Newnes Guide to Digital TV, 2nd Edition

4

Digital signal processing

Introduction

Digital signal processing (DSP) involves the manipulation of real-world signals (for instance audio signals, video signals, medical or geophysical data signals etc.) within a digital computer. Why might we want to do this? Because these signals, once converted into digital form (by means of an analogue-to-digital converter – see Chapter 3), may be manipulated using mathematical techniques to enhance, change or display the data in a particular way. For instance, the computer might use height or depth data from a geophysical survey to produce a coloured contour map, or the computer might use a series of two-dimensional medical images to build up a three-dimensional virtual visualization of diseased tissue ...