Digital signal processing is one of the most powerful technologies that will shape science and engineering in the twenty-first century. Revolutionary changes have already been made in a broad range of fields: communications, medical imaging, radar and sonar, high-fidelity music reproduction, and oil prospecting, to name just a few. Each of these areas has developed a deep DSP technology, with its own algorithms, mathematics, and specialized techniques. This combination of breadth and depth makes it impossible for any one individual to master all of the DSP technology that has been developed. DSP education involves two tasks: learning general concepts that apply to the field as a whole, and learning specialized techniques for your particular area of interest. This chapter starts our journey into the world of digital signal processing by describing the dramatic effect that DSP has made in several diverse fields. The revolution has begun.
Digital signal processing is distinguished from other areas in computer science by the unique type of data it uses: signals. In most cases, these signals originate as sensory data from the real world: seismic vibrations, visual images, sound waves, etc. DSP is the mathematics, the algorithms, and the techniques used to manipulate these signals after they have been converted into a digital form. This includes a wide variety of goals, such as: enhancement of visual images, recognition and generation of speech, compression of data for storage and transmission, etc. Suppose we attach an analog-to-digital converter to a computer and use it to acquire a chunk of real-world data. DSP answers the question: What next?
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This technological revolution occurred from the top-down. In the early 1980s, DSP was taught as a graduate level course in electrical engineering. A decade later, DSP had become a standard part of the undergraduate curriculum. Today, DSP is a basic skill needed by scientists and engineers in many fields. As an analogy, DSP can be compared to a previous technological revolution: electronics. While still the realm of electrical engineering, nearly every scientist and engineer has some background in basic circuit design. Without it, they would be lost in the technological world. DSP has the same future.
There are approximately one billion telephones in the world. At the press of a few buttons, switching networks allow any one of these to be connected to any other in only a few seconds. The immensity of this task is mind boggling! Until the 1960s, a connection between two telephones required passing the analog voice signals through mechanical switches and amplifiers. One connection required one pair of wires. In comparison, DSP converts audio signals into a stream of serial digital data. Since bits can be easily intertwined and later separated, many telephone conversations can be transmitted on a single channel. For example, a telephone standard known as the T-carrier system can simultaneously transmit 24 voice signals. Each voice signal is sampled 8000 times per second using an 8-bit companded (logarithmic compressed) analog-to-digital conversion. This results in each voice signal being represented as 64,000 bits/sec, and all 24 channels being contained in 1.544 megabits/sec. This signal can be transmitted about 6000 feet using ordinary telephone lines of 22-gauge copper wire, a typical interconnection distance. The financial advantage of digital transmission is enormous. Wire and analog switches are expensive; digital logic gates are cheap.
When a voice signal is digitized at 8000 samples/sec, most of the digital information is redundant. That is, the information carried by any one sample is largely duplicated by the neighboring samples. Dozens of DSP algorithms have been developed to convert digitized voice signals into data streams that require fewer bits/sec. These are called data compression algorithms. Matching uncompression algorithms are used to restore the signal to its original form. These algorithms vary in the amount of compression achieved and the resulting sound quality. In general, reducing the data rate from 64 kilobits/sec to 32 kilobits/sec results in no loss of sound quality. When compressed to a data rate of 8 kilobits/sec, the sound is noticeably affected, but still usable for long-distance telephone networks. The highest achievable compression is about 2 kilobits/sec, resulting in sound that is highly distorted, but usable for some applications such as military and undersea communications.
Echoes are a serious problem in long-distance telephone connections. When you speak into a telephone, a signal representing your voice travels to the connecting receiver, where a portion of it returns as an echo. If the connection is within a few hundred miles, the elapsed time for receiving the echo is only a few milliseconds. The human ear is accustomed to hearing echoes with these small time delays, and the connection sounds quite normal. As the distance becomes larger, the echo becomes increasingly noticeable and irritating. The delay can be several hundred milliseconds for intercontinental communications, and is particularly objectionable. Digital signal processing attacks this type of problem by measuring the returned signal and generating an appropriate antisignal to cancel the offending echo. This same technique allows speakerphone users to hear and speak at the same time without fighting audio feedback (squealing). It can also be used to reduce environmental noise by canceling it with digitally generated antinoise.
Speech generation and recognition are used to communicate between humans and machines. Rather than using your hands and eyes, you use your mouth and ears. This is very convenient when your hands and eyes should be doing something else, such as: driving a car, performing surgery, or (unfortunately) firing your weapons at the enemy. Two approaches are used for computer generated speech: digital recording and vocal tract simulation. In digital recording, the voice of a human speaker is digitized and stored, usually in a compressed form. During playback, the stored data are uncompressed and converted back into an analog signal. An entire hour of recorded speech requires only about three megabytes of storage, well within the capabilities of even small computer systems. This is the most common method of digital speech generation used today.
Vocal tract simulators are more complicated, trying to mimic the physical mechanisms by which humans create speech. The human vocal tract is an acoustic cavity with resonant frequencies determined by the size and shape of the chambers. Sound originates in the vocal tract in one of two basic ways, called voiced and fricative sounds. With voiced sounds, vocal cord vibration produces near-periodic pulses of air into the vocal cavities. In comparison, fricative sounds originate from the noisy air turbulence at narrow constrictions, such as the teeth and lips. Vocal tract simulators operate by generating digital signals that resemble these two types of excitation. The characteristics of the resonant chamber are simulated by passing the excitation signal through a digital filter with similar resonances. This approach was used in one of the very early DSP success stories, the Speak & Spell, a widely sold electronic learning aid for children.
Digital signal processing generally approaches the problem of voice recognition in two steps: feature extraction followed by feature matching. Each word in the incoming audio signal is isolated and then analyzed to identify the type of excitation and resonate frequencies. These parameters are then compared with previous examples of spoken words to identify the closest match. Often, these systems are limited to only a few hundred words; can only accept speech with distinct pauses between words; and must be retrained for each individual speaker. While this is adequate for many commercial applications, these limitations are humbling when compared to the abilities of human hearing. There is a great deal of work to be done in this area, with tremendous financial rewards for those that produce successful commercial products.
A common method of obtaining information about a remote object is to bounce a wave off of it. For example, radar operates by transmitting pulses of radio waves, and examining the received signal for echoes from aircraft. In sonar, sound waves are transmitted through the water to detect submarines and other submerged objects. Geophysicists have long probed the earth by setting off explosions and listening for the echoes from deeply buried layers of rock. While these applications have a common thread, each has its own specific problems and needs. Digital signal processing has produced revolutionary changes in all three areas.
In the ideal case, a sound pulse sent into the ground produces a single echo for each boundary layer the pulse passes through. Unfortunately, the situation is not usually this simple. Each echo returning to the surface must pass through all the other boundary layers above where it originated. This can result in the echo bouncing between layers, giving rise to echoes of echoes being detected at the surface. These secondary echoes can make the detected signal very complicated and difficult to interpret. Digital signal processing has been widely used since the 1960s to isolate the primary from the secondary echoes in reflection seismograms. How did the early geophysicists manage without DSP? The answer is simple: they looked in easy places, where multiple reflections were minimized. DSP allows oil to be found in difficult locations, such as under the ocean.
Images are signals with special characteristics. First, they are a measure of a parameter over space (distance), while most signals are a measure of a parameter over time. Second, they contain a great deal of information. For example, more than 10 megabytes can be required to store one second of television video. This is more than a thousand times greater than for a similar length voice signal. Third, the final judge of quality is often a subjective human evaluation, rather than an objective criterion. These special characteristics have made image processing a distinct subgroup within DSP.
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