ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the fundamentals of deterministic digital signal processing techniques, with specific attention to wireless distributed sensor network applications. Examples of natural signals in sensor network applications include temperature, humidity, wind speed, density of chemical agents, gas, solvent, sound, voice, image and video of targets, gesture, facial expressions, and many others. Signal processing concerns the acquisition, filtering, transformation, estimation, detection, compression, and recognition of signals represented in multiple media, multiple modalities, including sound, speech, image, video, and others. In digital signal processing, a natural or synthetic signal is first sampled and quantized using an analog-to-digital converter. The preprocessed digital signal may then be subject to further on-board signal processing so that the amount of data that needs to be transmitted through a wireless channel can be reduced. Deterministic signal processing tasks performed at this stage may involve discrete cosine transform, discrete wavelet transform, and digital filtering.