The increasing demand for non-sinusoidal currents affects the quality of distribution networks. Harmonic detection is a crucial step in the cancellation of those components by active power filters. In this paper, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is compared with different implementations based on Fourier transforms, demonstrating their equivalences and the advantages provided by the former. We demonstrate that the phase error in the presence of grid frequency deviations and the transient length are reduced by half in comparison to the discrete Fourier transform. A novel algorithm is developed to provide frequency adaptation to the DCT, taking advantage of its good features. The window width is adjusted in real time according to the actual value of the grid fundamental frequency by means of a phase-locked loop. A technique based on dithering is employed to overcome the limitation caused by the truncation of the window number of samples, so the frequency resolution is enhanced. The theoretical approach is verified by simulated and experimental results.