Chapter One

Discrete-Time Signals and Systems

Lecture #1

Rediet Million

AAiT, School Of Electrical and Computer Engineering

rediet.million@aait.edu.et

March,2018

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 1.1. Introduction To Digital Signal Processing

What is signal?
Any physical quantity that convey information.
In the field of electrical engineering more generally, a signal is any
time-varying or spatial-varying quantity.
−Current, voltage, acoustic waveform, light intensity across the focal plane
of a camera...
Within a complex society, any set of human information or machine
data can be taken as a signal.
−Stock market prices, number of bytes transmitted across a channel versus
time, human population as a function of time, ...
Often signals are represented mathematically as a function of
independent variables such as time (e.g.Speech signal), position
(e.g.Image) etc.

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Types of signals

The independent variable may be either continuous or discrete.

Analog signal is defined when both the independent variable time and
the amplitude are continuous.
A signal that is a function of a discrete time represented as sequence
of numbers, x[n] ,is called Discrete -Time signal .
When a discrete-time signal, x[n] , is quantized in amplitude,then we
have Digital Signal.

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Digital Signal Processing (DSP)

DSP is concerned with the representation of signals as sequences of

numbers and with methods of processing those numbers to achieve
some desired goal.
Typical DSP system components:

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Pros and cons of DSP

Pros of DSP:
I Flexibility can be achieved with software implementations.
I Easy to duplicate.
I Digital information can be encrypted for security.
I Digital storage is cheap.
I Non-linear and time-varying operations are easier to implement.
I Sensitivity to electrical noise is minimal.
I Stable and robust, not varying with temperature.
Cons of DSP:
I Sampling causes loss of information.
I Limited speed of processors.
I Quantization and round-off errors.
I Limited to signals with relatively low bandwidths

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Applications of DSP

Speech Processing:
I Enhancement noise filtering.
I Coding.
I Text-to-speech (synthesis)
I Recognition e.g ’Cortana’,’Seri’, .
Image processing :
I Enhancement, coding, pattern recognition (e.g. OCR).
Multimedia Processing :
I Media transmission, digital TV, video conferencing.
Communication
Bio-medical engineering e.g Ultrasound,Electrocardiogram (ECG)
Navigation, radar, GPS
Control, robotics, machine vision.

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