noise

communications Any part of a signal that is not the true or

original signal but is introduced by the communication

mechanism.

A common example would be an electrical signal travelling down

a wire to which noise is added by inductive and capacitive

coupling with other nearby signals (this kind of noise is

known as "crosstalk").

A less obvious form of noise is quantisation noise, such as

the error between the true colour of a point in a scene in the

real world and its representation as a pixel in a digital

image.

(2003-07-05)