Digital signal processing (DSP) is the use of digital processing, such as by computers or more specialized digital signal processors, to perform a wide variety of signal processing operations. The signals processed in this manner are a sequence of numbers that represent samples of a continuous variable in a domain such as time, space, or frequency.
Digital signal processing and analog signal processing are subfields of signal processing. DSP applications include audio and speech processing, sonar, radar and other sensor array processing, spectral density estimation, statistical signal processing, digital image processing, signal processing for telecommunications, control systems, biomedical engineering, seismology, among others.
DSP can involve linear or nonlinear operations. Nonlinear signal processing is closely related to nonlinear system identification and can be implemented in the time, frequency, and spatio-temporal domains.
The application of digital computation to signal processing allows for many advantages over analog processing in many applications, such as error detection and correction in transmission as well as data compression. DSP is applicable to both streaming data and static (stored) data.