The technical world is changing very rapidly. In only 15 years, the power of personal computers has increased by a factor of nearly one-thousand. By all accounts, it will increase by another factor of one-thousand in the next 15 years. This tremendous power has changed the way science and engineering is done, and there is no better example of this than Digital Signal Processing. <...>

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is concernedwith the theoretical and practical aspects of representing information bearing signals in digital form and with using computers or special purpose digital hardware either to extract that information or to transform the signals in useful ways. Areas where digital signal processing has made a significant impact include telecommunications, man-machine communications, computer engineering, multimedia applications, medical technology, radar and sonar, seismic data analysis, and remote sensing, to name just a few. <...>

Students learn in a number of ways and in a variety of settings. They learn through lectures, in informal study groups, or alone at their desks or in front of a computer terminal. Wherever the location, students learn most efficiently by solving problems, with frequent feedback from an instructor, following a worked-out problem as a model. Worked-out problems have a number of positive aspects. They can capture the essence of a key concept — often better than paragraphs of explanation. They provide methods for acquiring new knowledge and for evaluating its use. They provide a taste of real-life issues and demonstrate techniques for solving real problems. Most important, they encourage active participation in learning <...>

One of the by-products of the computer revolution has been the emergence of completely new fields of study. Each year, as integrated circuits have become faster, cheaper, and more compact, it has become possible to find feasible solutions to problems of ever-increasing complexity. Because it demands massive amounts of digital storage and comparable quantities of numerical computation, multidimensional digital signal processing is a problem area which has only recently begun to emerge.