• Dual Tone Multi-Frequency or DTMF is a method for instructing a telephone switching system of the telephone number to be dialed, or to issue commands to switching systems or related telephony equipment.

• The DTMF dialing system follow the technique proposed by AT&T in the 1950s called MF (Multi-Frequency) which was deployed within the AT&T telephone network to direct calls between switching facilities using in-band signaling.

• The DTMF system uses eight different frequency signals transmitted in pairs to represent sixteen different numbers, symbols and letters. This table shows how the frequencies are organized:

• The frequencies used were chosen to prevent any harmonics from being incorrectly detected by the receiver as some other DTMF frequency. The transmitter of a DTMF signal simultaneously sends one frequency from the high-group and one frequency from the low-group.

• This pair of signals represents the digit or symbol shown at the intersection of row and column in the table. For example, sending 1209Hz and 770Hz indicates that the "4" digit is being sent.

• At the transmitter, the maximum signal strength of a pair of tones must not exceed +1 dBm, and the minimum strength is -10.5 dBm for the low-group frequencies and -8.5 dBm for the high-group frequencies.

Labeling of DTMF numeric digits

• The DTMF telephone keypad is laid out in a 4×4 matrix of push buttons in which each row represents the low frequency component and each column represents the high frequency component of the DTMF signal. Pressing a key sends a combination of the row and column frequencies.

• For example, the key 1 produces a superimposition of tones of 697 and 1209 hertz (Hz). Initial pushbutton designs employed levers, so that each button activated two contacts. The tones are decoded by the switching center to determine the keys pressed by the user.

• DTMF was originally decoded by tuned filter banks. By the end of the 20th century, digital signal processing became the predominant technology for decoding. DTMF decoding algorithms often use the Goertzel algorithm to detect tones.