With the expected increases in both desktop and embedded computing performance in coming years, an important question is what applications will put the increased computing performance to use. Some of these applications would include speech recognition in noisy environments; intelligent searching in image/video databases; joint audio-video-graphics processing for video games; inferring genomic structures for diagnosing/treating disease; and identifying targets by collaborative audio-visual processing in wireless sensor networks. All of these applications fall under the umbrella of digital signal processing.
Digital signal processing concerns the analysis, compression, decompression, enhancement, modeling, projection, reconstruction, restoration, and transformation of digitized signals. Digitized signals are often streams of samples representing speech, audio, image, video, seismic, sonar, radar, and/or geonomic data. Multimedia digital signal processing concerns the joint processing of two or more types of digital media. An example would be to jointly use audio and image data for identification of a person.
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at The University of Texas at Austin has an active research and education program in digital signal processing. The digital signal processing applications being researched include audio, image, and video processing; wired and wireless communication systems; and sonar and radar. A particular recent emphasis is on signal processing for ad hoc wireless sensor networks.
Through the Wireless Networking and Communications Group, ECE faculty conduct research in theory and algorithms for 60 GHz wireless local area networks, multi-antenna communication systems, cognitive radio, wireless and ad hoc sensor networks, social networks, and distributed video surveillance. ECE faculty have also developed full system testbeds for powerline communications, multi-channel digital subscriber lines, underwater acoustic communications, multi-antenna wireless sensor networks, and mobile and ad hoc sensor networks. This research center also hosts the weekly Wireless Networking and Communications Seminar.
Through the Center for Perceptual Systems, ECE faculty collaborate with professors in the Psychology Department in research in speech processing and human visual processing, in the Music Department in research in computer music, and in Department of Computer Science in immersive virtual reality systems and data mining.
In graduate studies in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, digital signal processing theory and algorithms fall primarily under the Communications, Networks, and Systems (CommNetS) track. The design and implementation of DSP systems falls under the Computer Engineering track and the Circuit Design track. DSP applications fall under several tracks:
Links outside of UT Austin of interest to signal and image processing: