The expansion of the world’s population leads to the scarcity
of drinking water and drives increasing exploitation of
untapped water resources. Among them, the desalination
of seawater or saline ground water and the purification of
water originating from rivers or lakes are of growing interest.
Chemical, biological, and physical parameters defining
water quality criteria and quality thresholds imposed by government
agencies and health institutions must be satisfied.
This requires the implementation of monitoring procedures
in order to assess the conformity of potable water against
specified objectives. Facilitated by the advent of information
communication and technology, combined with the development
of state-of-the-art signal processing algorithms,
new approaches for efficient online water quality monitoring
are investigated. The benefit of such approaches is to
allow for online monitoring of the measurements of large
scale water systems and early detection of intentional or
unintentional contamination events.