Introduction to Signal Processing

Orfanidis wrote:This book provides an applications-oriented introduction to digital signal processing written primarily for electrical engineering undergraduates. Practicing engineers and graduate students may also find it useful as a first text on the subject.

Digital signal processing is everywhere. Today’s college students hear “DSP” all the time in their everyday life – from their CD players, to their electronic music synthesizers, to the sound cards in their PCs. They hear all about “DSP chips”, “oversampling digital filters”, “1-bit A/D and D/A converters”, “wavetable sound synthesis”, “audio effects processors”, “all-digital audio studios”. By the time they reach their junior year, they are already very eager to learn more about DSP.

Approach

The learning of DSP can be made into a rewarding, interesting, and fun experience for the student by weaving into the material several applications, such as the above, that serve as vehicles for teaching the basic DSP concepts, while generating and maintaining student interest. This has been the guiding philosophy and objective in writing this text. As a result, the book’s emphasis is more on signal processing than discrete-time system theory, although the basic principles of the latter are adequately covered.

The book teaches by example and takes a hands-on practical approach that emphasizes the algorithmic, computational, and programming aspects of DSP. It contains a large number of worked examples, computer simulations and applications, and includes several C and MATLAB functions for implementing various DSP operations. The practical slant of the book makes the concepts more concrete.