Below are some ideas for semester projects in digital signal processing. Some of the projects are more complex than others and will take more time. Also, these projects can be made more interesting by applying advanced techniques such as neural networks, hidden Markov modeling, adaptive filtering, and other tools beyond the scope of this book.

Over the span of a couple of months, projects are not going to be industrial-strength. Shortcuts should be included in the original project proposal, and acknowledged in a final report. For example, the number of test signals may be very small, and the effect on the project's results should be discussed.

1. Image watermarker

   Devise a way to put a simple watermark in an image that is invisible to a human observer.

2. Noise filtering

   Create a program to filter a noisy signal, such as cleaning up a speech signal recorded in a room full of other conversations.

3. Compression

   Given a music signal, store the information of both channels as efficiently as possible. What if your program subtracts one channel from the other? What if you use the previous sample as the expected value for the next sample, and only store the difference?

4. Music distinguisher

   Study songs representative of different music types, and write a program that distinguishes between them. For example, one might expect rap music to have more energy in the low frequency range (bass) compared to country music.

5. Color changer

   Using a color image, write a program to automatically map all the colors to...