What Is Decimation in Signal Processing?

In digital signal processing, downsampling, compression, and decimation are terms associated with the process of resampling in a multi-rate digital signal processing system.

What is decimation in digital signal processing?

Decimation is a term that historically means the removal of every tenth one. But in signal processing, decimation by a factor of 10 actually means keeping only every tenth sample. This factor multiplies the sampling interval or, equivalently, divides the sampling rate.

What is decimation process?

Loosely speaking, “decimation” is the process of reducing the sampling rate. In practice, this usually implies lowpass-filtering a signal, then throwing away some of its samples. “Downsampling” is a more specific term which refers to just the process of throwing away samples, without the lowpass filtering operation.