ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the basic principles for analyzing general discrete-time signals and systems will be reviewed. These principles underlie most of the speech analysis techniques to be discussed in Chapter 2, and form a basis for most speech technology applications. Although physical signals such as speech are continuous in time, i.e., they vary at an uncountably infinite number of times t E R, we in this book largely restrict ourselves to discrete-time speech signals. This is because most applications of speech processing involve use of digital computers, whose operation requires that continuous signals be converted to discrete-number sequences. The computation-oriented nature of speech processing and the close ties of speech processing techniques to digital-computing technology warrant an adequate coverage of the basics of digital signal processing (DSP), to which this chapter is devoted.
