A Signal Driven Adaptive Resolution Short-Time Fourier Transform

The frequency contents of the non-stationary signals vary with time. For proper characterization of such signals, a smart time-frequency representation is necessary. Classically, the STFT (short-time Fourier transform) is employed for this purpose. Its limitation is the fixed timefrequency resolution. To overcome this drawback an enhanced STFT version is devised. It is based on the signal driven sampling scheme, which is named as the cross-level sampling. It can adapt the sampling frequency and the window function (length plus shape) by following the input signal local variations. This adaptation results into the proposed technique appealing features, which are the adaptive time-frequency resolution and the computational efficiency.

Voice Driven Applications in Non-stationary and Chaotic Environment

Automated operations based on voice commands will become more and more important in many applications, including robotics, maintenance operations, etc. However, voice command recognition rates drop quite a lot under non-stationary and chaotic noise environments. In this paper, we tried to significantly improve the speech recognition rates under non-stationary noise environments. First, 298 Navy acronyms have been selected for automatic speech recognition. Data sets were collected under 4 types of noisy environments: factory, buccaneer jet, babble noise in a canteen, and destroyer. Within each noisy environment, 4 levels (5 dB, 15 dB, 25 dB, and clean) of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) were introduced to corrupt the speech. Second, a new algorithm to estimate speech or no speech regions has been developed, implemented, and evaluated. Third, extensive simulations were carried out. It was found that the combination of the new algorithm, the proper selection of language model and a customized training of the speech recognizer based on clean speech yielded very high recognition rates, which are between 80% and 90% for the four different noisy conditions. Fourth, extensive comparative studies have also been carried out.

Transient Population Dynamics of Phase Singularities in 2D Beeler-Reuter Model

The paper presented a transient population dynamics of phase singularities in 2D Beeler-Reuter model. Two stochastic modelings are examined: (i) the Master equation approach with the transition rate (i.e., λ(n, t) = λ(t)n and μ(n, t) = μ(t)n) and (ii) the nonlinear Langevin equation approach with a multiplicative noise. The exact general solution of the Master equation with arbitrary time-dependent transition rate is given. Then, the exact solution of the mean field equation for the nonlinear Langevin equation is also given. It is demonstrated that transient population dynamics is successfully identified by the generalized Logistic equation with fractional higher order nonlinear term. It is also demonstrated the necessity of introducing time-dependent transition rate in the master equation approach to incorporate the effect of nonlinearity.

3D Locomotion and Fractal Analysis of Goldfish for Acute Toxicity Bioassay

Biological reactions of individuals of a testing animal to toxic substance are unique and can be used as an indication of the existing of toxic substance. However, to distinguish such phenomenon need a very complicate system and even more complicate to analyze data in 3 dimensional. In this paper, a system to evaluate in vitro biological activities to acute toxicity of stochastic self-affine non-stationary signal of 3D goldfish swimming by using fractal analysis is introduced. Regular digital camcorders are utilized by proposed algorithm 3DCCPC to effectively capture and construct 3D movements of the fish. A Critical Exponent Method (CEM) has been adopted as a fractal estimator. The hypothesis was that the swimming of goldfish to acute toxic would show the fractal property which related to the toxic concentration. The experimental results supported the hypothesis by showing that the swimming of goldfish under the different toxic concentration has fractal properties. It also shows that the fractal dimension of the swimming related to the pH value of FD Ôëê 0.26pH + 0.05. With the proposed system, the fish is allowed to swim freely in all direction to react to the toxic. In addition, the trajectories are precisely evaluated by fractal analysis with critical exponent method and hence the results exhibit with much higher degree of confidence.

Study on Performance of Wigner Ville Distribution for Linear FM and Transient Signal Analysis

This research paper presents some methods to assess the performance of Wigner Ville Distribution for Time-Frequency representation of non-stationary signals, in comparison with the other representations like STFT, Spectrogram etc. The simultaneous timefrequency resolution of WVD is one of the important properties which makes it preferable for analysis and detection of linear FM and transient signals. There are two algorithms proposed here to assess the resolution and to compare the performance of signal detection. First method is based on the measurement of area under timefrequency plot; in case of a linear FM signal analysis. A second method is based on the instantaneous power calculation and is used in case of transient, non-stationary signals. The implementation is explained briefly for both methods with suitable diagrams. The accuracy of the measurements is validated to show the better performance of WVD representation in comparison with STFT and Spectrograms.

Robust Parameter and Scale Factor Estimation in Nonstationary and Impulsive Noise Environment

The problem of FIR system parameter estimation has been considered in the paper. A new robust recursive algorithm for simultaneously estimation of parameters and scale factor of prediction residuals in non-stationary environment corrupted by impulsive noise has been proposed. The performance of derived algorithm has been tested by simulations.

Improved Power Spectrum Estimation for RR-Interval Time Series

The RR interval series is non-stationary and unevenly spaced in time. For estimating its power spectral density (PSD) using traditional techniques like FFT, require resampling at uniform intervals. The researchers have used different interpolation techniques as resampling methods. All these resampling methods introduce the low pass filtering effect in the power spectrum. The lomb transform is a means of obtaining PSD estimates directly from irregularly sampled RR interval series, thus avoiding resampling. In this work, the superiority of Lomb transform method has been established over FFT based approach, after applying linear and cubicspline interpolation as resampling methods, in terms of reproduction of exact frequency locations as well as the relative magnitudes of each spectral component.

Comparison of S-transform and Wavelet Transform in Power Quality Analysis

In the power quality analysis non-stationary nature of voltage distortions require some precise and powerful analytical techniques. The time-frequency representation (TFR) provides a powerful method for identification of the non-stationary of the signals. This paper investigates a comparative study on two techniques for analysis and visualization of voltage distortions with time-varying amplitudes. The techniques include the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and the S-Transform. Several power quality problems are analyzed using both the discrete wavelet transform and S–transform, showing clearly the advantage of the S– transform in detecting, localizing, and classifying the power quality problems.

Probabilistic Center Voting Method for Subsequent Object Tracking and Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm for object tracking in video sequence. In order to represent the object to be tracked, we propose a spatial color histogram model which encodes both the color distribution and spatial information. The object tracking from frame to frame is accomplished via center voting and back projection method. The center voting method has every pixel in the new frame to cast a vote on whereabouts the object center is. The back projection method segments the object from the background. The segmented foreground provides information on object size and orientation, omitting the need to estimate them separately. We do not put any assumption on camera motion; the proposed algorithm works equally well for object tracking in both static and moving camera videos.

Adaptive Kernel Principal Analysis for Online Feature Extraction

The batch nature limits the standard kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) methods in numerous applications, especially for dynamic or large-scale data. In this paper, an efficient adaptive approach is presented for online extraction of the kernel principal components (KPC). The contribution of this paper may be divided into two parts. First, kernel covariance matrix is correctly updated to adapt to the changing characteristics of data. Second, KPC are recursively formulated to overcome the batch nature of standard KPCA.This formulation is derived from the recursive eigen-decomposition of kernel covariance matrix and indicates the KPC variation caused by the new data. The proposed method not only alleviates sub-optimality of the KPCA method for non-stationary data, but also maintains constant update speed and memory usage as the data-size increases. Experiments for simulation data and real applications demonstrate that our approach yields improvements in terms of both computational speed and approximation accuracy.

Envelope-Wavelet Packet Transform for Machine Condition Monitoring

Wavelet transform has been extensively used in machine fault diagnosis and prognosis owing to its strength to deal with non-stationary signals. The existing Wavelet transform based schemes for fault diagnosis employ wavelet decomposition of the entire vibration frequency which not only involve huge computational overhead in extracting the features but also increases the dimensionality of the feature vector. This increase in the dimensionality has the tendency to 'over-fit' the training data and could mislead the fault diagnostic model. In this paper a novel technique, envelope wavelet packet transform (EWPT) is proposed in which features are extracted based on wavelet packet transform of the filtered envelope signal rather than the overall vibration signal. It not only reduces the computational overhead in terms of reduced number of wavelet decomposition levels and features but also improves the fault detection accuracy. Analytical expressions are provided for the optimal frequency resolution and decomposition level selection in EWPT. Experimental results with both actual and simulated machine fault data demonstrate significant gain in fault detection ability by EWPT at reduced complexity compared to existing techniques.

Optimal Channel Equalization for MIMO Time-Varying Channels

We consider optimal channel equalization for MIMO (multi-input/multi-output) time-varying channels in the sense of MMSE (minimum mean-squared-error), where the observation noise can be non-stationary. We show that all ZF (zero-forcing) receivers can be parameterized in an affine form which eliminates completely the ISI (inter-symbol-interference), and optimal channel equalizers can be designed through minimization of the MSE (mean-squarederror) between the detected signals and the transmitted signals, among all ZF receivers. We demonstrate that the optimal channel equalizer is a modified Kalman filter, and show that under the AWGN (additive white Gaussian noise) assumption, the proposed optimal channel equalizer minimizes the BER (bit error rate) among all possible ZF receivers. Our results are applicable to optimal channel equalization for DWMT (discrete wavelet multitone), multirate transmultiplexers, OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), and DS (direct sequence) CDMA (code division multiple access) wireless data communication systems. A design algorithm for optimal channel equalization is developed, and several simulation examples are worked out to illustrate the proposed design algorithm.

The Study on the Stationarity of Energy Consumption in US States: Considering Structural Breaks, Nonlinearity, and Cross- Sectional Dependency

This study applies the sequential panel selection method (SPSM) procedure proposed by Chortareas and Kapetanios (2009) to investigate the time-series properties of energy consumption in 50 US states from 1963 to 2009. SPSM involves the classification of the entire panel into a group of stationary series and a group of non-stationary series to identify how many and which series in the panel are stationary processes. Empirical results obtained through SPSM with the panel KSS unit root test developed by Ucar and Omay (2009) combined with a Fourier function indicate that energy consumption in all the 50 US states are stationary. The results of this study have important policy implications for the 50 US states.

The Utility of Wavelet Transform in Surface Electromyography Feature Extraction -A Comparative Study of Different Mother Wavelets

Electromyography (EMG) signal processing has been investigated remarkably regarding various applications such as in rehabilitation systems. Specifically, wavelet transform has served as a powerful technique to scrutinize EMG signals since wavelet transform is consistent with the nature of EMG as a non-stationary signal. In this paper, the efficiency of wavelet transform in surface EMG feature extraction is investigated from four levels of wavelet decomposition and a comparative study between different mother wavelets had been done. To recognize the best function and level of wavelet analysis, two evaluation criteria, scatter plot and RES index are recruited. Hereupon, four wavelet families, namely, Daubechies, Coiflets, Symlets and Biorthogonal are studied in wavelet decomposition stage. Consequently, the results show that only features from first and second level of wavelet decomposition yields good performance and some functions of various wavelet families can lead to an improvement in separability class of different hand movements.

Analysis of Temperature Change under Global Warming Impact using Empirical Mode Decomposition

The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) represents any time series into a finite set of basis functions. The bases are termed as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) which are mutually orthogonal containing minimum amount of cross-information. The EMD successively extracts the IMFs with the highest local frequencies in a recursive way, which yields effectively a set low-pass filters based entirely on the properties exhibited by the data. In this paper, EMD is applied to explore the properties of the multi-year air temperature and to observe its effects on climate change under global warming. This method decomposes the original time-series into intrinsic time scale. It is capable of analyzing nonlinear, non-stationary climatic time series that cause problems to many linear statistical methods and their users. The analysis results show that the mode of EMD presents seasonal variability. The most of the IMFs have normal distribution and the energy density distribution of the IMFs satisfies Chi-square distribution. The IMFs are more effective in isolating physical processes of various time-scales and also statistically significant. The analysis results also show that the EMD method provides a good job to find many characteristics on inter annual climate. The results suggest that climate fluctuations of every single element such as temperature are the results of variations in the global atmospheric circulation.

Modern Vibration Signal Processing Techniques for Vehicle Gearbox Fault Diagnosis

This paper presents modern vibration signalprocessing techniques for vehicle gearbox fault diagnosis, via the wavelet analysis and the Squared Envelope (SE) technique. The wavelet analysis is regarded as a powerful tool for the detection of sudden changes in non-stationary signals. The Squared Envelope (SE) technique has been extensively used for rolling bearing diagnostics. In the present work a scheme of using the Squared Envelope technique for early detection of gear tooth pit. The pitting defect is manufactured on the tooth side of a fifth speed gear on the intermediate shaft of a vehicle gearbox. The objective is to supplement the current techniques of gearbox fault diagnosis based on using the raw vibration and ordered signals. The test stand is equipped with three dynamometers; the input dynamometer serves as the internal combustion engine, the output dynamometers introduce the load on the flanges of output joint shafts. The gearbox used for experimental measurements is the type most commonly used in modern small to mid-sized passenger cars with transversely mounted powertrain and front wheel drive; a five-speed gearbox with final drive gear and front wheel differential. The results show that the approaches methods are effective for detecting and diagnosing localized gear faults in early stage under different operation conditions, and are more sensitive and robust than current gear diagnostic techniques.

Chaotic Oscillations of Diaphragm Supported by Nonlinear Springs with Hysteresis

This paper describes vibration analysis using the finite element method for a small earphone, especially for the diaphragm shape with a low-rigidity. The viscoelastic diaphragm is supported by multiple nonlinear concentrated springs with linear hysteresis damping. The restoring forces of the nonlinear springs have cubic nonlinearity. The finite elements for the nonlinear springs with hysteresis are expressed and are connected to the diaphragm that is modeled by linear solid finite elements in consideration of a complex modulus of elasticity. Further, the discretized equations in physical coordinates are transformed into the nonlinear ordinary coupled equations using normal coordinates corresponding to the linear natural modes. We computed the nonlinear stationary and non-stationary responses due to the internal resonance between modes with large amplitude in the nonlinear springs and elastic modes in the diaphragm. The non-stationary motions are confirmed as the chaos due to the maximum Lyapunov exponents with a positive number. From the time histories of the deformation distribution in the chaotic vibration, we identified nonlinear modal couplings.

Sperm Whale Signal Analysis: Comparison using the Auto Regressive model and the Daubechies 15 Wavelets Transform

This article presents the results using a parametric approach and a Wavelet Transform in analysing signals emitting from the sperm whale. The extraction of intrinsic characteristics of these unique signals emitted by marine mammals is still at present a difficult exercise for various reasons: firstly, it concerns non-stationary signals, and secondly, these signals are obstructed by interfering background noise. In this article, we compare the advantages and disadvantages of both methods: Auto Regressive models and Wavelet Transform. These approaches serve as an alternative to the commonly used estimators which are based on the Fourier Transform for which the hypotheses necessary for its application are in certain cases, not sufficiently proven. These modern approaches provide effective results particularly for the periodic tracking of the signal's characteristics and notably when the signal-to-noise ratio negatively effects signal tracking. Our objectives are twofold. Our first goal is to identify the animal through its acoustic signature. This includes recognition of the marine mammal species and ultimately of the individual animal (within the species). The second is much more ambitious and directly involves the intervention of cetologists to study the sounds emitted by marine mammals in an effort to characterize their behaviour. We are working on an approach based on the recordings of marine mammal signals and the findings from this data result from the Wavelet Transform. This article will explore the reasons for using this approach. In addition, thanks to the use of new processors, these algorithms once heavy in calculation time can be integrated in a real-time system.

Hydrodynamic Processes in Bubbly Liquid Flow in Tubes and Nozzles

The hydrodynamic processes in bubbly liquid flowing in tubes and nozzles are studied theoretically and numerically. The principal regularities of non-stationary processes of boiling liquid outflow are established under conditions of experiments when the depressurization of a tube with high pressure inside occurs. The steady-state solution of bubbly liquid flow in the nozzle of round cross section with high pressure and temperature conditions inside bubbles is studied accounting for phase transition and chemical reactions.

On-line Speech Enhancement by Time-Frequency Masking under Prior Knowledge of Source Location

This paper presents the source extraction system which can extract only target signals with constraints on source localization in on-line systems. The proposed system is a kind of methods for enhancing a target signal and suppressing other interference signals. But, the performance of proposed system is superior to any other methods and the extraction of target source is comparatively complete. The method has a beamforming concept and uses an improved time-frequency (TF) mask-based BSS algorithm to separate a target signal from multiple noise sources. The target sources are assumed to be in front and test data was recorded in a reverberant room. The experimental results of the proposed method was evaluated by the PESQ score of real-recording sentences and showed a noticeable speech enhancement.