Digital signal processing with applications: a new and successful approach to undergraduate DSP education

The new approach to undergraduate digital signal processing education at Purdue is based on a simple idea: emphasize applications. Students are assumed to have a significant exposure to sampling and discrete-time signals, systems, and transforms at the junior level. In the senior course, the traditional digital signal processing topics of digital filter design, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), radix-2 fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), and quantization are covered in the first five weeks of the semester. Coverage of these topics is augmented by treatment in the laboratory component of the course using diverse software tools and by Matlab-based homework assignments. The remainder of the course is devoted to treating the topics of speech processing and image processing in substantial depth and involves a design project. The course has been very successful in terms of increasing enrolment and outstanding student evaluations.