Signal Processing Toolbox

Generating, Visualizing, and Analyzing Signals

Signal Processing Toolbox enables you to generate and analyze discrete signals in MATLAB^®. You can:

• Create vectors of discrete signal values
• Generate standard waveforms using built-in toolbox functions
• Import signals from files
• Acquire signals from instruments, multimedia devices, and other hardware

Generating Waveforms

You can generate continuous and discrete signals using signal generation functions in the toolbox. Support for commonly used waveforms includes:

• Periodic waveforms, such as sine, square, sawtooth, and rectangular signals
• Aperiodic waveforms, such as chirp and Gaussian pulse signals
• Common sequences, such as unit impulse, unit step, and unit ramp

Visualizing and Analyzing Waveforms

You can visualize signals in the time domain by plotting them against a time vector that you create in MATLAB. You can also use stem plots, staircase plots, and other MATLAB plots to obtain different views of signal characteristics. You can transform time-domain signals to the frequency domain using functions that compute the DFT and STFT.

Visualization of periodic, aperiodic, and swept-frequency waveforms.

Interactive Signal Processing

Signal Processing Tool (SPTool) is an interactive tool that enables basic signal analysis tasks. From the SPTool interface, you can launch other tools, including Signal Browser, Filter Design and Analysis Tool (FDATool), and Spectrum Viewer. Using these tools, you can:

• Import and visualize single-channel or multichannel signals in the time domain
• Make signal measurements, such as slope and peak value
• Play audio signals on a PC sound card
• Design or import FIR and IIR filters of various lengths and response types
• View characteristics of a designed or imported filter, including magnitude, phase, impulse, and step responses
• Apply the filter to a selected signal
• Graphically analyze signals in the frequency domain using a variety of spectral estimation methods

Visualizing a speech signal in the time domain using the Signal Browser interface in the Signal Processing Tool (SPTool).