended BBO and BBO with immigration refusal (IR)
which are used to optimize the filter and then compared with
each other. The works concludes that out of various variants,
blended BBO shines out with optimum results for a given set of
parameters. The convergence profiles of these variants proved
blended BBO as better converging variant of BBO.
Keywords—FIR-finite impulse response;BBO-bio-geography
based optimization; HSI- habitat suitability index;SIV-suitability
index variables; IR-immigration refusal;
I. INTRODUCTION
Filters are the electronic circuits which act as building
blocks for all digital signal processing (DSP) system [1].
Digital filters are the filters which give output in digital form
and are faster than analog filters when compared on the basis
of performance, output and reliability. Digital filters can be
classified into two types: Finite Impulse Response (FIR) and
Infinite Impulse Response (IIR). FIR filters are more stable,
free from phase distortion and less sensitive as compared to
IIR filters [3].
Litwin explored the basics of digital filters and difference
between FIR and IIR filters [1]. Further, Mastorakis et al.
designed a two dimensional filter using Genetic Algorithm
(GA) and compared it with some previous designs. The results
showed that stability can be guaranteed in this method with
simplification of the filter [2]. Karaboga and Cetinkaya
designed digital FIR filter using differential evolution (DE)
algorithm and its performance was compared with genetic
algorithm and least squares method. It was found that DE
calculated optimal results quicker than GA [3]. Ababneh et al.
designed linear phase FIR filter with the help of particle
swarm optimization (PSO) and GA where PSO outperformed
GA [4]. Luitel designed linear phase FIR filter using PSO and
differential evolution particle swarm optimization (DEPSO)
and concluded that DEPSO proved to be a better choice for
FIR filter in dynamic environment [5]. Mondal et al. designed
linear phase highpass FIR filter by implementing improved
978-1-4799-1734-1/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE 312
DOI 10.1109/ICACCE.2015.136
Dilpal Singh
Chandigarh University, Gharuan
Mohali, India
dilpal.singh01@gmail.com
particle swarm optimization (IPSO) and craziness based
particle swarm optimization (CRPSO) whose results were
much improved as compared to real code genetic algorithm
(RGA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and Park and
McClellan algorithm (PM) [11, 12, 13]. The algorithms used
to optimize problem function were basically adopted from
nature and its habitants. Simon proposed another algorithm
named biogeography based optimization (BBO) algorithm
which has some unique features as compared to other biology
based algorithms. This algorithm was demonstrated on real
world sensor selection problem and it proved better than
various other algorithms chosen for comparison [6]. The
algorithm was also used for dynamic deployment of static and
mobile sensors [7]. Du et al. implemented features of other
heuristic algorithms i.e. evolutionary strategy and immigration
refusal with BBO to modify the algorithm. The modified
version of BBO performed better than original BBO when
certain tests were implied over the new version BBO [8]. Ma
and Simon proposed BBO with blended migration for
constrained optimization problems and compared the modified
BBO with GA and PSO [9]. BBO has been used to optimize
the antenna and it provided superior results as compared to
other optimization algorithms [18-24]. In another work same
algorithm was compared with stud genetic algorithm (SGA)
and standard particle swarm optimization 2007 (SPSO 07)
where it was demonstrated that BBO performed better than
other competing algorithms [14]. Another modification was
proposed by Pattnaik et al. where clear duplicate operator was
introduced into BBO and was tested over different benchmark
functions. Enhanced BBO (EBBO) gave better results when
compared to BBO and its other variants [10]. Recently,
another modification of BBO was proposed as biogeography
with chaos to improve the performance of BBO for multi-
objective problems and it has been proven feasible [15].
This paper presents various migration variants of BBO.
The variants are enhanced BBO, blended BBO, immigration
refusal BBO and BBO with chaos. Each variant tries its best to
find the most optimum result i.e. fitness. All four variants are
compared on the various platforms and conclusions are
brought out.
The paper has been divided into various sections. Section I
gave a brief introduction about filters and BBO. Section II
explains about FIR filter and the objective function. The
following section i.e. section III explores the algorithm
implied with its variants. Further section IV discusses the III. BBO AND ITS VARIANTS
results with graphs and tables. Meanwhile section V tells Biogeography based optimization is the algorithm which is
about conclusion withdrawn. based on concept of biogeography i.e. distribution of
II. HIGHPASS FIR FILTER DESIGN organisms over space and time. The geographical area is
named as “island” or “habitat”. Each area is characterized by
Finite impulse response (FIR) filter are the digital filter some features which include position, availability of
which always produce a stable output. FIR filter’s response vegetation, rainfall etc, and are known as habitat suitability
can be given as given in (1). index (HSI). The number of species which a habitat hosts also
helps in determining the value of HSI because it is in direct
H ( z )  h(0)  h(1) z 1  ...  h( N ) z  N (1) proportion to the HSI’s value. The habitability is defined by
N
certain variables referred as suitability index variables (SIVs).
or, H ( z )   h( n) z
n 0
N
(2) These can be termed as independent variables while HSI are to
be termed as dependent variables. The habitats having high
value of HSI resist changes but are ready to dispense their
where h(n) is the impulse response and N is order of the features with the habitat with low HSI. Similarly habitats with
filter. Filter’s length can be determined from N+1. The low HSI are more vulnerable to changes and are ready to
designing process is chosen so as to obtain impulse response accept features from habitats with high HSI. The entering of
of filter. species into the habitat is termed as immigration and the
exiting of species from the island is termed as emigration.
Filter’s frequency response can be formulated as,
N
The algorithm works with two operators namely Migration
H (e jwk
)   h( n)e  jwk n
(3)
operator and Mutation operator. Migration operator adjusts the
habitat by moving the SIVs of better habitat into it which are
n 0
chosen according to their immigration rate (λ) and emigration

where  = , H( 
) is the Fourier transform vector. rate (μ) thus improving the habitat and further improving the
 generation. Mutation operator modifies the SIVs according to
The frequency in [0, π] is sampled with N points. The error
probability which is based on λ and μ parameters. Fig. 1
function refers to the difference between the magnitude of an
shows the variation of emigration rate with immigration rate
ideal filter and the designed filter. Thus, it can be formulated
with the number of species in single habitat. ‘I’ is the
as,
maximum immigration rate whereas ‘E’ is the maximum
N emigration rate, which are usually taken as one. ! is the
Error  max{[|| H i (e jwi ) |  | H d (e jwi ) ||]} (4) maximum number of species a habitat can handle making the
n 0 immigration rate minimum i.e. 0 and emigration rate to
maximum i.e. 1.
E ()  G()[ Hi (e jwi )  H d (e jwi )] (5)

where G(ω) is the function which provide weights for

different frequency bands and is termed as weighting function;
 (  ) is the frequency response of ideal filter and it can be
defined as,
1 ,1 ≤ ω ≤ 
H i (e jw )   0 , ℎ (6)

where  is cut-off frequency of the designed filter and

 (  ) is the frequency response of designed filter. The
error function needs to be minimized so fitness function has
been reformulated as
J  max p (| E () |  p )  max p (| E() |  s ) (7) Fig. 1. Relationship of immigration and emigration rates with number of
species in one habitat
where  and  are the pass band and the stop band ripple The values of λ and μ can be calculated as,
values;  and  are the normalized edge frequencies in the
EK
pass band and stop band respectively.
 (8)
The error function in (7) gives a generalized error function
P
which has to be minimized by proposed BBO. This function K
will be used to optimize the filter’s performance.      (9)
P
where E=maximum value of λ; I= maximum value of μ;
P=population size; K=number of species of the K-th

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individual. The pseudo-code of the migration and mutation
operators is given in following part.
Algorithm1:Pseudo-code for migration operator
1. For r =1 to P
the habitat [15]. The migration operator for this
modified version can be given with the following
pseudo-code.
Algorithm3:Pseudo-code for BBO with chaos

2. Choose " with probability proportional to λ" 1. For r =1 to P

3. If " is chosen 2. Choose " with probability proportional to $"

4. For s=1 to n 3. If rand < $"

5. Choose  with probability proportional to μ" 4. For s =1 to n

6. If  is selected 5. Choose H with probability proportional to μ"

7. Choose a random SIV σ from  6. If rand < μ"

8. Substitute a random SIV in " with σ 7. Choose random SIV σ from 

9. End if 8. " =   (&.'('*+- ))

10. End for 9. End if

11. End if 10. End for

12. End for 11. End if

Algorithm2:Pseudo-code for mutation operator 12. End for

1. For r=1 to P
2. For s=1 to n
3. Use $" and μ" and calculate %"
4. Choose SIV " (s) with probability similar to %"
5. If " (s) is selected
6. Substitute " (s) with randomly generated SIV
7. End if
8. End for
9. End for
Here P=size of population; n=number of variables in a
habitat; $" =immigration rate; μ" =emigration rate ; "
=emigrating habitat;  =immigrating habitat;
%" =immigration probability; σ=immigrating SIV.
A. BBO Variants
BBO’s migration operator exploits the habitats by fine-
tuning the SIVs of that habitat. This means previous
solutions are updated while mutation operator is the
operator which generates new SIVs. In this paper, the
variants have been modified in the migration operator of
the algorithm because the major work in BBO is
performed by the migration operator. So, mutation
operator is not modified here to check the performance of
migration operator variants. The variants analyzed in this
paper are given below with their modified migration
operator.
 BBO with Chaos: In this variant of BBO, real coding
is adopted. The migration operator is adopted from
strength parent evolutionary algorithm (SPEA). The
individuals possessing high HSI share their
characteristics with chaos and improve the diversity of
 Enhanced BBO: Standard migration operator creates
similar habitats which lead to duplication of habitats.
The duplication ultimately reduces the diversity of the
habitat. To avoid this harmful redundancy, a modified
operator termed as ‘modified clear duplicate operator’
is introduced to clear the duplicates into basic code
which increases the computation time of the algorithm
but with a considerable increase in its performance.
This operator clears the duplicate habitats by selecting
a value between minimum and maximum value of
SIVs [16]. The proposed migration operator can be
coded in the pseudo-code as follows.
Algorithm4:Pseudo-code for enhanced BBO
1. For r = 1 to P
2. For s = s+1 to P
3. If " = 
4. " = (min (" ) + (max ( ) - min (" ))*rand)
5. End if
6. End for
7. End for
Here rand= any random integer between 0 and 1
 Blended BBO: In this variant of BBO, new solutions
are made up of two parts: feature from other solution,
and feature from itself. This technique has been
adopted from blended crossover from GAs. Thus the
upcoming generation consists of own parent’s feature
as well as migrating SIV’s feature. A multiple ‘α’ has
been introduced whose value is between 0 and 1 or it
could be any random or deterministic value [14]. The
pseudo-code for this BBO variant can be presented as
given in following part.

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 Algorithm5:Pseudo-code for blended BBO The values of various parameters used for construction of
filters are:
1. For r =1 to P
 passband frequency ( ) = 0.75;
2. Choose " with probability proportional to λ"
 stopband frequency ( ) = 0.65;
3. If " is chosen
 passband ripples ( ) =0.1;
4. For s=1 to n
5. Choose  with probability proportional to μ"  stop band ripples ( ) = 0.01;

6. If  is chosen  Population size in BBO = 40;

7. " = α (" ) + (1- α)   Maximum number of generations = 200;

8. End if  Dimension = 11;

9. End for  Probability of mutation = 0.01;
10. End if  Elitism parameter=2.
11. End for The code has been evaluated and run on MATLAB 2012b
version on core (TM) i3 processor, 3.00 GHz with 3 GB
Here α=0.5. RAM. Fig. 2 shows the magnitude response of all the four
 BBO with immigration refusal (IR): Migration variants i.e. BBO with chaos, enhanced BBO, blended BBO
operator improves the SIVs by immigrating high HSI and BBO with IR over same objective function of high pass
habitats to low HSI habitat. But there are chances that filter. The frequency parameter has been normalized in the
there is immigration from low-fitness solution to high figure. Table I shows the optimized coefficients for the
fitness solution thus ruining the fitness of island. To designed FIR filter having order 20. Meanwhile, Table II
tackle this problem, fitness of immigrating island is presents the best, worst and average fitness value of all the
taken into consideration and is rejected if it is lower modified variants. The values from table and the graph
than the fitness of emigrating island [18]. The code for suggest that best frequency response has been produced by the
this variant is as follows: modified variant named blended BBO. The frequency
response graph suggests that other variants have same
Algorithm6:Pseudo-code for BBO with IR response in transition band but there is an improved response
1. For r= 1 to P in stop band region by blended BBO. This is because it makes
use of two features: the parents and the immigrating habitat’s
2. Choose " with probability proportional to λ" features which results in least fitness value and least ripples as
seen in Fig. 2. BBO with chaos also uses both features same as
3. If " is chosen
blended BBO but with exponent which makes the difference
4. For s=1 to n in computation thus making blended BBO the best variant of
BBO in optimization of FIR high pass filter.
5. Choose  with probability proportional to μ"
B. Comparison on basis of convergence curves
6. If fitness (" ) < fitness ( )
To compare each modified variant on the basis of
7. Substitute " with  convergence profile, convergence curves have been drawn in
8. End if Fig. 3 by plotting the average fitness values for a given
number of iterations. The iteration number is selected as 200
9. End for for each modified variant.
10. End if Fig. 3 concludes that blended BBO converges at a much
faster pace as compared to other variants of BBO. Also, it
11. End for
attains a much lower value of fitness function than other
IV. RESULTS AND COMPARISONS modified variants in less number of iterations. Meanwhile,
enhanced BBO produces a sub-optimal value for the fitness
A. Study of magnitude response of FIR highpass filter function and converges at a slower pace than blended BBO.
In order to bring out the results and compare the The reason for this is that enhanced BBO remove the habitats
effectiveness of all modified variants, FIR filter has been which result in reduction of diversity. BBO with IR attained a
designed using MATLAB. The designed filter has an order of low value which may be due to the refusal of SIVs.
value 20 thus the number of coefficients is 21. The number of Furthermore, BBO with chaos did not come up with good
sampling points is taken as 256 and the sampling frequency is results which might be due to the intake of parent SIVs but in
chosen as 1 Hz. Each modified variant of BBO has been run the exponential form as given in Algorithm 3. Thus, blended
40 times to get optimum solution. BBO brought out better results as compared to other variants
of BBO i.e. enhanced BBO, BBO with immigration refusal
and BBO with chaos.

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 TABLE I. OPTIMUM COEFFICIENTS OF BBO VARIANTS
h(N) BBO with chaos Enhanced BBO Blended BBO BBO with IR
h(1)=h(21) - 0.0172191591766668 0.0000000000000000 0.000808732857412956 -0.00135941944083007
h(2)=h(20) 0.0000000000000000 0.0200000000000000 0.0188318492348605 0.0000000000000000
h(3)=h(19) 0.0181391428940318 -0.0442181142862795 -0.0407884508250713 0.0368361088292808
h(4)=h(18) 0.0000000000000000 0.00403604349295295 0.00852423732438976 -0.0138256096358770
h(5)=h(17) 0.0000000000000000 0.0244260303745714 0.0380592939106986 0.0000000000000000
h(6)=h(16) 0.0531976107751360 -0.0521174300633237 -0.0592740463931042 0.0450974662849897
h(7)=h(15) -0.0768191037339498 0.0544200854784211 0.0464247337218026 -0.0867299707114245
h(8)=h(14) 0.0000000000000000 0.0300000000000000 0.0325544425941253 0.000000000000000
h(9)=h(13) 0.207746275696171 -0.160498653596845 -0.134532387021371 0.191909339460792
h(10)=h(12) -0.275936628556418 0.247392588790788 0.270756153116677 -0.237300806497940
h(11) 0.286528896803798 -0.307971789732571 -0.278649888479125 0.313559044851423

TABLE II. COMPARISON OF BEST WORST AND MEAN VALUES

BBO Variant Best Value Worst Value Mean Value

BBO with 0.2498 2.6187 0.6551
chaos
Enhanced 0.0621 2.6796 0.2456
BBO
Blended BBO 0.0616 2.5451 0.2175
BBO with IR 0.1877 2.4374 0.4633

Fig. 2. Magnitude and frequency graph for different variants of BBO.

Fig. 3. Convergence profile of different variants of BBO.

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