ECE Offers Special Fall 06 Course

This is an amazing opportunity for our seniors and graduate students! Dr Fowler is well-respected internationally in image coding, as well as being one of our best teachers. Dr. Flanagan is often noted to be the father of modern speech processing while at Bell Labs, the top engineering research center in the world when he was there." - ECE Professor Robert Moorhead

Distinguished Research Professor and Recipient of the National Medal of Science, Jim Flanagan, will join Associate Professor Jim Fowler as they present concepts underlying modern multimedia signal processing systems.

The initial portion of the course explores general signal-processing fundamentals, including analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion, sampling and reconstruction, as well as the z-transform and transfer functions. On the other hand, the latter portion of the course focuses on the perception, processing, and representation of audio, speech, images, and video. The student will develop an understanding of the human perception of multimedia signals as well as a familiarity with algorithms that underlie popular multimedia representations and file formats. Additionally, the student will learn to read and digest appropriate literature in the field. Topics include:

• Sampling
• Quantization
• A/D & D/A conversion
• z-transform, transfer functions
• Upsampling, downsampling, interpolation
• Properties of audition
• Analysis, and coding of speech
• Synthesis of speech
• Perceptual audio coding
• Image perception, color spaces
• JPEG image compression
• MPEG video compression

See ECE4990 for more details. Note that for the fall 06, only, this course is an equivalent replacement for ECE 4413 Digital Signal Processing.