sampling

Signal sampling representation. The continuous signal S(t) is represented with a green colored line while the discrete samples are indicated by the blue vertical lines.

In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of "samples". A sample is a value of the signal at a point in time and/or space; this definition differs from the term's usage in statistics, which refers to a set of such values.