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Chapter 1: Introduction


Signal Processing exploits the representation, transformation, and manipulation of signals and
explores the information conveyed or contained by signals.
The main applications that we concern are modulation, equalization, estimation/detection in
Communication Engineering; image/video coding (J PEG, MPEG, H.264), enhancement, 3D
imaging, editing, search in Video Processing; speech/audio coding (MP3, MPEG, cellular
phone), speech recognition, speech synthesis, audio search in Speech/Audio Processing; and
some Medical applications.

The objects processed by Discrete-time signal processing are integer-indexed numerical
sequences.

The objects processed by Digital Signal Processing (DSP) are data (sample) sequences. They
can be obtained from continuous-time signals by sampling and quantization.

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A data sequence differs from a discrete-time sequence only on the quantization of samples. The
difference is usually not large and can be negligible. This is especially true for the case of
high-precision computation in which the word length used to quantize a sample is large. So, the
two terms are mixed up to use DSP as the generic name. We always use DSP in real world
computation and use Discrete-time signal processing in theoretic analysis to avoid the difficulty
resulting from sample quantization. The two terms are distinguished when we consider the
effect of quantization on the precision of theoretic analysis.

DSP is usually applied to manipulate a signal in order to produce another signal, e.g. filtering.
It may also perform a signal interpretation, e.g. transform, to explore the signal characteristics,
such as spectrum, energy, period and so on.
The main reasons of using the DSP technology are: (1) The well-development of
the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) technique; (2) The fast growing of the logic
circuits design and manufacturing; (3) The fast growing of computers.
DSP processor is a generic term to represent a device specially designed for DSP
computation. TI is the major player in this field. In recent year, a domestic DSP
processor, called PAC (Parallel Architecture CoreDSP, is developing by ITRI.
In recent year, handheld devices are popular. The processors used in a handheld
device are generally called embedded processors or systems. The market is
dominated by ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) which is a 32-bit reduced
instruction set computer (RISC) with instruction set architecture (ISA). A
domestic embedded processor was developed by the NSoC National Science
and Technology Program and technique transferred to the Andes ()
company.
Since the fast growing of computers, a real-time DSP can be implemented on a
PC.

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The textbook used in the lecture is:
Discrete-time Signal Processing, 2010, 3rd edition,
By A. V. Oppenheim and R. W. Schafer Pearson,
The lecture notes are directly generated from the textbook.

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