Digital Signal Processing

Next Session:

Feb 18th 2013 (8 weeks long)

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Workload: 8-10 hours/week 

About the Course

The goal of the course is to develop a complete working set of digital signal processing notions from the ground up. DSP is arguably at the heart of the “digital revolution” that, in the space of just a few decades, has enabled unprecedented levels of interpersonal communication and of information availability.

In the class, starting from the basic definitions of a discrete-time signal, we will work our way through Fourier analysis, filter design, sampling, interpolation and quantization to build a DSP toolset complete enough to analyze a practical communication system in detail. Hands-on examples and demonstration will be routinely used to close the gap between theory and practice.

About the Instructor(s)

Paolo Prandoni fell in love with signal processing twenty years ago and has never had any reason to regret it. He graduated from Padua (Italy) and obtained his PhD from EPFL (Switzerland) with a stint in Berkeley in between. Since then he’s been alternating between academia and industry, teaching Signal Processing at EPFL and working for a number of start-ups before founding his own in Paris.

Martin Vetterli, educated at ETHZ, Stanford, and EPFL, has been on the faculty at Columbia and Berkeley and is now a professor at EPFL. He has been interested in signal processing all his life, first as an (amateur) musician, then as a researcher and finally as an educator. He is known for his work on wavelets and filter banks, used in media standards like MP3 and JPEG.

Several years of undergraduate teaching have coalesced into a co-written textbook: Signal Processing for Communications (EPFL Press, 2009). Martin and Paolo have convinced their publisher to offer the book also as a free download on www.sp4comm.org and are constantly amazed by how far and wide their manuscript has traveled since doing so.

Course Syllabus

Broad outline of the topics covered in the class: 

1. Basic discrete-time signals and systems, signal classes and operations on discrete-time signals, signals as vectors in Hilbert space 
2. Fourier analysis: DFT, DFS and DTFT 
3. Discrete-time systems: FIR and IIR filters, convolution and modulation theorems, difference equations, stability issues 
4. Z-transform
5. Filter design, filter structures 
6. Stochastic Signal Processing 
7. The continuous-time model, interpolation and sampling, aliasing 
8. Multi-rate signal processing 
9. Quantization 
10. Multi-dimensional signals and processing, introduction to image processing.

Recommended Background

Fundamentals of linear algebra and calculus are a must. Familiarity with probability theory and system theory are highly recommended. Familiarity with Matlab (or equivalent) and/or scientific programming are a plus.

Suggested Readings

A companion textbook is available both in printed format and electronically on the web (free of charge). Please refer to www.sp4comm.org for details. Many more bibliographical references can be found in the textbook.

Course Format

The class will consist of videolectures, each approximately 45 minutes in length; videos will contain some interactive quiz questions. Students are encouraged to implement many of the course topics in the programming language of their choice; worked out examples in Matlab-compatible code will be provided on a weekly basis. The final grade will be based on the students' performance in weekly homework sets, which will include applied coding problems.

FAQ

• Will I get a certificate after completing this class?
  Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.
• What resources will I need for this class?
  The basic material (textbook, slides, videos) will available on the web. Programming exercises are mostly language-independent; numerical problems can be solved using Octave (free software) or Matlab (commercial software).
• What is so cool about digital signal processing?
  In the old days, i.e. the days of discrete electronics, if you wanted to build a circuit as a practical application of the theory you had studied, you had to shop for components, solder them together, and then repeat the process when a mistake led to a burn out -- a very common occurrence. With DSP, as long as you have a PC, you have a portable and indestructible lab in which you can quickly assemble prototypes of your favorite circuits, from guitar effects to data communication systems. In this class, you will learn how to do all that!
• Is this class about DSP chips?
  In short, no. DSP chips are specialized microprocessors designed to perform very efficiently the set of operations that are most common in digital signal processing. Many DSP chips exist and there is a rich body of literature on DSP chip programming. However, in this class we will deal with the fundamentals of signal processing in more abstract terms, and focus less on the specifics of a particular implementation strategy. The reward