Signal processing

Last updated
Signal transmission using electronic signal processing. Transducers convert signals from other physical waveforms to electric current or voltage waveforms, which then are processed, transmitted as electromagnetic waves, received and converted by another transducer to final form. Signal processing system.png
Signal transmission using electronic signal processing. Transducers convert signals from other physical waveforms to electric current or voltage waveforms, which then are processed, transmitted as electromagnetic waves, received and converted by another transducer to final form.
Cosine Series Plus Noise.png
Cosine Series Plus Noise TFM.png
The signal on the left looks like noise, but the signal processing technique known as spectral density estimation (right) shows that it contains five well-defined frequency components.

Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing signals , such as sound, images, potential fields, seismic signals, altimetry processing, and scientific measurements. [1] Signal processing techniques are used to optimize transmissions, digital storage efficiency, correcting distorted signals, subjective video quality, and to also detect or pinpoint components of interest in a measured signal. [2]

Contents

History

According to Alan V. Oppenheim and Ronald W. Schafer, the principles of signal processing can be found in the classical numerical analysis techniques of the 17th century. They further state that the digital refinement of these techniques can be found in the digital control systems of the 1940s and 1950s. [3]

In 1948, Claude Shannon wrote the influential paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" which was published in the Bell System Technical Journal . [4] The paper laid the groundwork for later development of information communication systems and the processing of signals for transmission. [5]

Signal processing matured and flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, and digital signal processing became widely used with specialized digital signal processor chips in the 1980s. [5]

Definition of a signal

A signal is a function , where this function is either [6]

Categories

Analog

Analog signal processing is for signals that have not been digitized, as in most 20th-century radio, telephone, and television systems. This involves linear electronic circuits as well as nonlinear ones. The former are, for instance, passive filters, active filters, additive mixers, integrators, and delay lines. Nonlinear circuits include compandors, multipliers (frequency mixers, voltage-controlled amplifiers), voltage-controlled filters, voltage-controlled oscillators, and phase-locked loops.

Continuous time

Continuous-time signal processing is for signals that vary with the change of continuous domain (without considering some individual interrupted points).

The methods of signal processing include time domain, frequency domain, and complex frequency domain. This technology mainly discusses the modeling of a linear time-invariant continuous system, integral of the system's zero-state response, setting up system function and the continuous time filtering of deterministic signals

Discrete time

Discrete-time signal processing is for sampled signals, defined only at discrete points in time, and as such are quantized in time, but not in magnitude.

Analog discrete-time signal processing is a technology based on electronic devices such as sample and hold circuits, analog time-division multiplexers, analog delay lines and analog feedback shift registers. This technology was a predecessor of digital signal processing (see below), and is still used in advanced processing of gigahertz signals.

The concept of discrete-time signal processing also refers to a theoretical discipline that establishes a mathematical basis for digital signal processing, without taking quantization error into consideration.

Digital

Digital signal processing is the processing of digitized discrete-time sampled signals. Processing is done by general-purpose computers or by digital circuits such as ASICs, field-programmable gate arrays or specialized digital signal processors (DSP chips). Typical arithmetical operations include fixed-point and floating-point, real-valued and complex-valued, multiplication and addition. Other typical operations supported by the hardware are circular buffers and lookup tables. Examples of algorithms are the fast Fourier transform (FFT), finite impulse response (FIR) filter, Infinite impulse response (IIR) filter, and adaptive filters such as the Wiener and Kalman filters.

Nonlinear

Nonlinear signal processing involves the analysis and processing of signals produced from nonlinear systems and can be in the time, frequency, or spatiotemporal domains. [7] [8] Nonlinear systems can produce highly complex behaviors including bifurcations, chaos, harmonics, and subharmonics which cannot be produced or analyzed using linear methods.

Polynomial signal processing is a type of non-linear signal processing, where polynomial systems may be interpreted as conceptually straightforward extensions of linear systems to the non-linear case. [9]

Statistical

Statistical signal processing is an approach which treats signals as stochastic processes, utilizing their statistical properties to perform signal processing tasks. [10] Statistical techniques are widely used in signal processing applications. For example, one can model the probability distribution of noise incurred when photographing an image, and construct techniques based on this model to reduce the noise in the resulting image.

Application fields

Seismic signal processing Seismic Data Processing.jpg
Seismic signal processing

In communication systems, signal processing may occur at:

Typical devices

Mathematical methods applied

See also

Related Research Articles

Digital signal processing (DSP) is the use of digital processing, such as by computers or more specialized digital signal processors, to perform a wide variety of signal processing operations. The digital signals processed in this manner are a sequence of numbers that represent samples of a continuous variable in a domain such as time, space, or frequency. In digital electronics, a digital signal is represented as a pulse train, which is typically generated by the switching of a transistor.

Linear filters process time-varying input signals to produce output signals, subject to the constraint of linearity. In most cases these linear filters are also time invariant in which case they can be analyzed exactly using LTI system theory revealing their transfer functions in the frequency domain and their impulse responses in the time domain. Real-time implementations of such linear signal processing filters in the time domain are inevitably causal, an additional constraint on their transfer functions. An analog electronic circuit consisting only of linear components will necessarily fall in this category, as will comparable mechanical systems or digital signal processing systems containing only linear elements. Since linear time-invariant filters can be completely characterized by their response to sinusoids of different frequencies, they are sometimes known as frequency filters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Analog-to-digital converter</span> System that converts an analog signal into a digital signal

In electronics, an analog-to-digital converter is a system that converts an analog signal, such as a sound picked up by a microphone or light entering a digital camera, into a digital signal. An ADC may also provide an isolated measurement such as an electronic device that converts an analog input voltage or current to a digital number representing the magnitude of the voltage or current. Typically the digital output is a two's complement binary number that is proportional to the input, but there are other possibilities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital filter</span> Device for suppressing part of a discretely-sampled signal

In signal processing, a digital filter is a system that performs mathematical operations on a sampled, discrete-time signal to reduce or enhance certain aspects of that signal. This is in contrast to the other major type of electronic filter, the analog filter, which is typically an electronic circuit operating on continuous-time analog signals.

System analysis in the field of electrical engineering characterizes electrical systems and their properties. System analysis can be used to represent almost anything from population growth to audio speakers; electrical engineers often use it because of its direct relevance to many areas of their discipline, most notably signal processing, communication systems and control systems.

Filter design is the process of designing a signal processing filter that satisfies a set of requirements, some of which may be conflicting. The purpose is to find a realization of the filter that meets each of the requirements to a sufficient degree to make it useful.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Signal</span> Varying physical quantity that conveys information

Signal refers to both the process and the result of transmission of data over some media accomplished by embedding some variation. Signals are important in multiple subject fields including signal processing, information theory and biology.

In signal processing and electronics, the frequency response of a system is the quantitative measure of the magnitude and phase of the output as a function of input frequency. The frequency response is widely used in the design and analysis of systems, such as audio and control systems, where they simplify mathematical analysis by converting governing differential equations into algebraic equations. In an audio system, it may be used to minimize audible distortion by designing components so that the overall response is as flat (uniform) as possible across the system's bandwidth. In control systems, such as a vehicle's cruise control, it may be used to assess system stability, often through the use of Bode plots. Systems with a specific frequency response can be designed using analog and digital filters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frequency domain</span> Signal representation

In mathematics, physics, electronics, control systems engineering, and statistics, the frequency domain refers to the analysis of mathematical functions or signals with respect to frequency, rather than time, as in time series. Put simply, a time-domain graph shows how a signal changes over time, whereas a frequency-domain graph shows how the signal is distributed within different frequency bands over a range of frequencies. A complex valued frequency-domain representation consists of both the magnitude and the phase of a set of sinusoids at the frequency components of the signal. Although it is common to refer to the magnitude portion as the frequency response of a signal, the phase portion is required to uniquely define the signal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Time series</span> Sequence of data points over time

In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus it is a sequence of discrete-time data. Examples of time series are heights of ocean tides, counts of sunspots, and the daily closing value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Homomorphic filtering is a generalized technique for signal and image processing, involving a nonlinear mapping to a different domain in which linear filter techniques are applied, followed by mapping back to the original domain. This concept was developed in the 1960s by Thomas Stockham, Alan V. Oppenheim, and Ronald W. Schafer at MIT and independently by Bogert, Healy, and Tukey in their study of time series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Direct digital synthesis</span>

Direct digital synthesis (DDS) is a method employed by frequency synthesizers used for creating arbitrary waveforms from a single, fixed-frequency reference clock. DDS is used in applications such as signal generation, local oscillators in communication systems, function generators, mixers, modulators, sound synthesizers and as part of a digital phase-locked loop.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Filter bank</span> Tool for Digital Signal Processing

In signal processing, a filter bank is an array of bandpass filters that separates the input signal into multiple components, each one carrying a single frequency sub-band of the original signal. One application of a filter bank is a graphic equalizer, which can attenuate the components differently and recombine them into a modified version of the original signal. The process of decomposition performed by the filter bank is called analysis ; the output of analysis is referred to as a subband signal with as many subbands as there are filters in the filter bank. The reconstruction process is called synthesis, meaning reconstitution of a complete signal resulting from the filtering process.

In signal processing, a nonlinearfilter is a filter whose output is not a linear function of its input. That is, if the filter outputs signals R and S for two input signals r and s separately, but does not always output αR + βS when the input is a linear combination αr + βs.

A cyclostationary process is a signal having statistical properties that vary cyclically with time. A cyclostationary process can be viewed as multiple interleaved stationary processes. For example, the maximum daily temperature in New York City can be modeled as a cyclostationary process: the maximum temperature on July 21 is statistically different from the temperature on December 20; however, it is a reasonable approximation that the temperature on December 20 of different years has identical statistics. Thus, we can view the random process composed of daily maximum temperatures as 365 interleaved stationary processes, each of which takes on a new value once per year.

In applied mathematics, the Wiener–Khinchin theorem or Wiener–Khintchine theorem, also known as the Wiener–Khinchin–Einstein theorem or the Khinchin–Kolmogorov theorem, states that the autocorrelation function of a wide-sense-stationary random process has a spectral decomposition given by the power spectral density of that process.

Geophysical survey is the systematic collection of geophysical data for spatial studies. Detection and analysis of the geophysical signals forms the core of Geophysical signal processing. The magnetic and gravitational fields emanating from the Earth's interior hold essential information concerning seismic activities and the internal structure. Hence, detection and analysis of the electric and Magnetic fields is very crucial. As the Electromagnetic and gravitational waves are multi-dimensional signals, all the 1-D transformation techniques can be extended for the analysis of these signals as well. Hence this article also discusses multi-dimensional signal processing techniques.

In statistical signal processing, the goal of spectral density estimation (SDE) or simply spectral estimation is to estimate the spectral density of a signal from a sequence of time samples of the signal. Intuitively speaking, the spectral density characterizes the frequency content of the signal. One purpose of estimating the spectral density is to detect any periodicities in the data, by observing peaks at the frequencies corresponding to these periodicities.

In signal processing, a filter is a device or process that removes some unwanted components or features from a signal. Filtering is a class of signal processing, the defining feature of filters being the complete or partial suppression of some aspect of the signal. Most often, this means removing some frequencies or frequency bands. However, filters do not exclusively act in the frequency domain; especially in the field of image processing many other targets for filtering exist. Correlations can be removed for certain frequency components and not for others without having to act in the frequency domain. Filters are widely used in electronics and telecommunication, in radio, television, audio recording, radar, control systems, music synthesis, image processing, computer graphics, and structural dynamics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic engineering</span> Electronic engineering involved in the design of electronic circuits, devices, and their systems

Electronic engineering is a sub-discipline of electrical engineering that emerged in the early 20th century and is distinguished by the additional use of active components such as semiconductor devices to amplify and control electric current flow. Previously electrical engineering only used passive devices such as mechanical switches, resistors, inductors, and capacitors.

References

  1. Sengupta, Nandini; Sahidullah, Md; Saha, Goutam (August 2016). "Lung sound classification using cepstral-based statistical features". Computers in Biology and Medicine. 75 (1): 118–129. doi:10.1016/j.compbiomed.2016.05.013. PMID   27286184.
  2. Alan V. Oppenheim and Ronald W. Schafer (1989). Discrete-Time Signal Processing. Prentice Hall. p. 1. ISBN   0-13-216771-9.
  3. Oppenheim, Alan V.; Schafer, Ronald W. (1975). Digital Signal Processing. Prentice Hall. p. 5. ISBN   0-13-214635-5.
  4. "A Mathematical Theory of Communication – CHM Revolution". Computer History. Retrieved 2019-05-13.
  5. 1 2 Fifty Years of Signal Processing: The IEEE Signal Processing Society and its Technologies, 1948–1998 (PDF). The IEEE Signal Processing Society. 1998.
  6. Berber, S. (2021). Discrete Communication Systems. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press., page 9, https://books.google.com/books?id=CCs0EAAAQBAJ&pg=PA9
  7. 1 2 Billings, S. A. (2013). Nonlinear System Identification: NARMAX Methods in the Time, Frequency, and Spatio-Temporal Domains. Wiley. ISBN   978-1-119-94359-4.
  8. Slawinska, J.; Ourmazd, A.; Giannakis, D. (2018). "A New Approach to Signal Processing of Spatiotemporal Data". 2018 IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP). IEEE Xplore. pp. 338–342. doi:10.1109/SSP.2018.8450704. ISBN   978-1-5386-1571-3. S2CID   52153144.
  9. V. John Mathews; Giovanni L. Sicuranza (May 2000). Polynomial Signal Processing. Wiley. ISBN   978-0-471-03414-8.
  10. 1 2 Scharf, Louis L. (1991). Statistical signal processing: detection, estimation, and time series analysis. Boston: Addison–Wesley. ISBN   0-201-19038-9. OCLC   61160161.
  11. Sarangi, Susanta; Sahidullah, Md; Saha, Goutam (September 2020). "Optimization of data-driven filterbank for automatic speaker verification". Digital Signal Processing. 104: 102795. arXiv: 2007.10729 . doi:10.1016/j.dsp.2020.102795. S2CID   220665533.
  12. Anastassiou, D. (2001). "Genomic signal processing". IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. IEEE. 18 (4): 8–20. Bibcode:2001ISPM...18....8A. doi:10.1109/79.939833.
  13. Telford, William Murray; Geldart, L. P.; Sheriff, Robert E. (1990). Applied geophysics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-33938-4.
  14. Reynolds, John M. (2011). An Introduction to Applied and Environmental Geophysics. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN   978-0-471-48535-3.
  15. Patrick Gaydecki (2004). Foundations of Digital Signal Processing: Theory, Algorithms and Hardware Design. IET. pp. 40–. ISBN   978-0-85296-431-6.
  16. Shlomo Engelberg (8 January 2008). Digital Signal Processing: An Experimental Approach. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN   978-1-84800-119-0.
  17. Boashash, Boualem, ed. (2003). Time frequency signal analysis and processing a comprehensive reference (1 ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier. ISBN   0-08-044335-4.
  18. Stoica, Petre; Moses, Randolph (2005). Spectral Analysis of Signals (PDF). NJ: Prentice Hall.
  19. Peter J. Schreier; Louis L. Scharf (4 February 2010). Statistical Signal Processing of Complex-Valued Data: The Theory of Improper and Noncircular Signals. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-1-139-48762-7.
  20. Max A. Little (13 August 2019). Machine Learning for Signal Processing: Data Science, Algorithms, and Computational Statistics. OUP Oxford. ISBN   978-0-19-102431-3.
  21. Steven B. Damelin; Willard Miller, Jr (2012). The Mathematics of Signal Processing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-1-107-01322-3.
  22. Daniel P. Palomar; Yonina C. Eldar (2010). Convex Optimization in Signal Processing and Communications. Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-76222-9.

Further reading