It has been observed in the literature that the characteristic polynomial of a discrete system can be computed from the characteristic impulse response Gramian. In this letter it is shown that a given characteristic impulse response Gramian, in fact, contains information on two characteristic polynomials. The importance of this result is illustrated through an application to model reduction of discrete systems.

Recently Azou et al. proposed a method of model reduction for discrete systems based on a new impulse response Gramian. The reduced model was derived by first approximating the low-order impulse response Gramian, and then matching some Markov parameters and time-moments of an original model. In this note a modified method is presented so that the reduced model exactly preserves the low-order impulse response Gramian together with a slightly different set of Markov parameters and time-moments of the original model.