Signal Processing

This chapter explores signal processing, a subject with applications in diverse branches of science and engineering. A signal in this context can be a quantity that varies in time (temporal signal) or as a function of space coordinates (spatial signal). An audio signal is a typical example of a temporal signal, while an image is a typical example of a spatial signal in two dimensions. In practice, signals are often continuous functions. But it is common in computational applications to work with discretized signals, where the original continuous signal is sampled at discrete points with uniform distances. The sampling theorem gives rigorous and quantitative conditions for when a discrete sequence of samples can accurately represent a continuous signal.