Introduction to Real-Time Digital Signal Processing

Chapter 1 of the book: Real-Time Digital Signal Processing: Fundamentals, Implementations and Applications, 3rd Edition

Signal Processing for Communications

A Pragmatic Introduction to Signal Processing

An illustrated essay with software available for free download.

Introduction to Signal Processing

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.

C++ Tutorial

This tutorial is for those people who want to learn programming in C++ and do not necessarily have any previous knowledge of other programming languages. Of course any knowledge of other programming languages or any general computer skill can be useful to better understand this tutorial, although it is not essential. It is also suitable for those who need a little update on the new features the language has acquired from the latest standards. If you are familiar with the C language, you can take the first 3 parts of this tutorial as a review of concepts, since they mainly explain the C part of C++. There are slight differences in the C++ syntax for some C features, so I recommend you its reading anyway. The 4th part describes object-oriented programming. The 5th part mostly describes the new features introduced by ANSI-C++ standard.

Introduction to Sound Processing

Audio signal processing with MATLAB and Octave code examples.

Computing FFT Twiddle Factors

In this document are two algorithms showing how to compute the individual twiddle factors of an N-point decimation-in-frequency (DIF) and an N-point decimation-in-time (DIT) FFT.

Generating Complex Baseband and Analytic Bandpass Signals

There are so many different time- and frequency-domain methods for generating complex baseband and analytic bandpass signals that I had trouble keeping those techniques straight in my mind. Thus, for my own benefit, I created a kind of reference table showing those methods. I present that table for your viewing pleasure in this document.

How Discrete Signal Interpolation Improves D/A Conversion

Earlier this year, for the Linear Audio magazine, published in the Netherlands whose subscribers are technically-skilled hi-fi audio enthusiasts, I wrote an article on the fundamentals of interpolation as it's used to improve the performance of analog-to-digital conversion. Perhaps that article will be of some value to the subscribers of dsprelated.com. Here's what I wrote: We encounter the process of digital-to-analog conversion every day—in telephone calls (land lines and cell phones), telephone answering machines, CD & DVD players, iPhones, digital television, MP3 players, digital radio, and even talking greeting cards. This material is a brief tutorial on how sample rate conversion improves the quality of digital-to-analog conversion.

Understanding the 'Phasing Method' of Single Sideband Demodulation

There are four ways to demodulate a transmitted single sideband (SSB) signal. Those four methods are: synchronous detection, phasing method, Weaver method, and filtering method. Here we review synchronous detection in preparation for explaining, in detail, how the phasing method works. This blog contains lots of preliminary information, so if you're already familiar with SSB signals you might want to scroll down to the 'SSB DEMODULATION BY SYNCHRONOUS DETECTION' section.

A Review of Physical and Perceptual Feature Extraction Techniques for Speech, Music and Environmental Sounds

Endowing machines with sensing capabilities similar to those of humans is a prevalent quest in engineering and computer science. In the pursuit of making computers sense their surroundings, a huge effort has been conducted to allow machines and computers to acquire, process, analyze and understand their environment in a human-like way. Focusing on the sense of hearing, the ability of computers to sense their acoustic environment as humans do goes by the name of machine hearing. To achieve this ambitious aim, the representation of the audio signal is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present an up-to-date review of the most relevant audio feature extraction techniques developed to analyze the most usual audio signals: speech, music and environmental sounds. Besides revisiting classic approaches for completeness, we include the latest advances in the field based on new domains of analysis together with novel bio-inspired proposals. These approaches are described following a taxonomy that organizes them according to their physical or perceptual basis, being subsequently divided depending on the domain of computation (time, frequency, wavelet, image-based, cepstral, or other domains). The description of the approaches is accompanied with recent examples of their application to machine hearing related problems.

Correcting an Important Goertzel Filter Misconception

Correcting an Important Goertzel Filter Misconception

Algorithm Adaptation and Optimization of a Novel DSP Vector Co-processor

The Division of Computer Engineering at Linköping's university is currently researching the possibility to create a highly parallel DSP platform, that can keep up with the computational needs of upcoming standards for various applications, at low cost and low power consumption. The architecture is called ePUMA and it combines a general RISC DSP master processor with eight SIMD co-processors on a single chip. The master processor will act as the main processor for general tasks and execution control, while the co-processors will accelerate computing intensive and parallel DSP kernels.This thesis investigates the performance potential of the co-processors by implementing matrix algebra kernels for QR decomposition, LU decomposition, matrix determinant and matrix inverse, that run on a single co-processor. The kernels will then be evaluated to find possible problems with the co-processors' microarchitecture and suggest solutions to the problems that might exist. The evaluation shows that the performance potential is very good, but a few problems have been identified, that causes significant overhead in the kernels. Pipeline mismatches, that occurs due to different pipeline lengths for different instructions, causes pipeline hazards and the current solution to this, doesn't allow effective use of the pipeline. In some cases, the single port memories will cause bottlenecks, but the thesis suggests that the situation could be greatly improved by using buffered memory write-back. Also, the lack of register forwarding makes kernels with many data dependencies run unnecessarily slow.

De-Noising Audio Signals Using MATLAB Wavelets Toolbox

Based on the fact that noise and distortion are the main factors that limit the capacity of data transmission in telecommunications and that they also affect the accuracy of the results in the signal measurement systems, whereas, modeling and removing noise and distortions are at the core of theoretical and practical considerations in communications and signal processing. Another important issue here is that, noise reduction and distortion removal are major problems in applications such as; cellular mobile communication, speech recognition, image processing, medical signal processing, radar, sonar, and any other application where the desired signals cannot be isolated from noise and distortion. The use of wavelets in the field of de-noising audio signals is relatively new, the use of this technique has been increasing over the past 20 years. One way to think about wavelets matches the way how our eyes perceive the world when they are faced to different distances. In the real world, a forest can be seen from many different perspectives; they are, in fact, different scales of resolution. From the window of an airplane, for instance, the forest cover appears as a solid green roof. From the window of a car, the green roof gets transformed into individual trees, and if we leave the car and approach to the forest, we can gradually see details such as the trees branches and leaves. If we had a magnifying glass, we could see a dew drop on the tip of a leaf. As we get closer to even smaller scales, we can discover details that we had not seen before. On the other hand, if we tried to do the same thing with a photograph, we would be completely frustrated. If we enlarged the picture "closer" to a tree, we would only be able to see a blurred tree image; we would not be able to spot neither the branch, nor the leaf, and it would be impossible to spot the dew drop. Although our eyes can see on many scales of resolution, the camera can only display one at a time. In this chapter, we introduce the reader to a way to reduce noise in an audio signal by using wavelet transforms. We developed this technique by using the wavelet tool in MATLAB. A Simulink is used to acquire an audio signal and we use it to convert the signal to a digital format so it can be processed. Finally, a Graphical User Interface Development Environment (GUIDE) is used to create a graphical user interface. The reader can go through this chapter systematically, from the theory to the implementation of the noise reduction technique. We will introduce in the first place the basic theory of an audio signal, the noise treatment fundamentals and principles of the wavelets theory. Then, we will present the development of noise reduction when using wavelet functions in MATLAB. In the foreground, we will demonstrate the usefulness of wavelets to reduce noise in a model system where Gaussian noise is inserted to an audio signal. In the following sections, we will present a practical example of noise reduction in a sinusoidal signal that has been generated in the MATLAB, which it is followed by an example with a real audio signal captured via Simulink. Finally, the graphic noise reduction model using GUIDE will be shown.

Acoustic Echo Cancellation using Digital Signal Processing

Acoustic echo cancellation is a common occurrence in todays telecommunication systems. It occurs when an audio source and sink operate in full duplex mode, an example of this is a hands-free loudspeaker telephone. In this situation the received signal is output through the telephone loudspeaker (audio source), this audio signal is then reverberated through the physical environment and picked up by the systems microphone (audio sink). The effect is the return to the distant user of time delayed and attenuated images of their original speech signal. The signal interference caused by acoustic echo is distracting to both users and causes a reduction in the quality of the communication. This thesis focuses on the use of adaptive filtering techniques to reduce this unwanted echo, thus increasing communication quality. Adaptive filters are a class of filters that iteratively alter their parameters in order to minimise a function of the difference between a desired target output and their output. In the case of acoustic echo in telecommunications, the optimal output is an echoed signal that accurately emulates the unwanted echo signal. This is then used to negate the echo in the return signal. The better the adaptive filter emulates this echo, the more successful the cancellation will be. This thesis examines various techniques and algorithms of adaptive filtering, employing discrete signal processing in MATLAB. Also a real-time implementation of an adaptive echo cancellation system has been developed using the Texas Instruments TMS320C6711 DSP development kit.

The DFT Magnitude of a Real-valued Cosine Sequence

This article may seem a bit trivial to some readers here but, then again, it might be of some value to DSP beginners. It presents a mathematical proof of what is the magnitude of an N-point discrete Fourier transform (DFT) when the DFT's input is a real-valued sinusoidal sequence.

Implementing Simultaneous Digital Differentiation, Hilbert Transformation, and Half-Band Filtering

Recently I've been thinking about digital differentiator and Hilbert transformer implementations and I've developed a processing scheme that may be of interest to the readers here on dsprelated.com.

Audio Time-Scale Modification

Audio time-scale modification is an audio effect that alters the duration of an audio signal without affecting its perceived local pitch and timbral characteristics. There are two broad categories of time-scale modification algorithms, time-domain and frequency-domain. The computationally efficient time-domain techniques produce high quality results for single pitched signals such as speech, but do not cope well with more complex signals such as polyphonic music. The less efficient frequencydomain techniques have proven to be more robust and produce high quality results for a variety of signals; however they introduce a reverberant artefact into the output. This dissertation focuses on incorporating aspects of time-domain techniques into frequency-domain techniques in an attempt to reduce the presence of the reverberant artefact and improve upon computational demands. From a review of prior work it was found that there are a number of time-domain algorithms available and that the choice of algorithm parameters varies considerably in the literature. This finding prompted an investigation into the effects of the choice of parameters and a comparison of the various techniques employed in terms of computational requirements and output quality. The investigation resulted in the derivation of an efficient and flexible parameter set for use within time-domain implementations. Of the available frequency-domain approaches the phase vocoder and timedomain/ subband techniques offer an efficiency and robustness advantage over sinusoidal modelling and iterative phase update techniques, and as such were identified as suitable candidates for the provision of a framework for further investigation. Following from this observation, improvements in the quality produced by time-domain/subband techniques are realised through the use of a bark based subband partitioning approach and effective subband synchronisation techniques. In addition, computational and output quality improvements within a phase vocoder implementation are achieved by taking advantage of a certain level of flexibility in the choice of phase within such an implementation. The phase flexibility established is used to push or pull phase values into a phase coherent state. Further improvements are realised by incorporating features of time-domain algorithms into the system in order to provide a ‘good’ initial set of phase estimates; the transition to ‘perfect’ phase coherence is significantly reduced through this scheme, thereby improving the overall output quality produced. The result is a robust and efficient time-scale modification algorithm which draws upon various aspects of a number of general approaches to time-scale modification.

Algorithms, Architectures, and Applications for Compressive Video Sensing

The design of conventional sensors is based primarily on the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem, which states that a signal of bandwidth W Hz is fully determined by its discrete-time samples provided the sampling rate exceeds 2W samples per second. For discrete-time signals, the Shannon-Nyquist theorem has a very simple interpretation: the number of data samples must be at least as large as the dimensionality of the signal being sampled and recovered. This important result enables signal processing in the discrete-time domain without any loss of information. However, in an increasing number of applications, the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem dictates an unnecessary and often prohibitively high sampling rate. (See Box 1 for a derivation of the Nyquist rate of a time-varying scene.) As a motivating example, the high resolution of the image sensor hardware in modern cameras reflects the large amount of data sensed to capture an image. A 10-megapixel camera, in effect, takes 10 million measurements of the scene. Yet, almost immediately after acquisition, redundancies in the image are exploited to compress the acquired data significantly, often at compression ratios of 100:1 for visualization and even higher for detection and classification tasks. This example suggests immense wastage in the overall design of conventional cameras.

Sum of Two Equal-Frequency Sinusoids

The sum of two equal-frequency real sinusoids is itself a single real sinusoid. However, the exact equations for all the various forms of that single equivalent sinusoid are difficult to find in the signal processing literature. Here we provide those equations.