The field of Signal Processing has developed so fast that it was incorporated into the graduate and undergraduate programs of all universities. The development of microelectronics technology caused a great impact in our modern life, making available a number of electronic equipment such as mobile phones, iPads, computers, video, and audio systems at a reasonable cost. This development occurred in parallel with the advances in the technology of transmission, processing, recording, reproduction, and general treatment of signals through analog and digital electronics as well as other means such as acoustics, mechanical, optical etc.

The signals, multimedia, and telecommunications (SMT) group consists of 5 full-time faculty members where four is Full Professor, one is Associate Professor. The group has its origins in 1995 with the inauguration of the Signal Processing Laboratory. The signal processing activities originated from the circuit theory group that started at COPPE in the early seventies. The signal multimedia and telecommunications group had only three Professors until 1993. In 2012 the SMT was formed and officially currently the group has 6 professors.

The group contributions cover a wide range of activities. They include contributions to electrical engineering education, especially in personnel training and on dissemination of modern signal processing techniques, including audio, speech, video, telecommunications, and applications in Brazil and abroad.

There is a good balance between graduate and undergraduate teaching. The members of the signal multimedia and telecommunications group have taught the following undergraduate courses in recent years: Signal Processing, Electronics, Analog Communications, Digital Communications, Image Processing, Linear Systems, Statistical Signal Processing, Probabilistic Models, Electromagnetics, Linear Algebra, Wireless Communications, Speech Processing, Audio Processing, among others.

At graduate-level the courses recently offered are Digital Filters, Stochastic Processes, Adaptive Filtering, Image Processing, Spectral Estimation, Wavelets and Filter Banks, Signal Compression, Detection and Estimation, Optimization, Array Processing, Information Theory, Speech Processing, Audio Processing, and Video, Wireless Communications among others

Some of the most important research topics of the group are adaptive systems, image and video processing, digital signal processing and its applications, speech processing, audio processing, wireless communications, and distributed processing.

The members of the group advised over 150 EE, 131 M.Sc., 81 D.Sc. and Ph.D. theses in signal processing theory and applications. two members of the group chaired the Program of Electrical Engineering, one chaired the Department of Electronics and Computer engineering and two members of the group acted as undergraduate course coordinators.

Some members of the signal multimedia and telecommunications group are also very active in scientific policy at the national level. They worked in accreditation visiting teams, and all are members of consulting committees of several research funding agencies.

There are a number of consulting activities being developed by the signal multimedia and telecommunications group with national and international companies such as CEPEL (Power systems research center), Petrobras (Brazilian petroleum company), IPqM (Navy Research Institute), smaller Brazilian industries, NOKIA, INdT, GE, HP, Statoil/Equinor, Halliburton, EMC-DELL, Anatel, Samsung, Siemens, Microsoft and a number of projects supported by the European Commission.

The SMT occupies on an area of 310 square meters. Its asset includes computers, spectrum analyzers, digital oscilloscopes, signal generators, real-time video storage system, PXT Wireless Communications Test Set and several DSP development systems among other things.