QR-factorization method for computing the greatest common divisor of polynomials with inexact coefficients

This paper presents a novel means of computing the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two polynomials with real-valued coefficients that have been perturbed by noise. The method involves the QR-factorization of a near-to-Toeplitz matrix derived from the Sylvester matrix of the two polynomials. It turns out that the GCD to within a constant factor is contained in the last nonzero row of the upper triangular matrix R in the QR-factorization of the near-to-Toeplitz matrix. The QRfactorization is efficiently performed by an algorithm due to Chun et al. (1987). A condition number estimator due to Bischof (1990) and an algorithm for rank estimation due to Zarowski (1998) are employed to account for the effects of noise.