The use of genetic algorithms to maximize the performance of a partially lined screened room

This paper shows that it is possible to use genetic algorithms to optimize the layout of ferrite tile absorber in a partially lined screened enclosure to produce a "best" performance. The enclosure and absorber are modeled using TLM modeling techniques and the performance is determined by comparison with theoretical normalized site attenuation of free space. The results show that it is possible to cover just 80% of the surface of the enclosure with ferrite absorber and obtain a response which is within +/-4 dB of the free space response between 40 and 200 MHz

ShearLab: A Rational Design of a Digital Parabolic Scaling Algorithm

Multivariate problems are typically governed by anisotropic features such as edges in images. A common bracket of most of the various directional representation systems which have been proposed to deliver sparse approximations of such features is the utilization of parabolic scaling. One prominent example is the shearlet system. Our objective in this paper is three-fold: We firstly develop a digital shearlet theory which is rationally designed in the sense that it is the digitization of the existing shearlet theory for continuous data. This implicates that shearlet theory provides a unified treatment of both the continuum and digital realm. Secondly, we analyze the utilization of pseudo-polar grids and the pseudo-polar Fourier transform for digital implementations of parabolic scaling algorithms. We derive an isometric pseudo-polar Fourier transform by careful weighting of the pseudo-polar grid, allowing exploitation of its adjoint for the inverse transform. This leads to a digital implementation of the shearlet transform; an accompanying Matlab toolbox called ShearLab is provided. And, thirdly, we introduce various quantitative measures for digital parabolic scaling algorithms in general, allowing one to tune parameters and objectively improve the implementation as well as compare different directional transform implementations. The usefulness of such measures is exemplarily demonstrated for the digital shearlet transform.Comment: submitted to SIAM J. Multiscale Model. Simu

COSMOGRAIL: the COSmological MOnitoring of GRAvItational Lenses XV. Assessing the achievability and precision of time-delay measurements

COSMOGRAIL is a long-term photometric monitoring of gravitationally lensed QSOs aimed at implementing Refsdal's time-delay method to measure cosmological parameters, in particular H0. Given long and well sampled light curves of strongly lensed QSOs, time-delay measurements require numerical techniques whose quality must be assessed. To this end, and also in view of future monitoring programs or surveys such as the LSST, a blind signal processing competition named Time Delay Challenge 1 (TDC1) was held in 2014. The aim of the present paper, which is based on the simulated light curves from the TDC1, is double. First, we test the performance of the time-delay measurement techniques currently used in COSMOGRAIL. Second, we analyse the quantity and quality of the harvest of time delays obtained from the TDC1 simulations. To achieve these goals, we first discover time delays through a careful inspection of the light curves via a dedicated visual interface. Our measurement algorithms can then be applied to the data in an automated way. We show that our techniques have no significant biases, and yield adequate uncertainty estimates resulting in reduced chi2 values between 0.5 and 1.0. We provide estimates for the number and precision of time-delay measurements that can be expected from future time-delay monitoring campaigns as a function of the photometric signal-to-noise ratio and of the true time delay. We make our blind measurements on the TDC1 data publicly availableComment: 11 pages, 8 figures, published in Astronomy & Astrophysic