sampling (signal processing)

For other use, see sampling (disambiguation)

Sampling encodes a continuous signal as discrete set of samples. The reverse process is called reconstruction.

Subtopics

• aliasing and Nyquist-Shannon theorem
• reconstruction
• variance

Sampling Period and Rate

See also: period and frequency

When measuring a continuous signal uniformly, the sampling period measures the number of seconds between samples. We can represent the relationship between discrete samples and continuous signal as the following:

Oftentimes, it is more convenient to work with the sampling rate (or sampling frequency), which is denoted as

Note that we can convert between sampling rate and period via taking reciprocals, resulting in the following equivalent form for discretely sampled signals:

Related

• sampling (statistics)
• Monte Carlo methods
• pseudo-random number sampling