Interactive software systems for digital signal processing applications

The development, testing and evaluation of digital signal processing algorithms can lead to cumbersome programming problems if these tasks involve extensive data manipulations and interactions with other existing software. When this is the case, there is a need for an interactive software tool that allows flexibility of data and algorithm manipulations and relieves the system designer of many of these time consuming functions. In this paper we describe the design of such a software package. In this system algorithms are coded as procedures called by an executive. Data input and output is done with files managed by a file management function. This function is the most important aspect of the system, providing the user with control over file creation, deletion and anotation as well as handling all data transfers without unnecessary user intervention. A first application of this system was to implement a spectrum analysis package. Other possible applications include the design of state-space estimation and control algorithms.