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Signal Processing.
In this module we're going to see what
signals actually are.
We're going to through history, see the
earliest of examples
of discreet time signals, actually it goes
back to Egyptian times.
Then through this history see how digital
signals for
example, with the telegraph signals,
became important in communications.
And today, how signals are pervasive in
many applications
in every day life objects.
For this we're going to see what the
signal is,
what a continuous time analog signal is,
what the discreet
time continuous amplitude signal is and
how these signals
relate to each other and are used in
communication devices.
We are not going to have any math in this
first module,
it's more illustrative and the mathematics
will come later in the class.
>> Hi, welcome to our Digital Signal
Processing class.
In this introduction we would like to give
you
an overview of what digital signal
processing is all about.
And perhaps the best way to do that is to
consider in turn what we mean
when we use the word signal, when we use
the word processing or the word digital.
And you will see that digital signal
processing is
really an intermediate point in a
reflection about physics,
about math and about the reality around us
that started
a very long time ago and continues to this
day.
So let's consider the concept of signal to
begin with.
In general a signal is a description of
the evolution of a physical phenomenon.
This is best understood by example.
Take the weather for instance, the weather
is a
physical phenomenon that we usually
measure in terms of temperature.
So temperature becomes
a signal that evolves overtime and that
represents a measurement of the underlying
physical phenomenon.
We could've chosen another variable.
For instance, we could've chosen rainfall.
their minds.
Finding new markets and winning the war of
conquest that came with the appropriation
of new markets.
Calculus, that was invented in those
years, purported to
provide a new answer to both problems, in
the sense that you could use calculus
to find optimal ship routes around the
globe and to find optimal trajectory for
cannonballs.
Galileo, in particular, worked on the
cannonball problem.
And operated by running a series of
experiments in which
the trajectory of balls thrown by a cannon
was experimentally determined.
And then working backwards to derive an
ideal Platonic model of the balls
trajectory.
That is given by this equation where the
initial velocity, expressed as a vector in
the Cartesian plane, is coupled with the
pull of gravity to give a parabolic shape.
So the way science proceeded was by
starting from set of
experimental data points and then work
backwards to find the description
of the underlying phenomenon in the form
of a perfect algebraic equation.
This usually worked very well for
astronomy, which was a main concern
in those days, because the trajectories of
the planets are perfect conic curves.
The invention of calculus and the
availability of models for reality
based on functions of real variables, led
naturally to what we call
continuous time signal processing.
So if you have a function like this which
is
for instance, a temperature function, you
can compute the average,
in continuous time, by taking the integral
of the function
over its support and dividing by the
length of the support.
Without calculus what you would have to do
is take daily measurements say of the
temperature.
And to compute the average you would just
sum this values together and then divide
by the number of days.
Now the question is what is the relation
between these two averages?
What is the error I incur if I use
experimental data rather
than finding the ideal function behind the
data and then computing the integral.
And even if I can do that for certain