Interactive DSP course development/teaching environment

The authors have developed an interactive environment for the creation and maintenance of dynamic, active multimedia-based teaching mechanisms. The Environment is designed to be user-friendly and to facilitate the creation of educational material. This tool has already been used to create courses in Multi Dimensional Signal Processing (MDSP) by researchers working together while geographically separated . 1. I N T R O D U C T I O N New advances introduced by the World Wide Web (WWW) impose new ways of building learning materials. New technologies have a great impact on developing and defining new teaching concepts that expose students to real case situations. In fact, many conferences now contain a special session on education using some of these tools [l, 2, 31. In ICIP’94 [4, 11 and ICIP’96 [ 5 ] , we reported the use of Khoros as an authoring system for image processing and that we were developing new advances integrating Khoros, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the WWW. As a result, Digital Image Processing (DIP) Khorosware as a toolbox for the Khoros environment [6] was released. Since then several versions of this toolbox have been released and became the nucleus of a series of courses on MDSP. The first such course was developed by researchers working together at the University of New Mexico, USA, and the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil. The purpose of the courses is to give users a hands-on approach to MDSP through an extensive number of experiments. Theory and practice are mixed in such a way that students can immediately relate experimental results to theoretical concepts. This tool is unique in that it: 1) is interactive, 2) can be accessed by Internet browsers running on any platform (workstations or PCs), 3) is freely available, and 4) depends on free access software (Linux, GNU, JAVA, and Khoros software). In addition, some of the applications utilized in the Environment have been created to utilize Matlab, which is commonly available for educational activities. This paper is organized as follows: section 2. contains a discussion of the organization and the tools used in the course. In section 3. we present the Digital Image processing (DIP) course, while section 4. contains our conclusions and future work. 2. MDSP C O U R S E ORGANIZATION The course is divided by topics: The following preliminary topics have been identified.