Help center desperately needs more detail

Question

The help/on-topic page needs some love. Right now it consists of a total of one sentence of guidance on what is on-topic:

"Signal Processing Stack Exchange is for practitioners of the art and science of signal, image and video processing."

I'm confident this community can do better than that. Please suggest helpful text to further elaborate what topics are and aren't appropriate on this site, so that the help center page can be updated.

Answer 1

Definitely! There has been some discussion in the teacher's lounge (all-mod chat room) about this: there is zero information available to mods from other SE sites to say what is on-topic for SP.SE. A suggested update:

What topics can I ask about here?

• Signal processing conceptual questions.
  • Example: Why is the Fourier transform so important?
• Signal processing theory questions.
  • Example: How do the Fourier transforms relate to the Fourier Series?
• Signal/image/video processing practice questions.
  • Example: How do I remove baseline drift from an ECG signal?
  • Example: which image processing workflow to perform “River” detection in text?
  • Example: Vehicle counting from a video
• Algorithm recommendations.
  • Example: Which factors should I consider when choosing an edge detection algorithm?
• Algorithm debugging questions.
  • If the algorithm you are implementing does not produce the results you expect, you can ask here provided you include plots of what you're seeing and what you expect to see, as well as code / pseudocode of how you're implementing the algorithm.
  • Example: Basic FIR Filtering with audio buffer in C++
• Signal processing homework questions, provided you make a good faith attempt at answering the problem first and try to explain what you need help with.
  • Example: Intuitive interpretation of Laplace transform
• Some software requests: Most software requests are off-topic, but specific requests for reference implementations of signal processing algorithms are on-topic.
  • See this discussion on meta for more information.

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Please note: this post is marked as community wiki, so please edit it to add / remove / correct / improve it!