[dTal]

Yes, as described in the article, this is just dithering. I've never heard of "stochastic resonance", but from what I can discern from the wikipedia article, it's essentially the same thing except applied to systems that are merely "nonlinear" and "bistable", as opposed to outright quantized.

It appears we are not the first to note the connection: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11046260

[iQuercus]

In effect yes they are essentially the same thing. One of the (potentially annoying) things you'll see going through the literature is that the term has very broad meaning. Other times it'll be a very narrow term. The broadest is basically "random noise can be used to improve signal." Under that definition, dithering would be a form of stochastic resonance. This biology article actually touches on the definition issues.(http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...)

There's also a case to be made that the definition of SR should be narrowed, and a lot of what's called resonance isn't resonance at all.(http://www.nipslab.org/files/PRE1995-SR-and-dithering-p4691_...)