DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING (DSP)

What is Digital Signal Processing?

It’s a major branch of science that deals with the representation of signals as symbols or sequences and after that these signals are getting processed. There are two subfields of processing available- Analog signal processing and Digital signal processing.

This digital signal processing also includes subfields like audio and speech processing, sonar and radar processing, sensor array processing, spectral estimation, statistical signal processing, digital image processing, signal processing for communication systems, biomedical signal processing, seismic signal processing etc. So from the above description it’s clear that DSP is a vast branch in engineering field that requires genuine attention and development.

Generally these processing measures the continuous analog signals and is then converted into digital form by means of an Analog to Digital converter (A-D converter). For certain, the required output would be in Analog form, so the signal is then converted to Analog using Digital to Analog converter (D-A converter). We know that this process is very complex when compared with analog processing and hence error detection and correction methods are used to clarify the process.

The main notable advantage of DSP is that it is less affected to noise and hence non vulnerable. DSP algorithms are carried out in special processors like Digital Signal Processors which is inbuilt in the systems. Since the process is very lengthy and time consuming, we usually undergo the process in this type of processors. DSP’s include microprocessors, digital signal controllers, field programmable gate arrays etc. DSP’s can be implemented using specialized microprocessors like DSP56000, TMS320 and the SHARC.

Usually the digital signals are denoted in time domain, frequency domain, spatial domain etc. With the available characteristics, it is decided that on which domain the signal can be denoted. Sampling is another important point to be specified. Sampling can be done in signal processing during two stages discretization and quantization. In the dicretization stage the space of signals are divided into equivalence classes and quantization is carried out by replacing the signals with representative signals.

DSP has applications in the fields of audio signal processing, audio compression and in the fields as mentioned earlier.