In control theory and signal processing, a linear, time-invariant system is said to be minimum-phase if the system and its inverse are causal and stable.
The most general causal LTI transfer function can be uniquely factored into a series of an all-pass and a minimum phase system. The system function is then the product of the two parts, and in the time domain the response of the system is the convolution of the two-part responses. The difference between a minimum phase and a general transfer function is that a minimum phase system has all of the poles and zeroes of its transfer function in the left half of the s-plane representation (in discrete time, respectively, inside the unit circle of the z-plane). Since inverting a system function leads to poles turning to zeroes and vice versa, and poles on the right side (s-plane imaginary line) or outside (z-plane unit circle) of the complex plane lead to unstable systems, only the class of minimum phase systems is closed under inversion. Intuitively, the minimum phase part of a general causal system implements its amplitude response with minimum group delay, while its all pass part corrects its phase response alone to correspond with the original system function.