- published: 13 Dec 2011
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Signal processing is an area of systems engineering, electrical engineering and applied mathematics that deals with operations on or analysis of signals, in either discrete or continuous time. Signals of interest can include sound, images, time-varying measurement values and sensor data, for example biological data such as electrocardiograms, control system signals, telecommunication transmission signals, and many others. Signals are analog or digital electrical representations of time-varying or spatial-varying physical quantities.
Processing of signals includes the following operations and algorithms with application examples:
In communication systems, signal processing may occur at OSI layer 1, the Physical Layer (modulation, equalization, multiplexing, etc.) in the seven layer OSI model, as well as at OSI layer 6, the Presentation Layer (source coding, including analog-to-digital conversion and data compression).
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 "digitalization" or digital refinement of these techniques can be found in the digital control systems of the 1940s and 1950s.