Exploitation of Intra-Spectral Band Correlation for Rapid Feacture Selection and Target Identification in Hyperspectral Imagery

This research extends the work produced by Capt. Robert Johnson for detecting target pixels within hyperspectral imagery (HSI). The methodology replaces Principle Components Analysis for dimensionality reduction with a clustering algorithm which seeks to associate spectral rather than spatial dimensions. By seeking similar spectral dimensions, the assumption of no a priori knowledge of the relationship between clustered members can be eliminated and clusters are formed by seeking high correlated adjacent spectral bands. Following dimensionality reduction Independent Components Analysis (ICA) is used to perform feature extraction. Kurtosis and Potential Target Fraction are added to Maximum Component Score and Potential Target Signal to Noise Ratio as mechanisms for discriminating between target and non-target maps. A new methodology exploiting Johnson’s Maximum Distance Secant Line method replaces the first zero bin method for identifying the breakpoint between signal and noise. A parameter known as Left Partial Kurtosis is defined and applied to determine when target pixels are likely to be found in the left tail of each signal histogram. A variable control over the number of iterations of Adaptive Iterative Noise filtering is introduced. Results of this modified algorithm are compared to those of Johnson’s AutoGAD [2007]

Anomaly detection: sparse representation for high dimensional data

In this thesis, I investigated in three different anomaly aware sparse representation approaches. The first approach focuses on algorithmic development for the low-rank matrix completion problem. It has been shown that in the l0-search for low- rank matrix completion, the singular points in the objective function are the major reasons for failures. While different methods have been proposed to handle singular points, rigorous analysis has shown that there is a need for further improvement. To address the singularity issue, we propose a new objective function that is continuous everywhere. The new objective function is a good approximation of the original objective function in the sense that in the limit, the lower level sets of the new objective function are the closure of those of the original objective function. We formulate the matrix completion problem as the minimization of the new objective function and design a quasi-Newton method to solve it. Simulations demonstrate that the new method achieves excellent numerical performance. The second part discusses dictionary learning algorithms to solve the blind source separation (BSS) problem. For the proof of concepts, the focus is on the scenario where the number of mixtures is not less than that of sources. Based on the assumption that the sources are sparsely represented by some dictionaries, we present a joint source separation and dictionary learning algorithm (SparseBSS) to separate the noise corrupted mixed sources with very little extra information. We also discuss the singularity issue in the dictionary learning process which is one major reason for algorithm failure. Finally, two approaches are presented to address the singularity issue. The last approach focuses on algorithmic approaches to solve the robust face recognition problem where the test face image can be corrupted by arbitrary sparse noise. The standard approach is to formulate the problem as a sparse recovery problem and solve it using l1-minimization. As an alternative, the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm had been tested but resulted in pessimistic results. The contribution of this part is to successfully solve the robust face recognition problem using the AMP framework. The recently developed adaptive damping technique has been adopted to address the issue that AMP normally only works well with Gaussian matrices. Statistical models are designed to capture the nature of the signal more authentically. Expectation maximization (EM) method has been used to learn the unknown hyper-parameters of the statistical model in an online fashion. Simulations demonstrate that our method achieves better recognition performance than the already impressive benchmark l1-minimization, is robust to the initial values of hyper-parameters, and exhibits low computational cost.Open Acces

Motion Artifact Processing Techniques for Physiological Signals

The combination of reducing birth rate and increasing life expectancy continues to drive the demographic shift toward an ageing population and this is placing an ever-increasing burden on our healthcare systems. The urgent need to address this so called healthcare \time bomb" has led to a rapid growth in research into ubiquitous, pervasive and distributed healthcare technologies where recent advances in signal acquisition, data storage and communication are helping such systems become a reality. However, similar to recordings performed in the hospital environment, artifacts continue to be a major issue for these systems. The magnitude and frequency of artifacts can vary signicantly depending on the recording environment with one of the major contributions due to the motion of the subject or the recording transducer. As such, this thesis addresses the challenges of the removal of this motion artifact removal from various physiological signals. The preliminary investigations focus on artifact identication and the tagging of physiological signals streams with measures of signal quality. A new method for quantifying signal quality is developed based on the use of inexpensive accelerometers which facilitates the appropriate use of artifact processing methods as needed. These artifact processing methods are thoroughly examined as part of a comprehensive review of the most commonly applicable methods. This review forms the basis for the comparative studies subsequently presented. Then, a simple but novel experimental methodology for the comparison of artifact processing techniques is proposed, designed and tested for algorithm evaluation. The method is demonstrated to be highly eective for the type of artifact challenges common in a connected health setting, particularly those concerned with brain activity monitoring. This research primarily focuses on applying the techniques to functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) data due to their high susceptibility to contamination by subject motion related artifact. Using the novel experimental methodology, complemented with simulated data, a comprehensive comparison of a range of artifact processing methods is conducted, allowing the identication of the set of the best performing methods. A novel artifact removal technique is also developed, namely ensemble empirical mode decomposition with canonical correlation analysis (EEMD-CCA), which provides the best results when applied on fNIRS data under particular conditions. Four of the best performing techniques were then tested on real ambulatory EEG data contaminated with movement artifacts comparable to those observed during in-home monitoring. It was determined that when analysing EEG data, the Wiener lter is consistently the best performing artifact removal technique. However, when employing the fNIRS data, the best technique depends on a number of factors including: 1) the availability of a reference signal and 2) whether or not the form of the artifact is known. It is envisaged that the use of physiological signal monitoring for patient healthcare will grow signicantly over the next number of decades and it is hoped that this thesis will aid in the progression and development of artifact removal techniques capable of supporting this growth

Unsupervised neural spike identification for large-scale, high-density micro-electrode arrays

This work deals with the development and evaluation of algorithms that extract sequences of single neuron action potentials from extracellular recordings of superimposed neural activity - a task commonly referred to as spike sorting. Large ($>10^3$ electrodes) and dense (subcellular spatial sampling) CMOS-based micro-electrode-arrays allow to record from hundreds of neurons simultaneously. State of the art algorithms for up to a few hundred sensors are not directly applicable to this type of data. Promising modern spike sorting algorithms that seek the statistically optimal solution or focus on real-time capabilities need to be initialized with a preceding sorting. Therefore, this work focused on unsupervised solutions, in order to learn the number of neurons and their spike trains with proper resolution of both temporally and spatiotemporally overlapping activity from the extracellular data alone. Chapter (1) informs about the nature of the data, a model based view and how this relates to spike sorting in order to understand the design decisions of this thesis. The main materials and methods chapter (2) bundles the infrastructural work that is independent of but mandatory for the development and evaluation of any spike sorting method. The main problem was split in two parts. Chapter (3) assesses the problem of analyzing data from thousands of densely integrated channels in a divide-and-conquer fashion. Making use of the spatial information of dense 2D arrays, regions of interest (ROIs) with boundaries adapted to the electrical image of single or multiple neurons were automatically constructed. All ROIs could then be processed in parallel. Within each region of interest the maximum number of neurons could be estimated from the local data matrix alone. An independent component analysis (ICA) based sorting was used to identify units within ROIs. This stage can be replaced by another suitable spike sorting algorithm to solve the local problem. Redundantly identified units across different ROIs were automatically fused into a global solution. The framework was evaluated on both real as well as simulated recordings with ground truth. For the latter it was shown that a major fraction of units could be extracted without any error. The high-dimensional data can be visualized after automatic sorting for convenient verification. Means of rapidly separating well from poorly isolated neurons were proposed and evaluated. Chapter (4) presents a more sophisticated algorithm that was developed to solve the local problem of densely arranged sensors. ICA assumes the data to be instantaneously mixed, thereby reducing spatial redundancy only and ignoring the temporal structure of extracellular data. The widely accepted generative model describes the intracellular spike trains to be convolved with their extracellular spatiotemporal kernels. To account for the latter it was assessed thoroughly whether convolutive ICA (cICA) could increase sorting performance over instantaneous ICA. The high computational complexity of cICA was dealt with by automatically identifying relevant subspaces that can be unmixed in parallel. Although convolutive ICA is suggested by the data model, the sorting results were dominated by the post-processing for realistic scenarios and did not outperform ICA based sorting. Potential alternatives are discussed thoroughly and bounded from above by a supervised sorting. This work provides a completely unsupervised spike sorting solution that enables the extraction of a major fraction of neurons with high accuracy and thereby helps to overcome current limitations of analyzing the high-dimensional datasets obtained from simultaneously imaging the extracellular activity from hundreds of neurons with thousands of electrodes

Portfolio choice with independent components: applications in infrastructure investment

One of the principal questions in financial economics and applied finance relates to the optimal allocation of capital assets to portfolios. In recent times this field has received renewed attention as traditional portfolio optimisation methods were found to inadequately capture the nongaussian and interdependent nature of the returns of capital assets. A particular case is that of infrastructure assets, which exhibits particularly nongaussian and interdependent returns. In this thesis we introduce a portfolio choice method developed for nongaussian and interdependent assets and for longer investment horizons, as is common to infrastructure investment. Starting from the classical financial economic assumption of an expected utility maximizing investor, we derive an analytical solution, which incorporates all higher moments of the assets’ distributions without making limiting assumptions to ensure solvability. Rather than imposing subjective probability beliefs to infer the return’s distributions, we employ Independent Component Analysis to perform a decomposition of the asset space. In this way we are able to identify the fundamental drivers of the returns data and base our portfolio selection on their nature and interdependence. We apply the method on two samples of infrastructure assets. Firstly, we consider global infrastructure indexes. Secondly, we consider a large sample of airport operators, an asset class of particular interest to this thesis. In both cases we show how the method will outperform its principal rival and contestant, the standard mean-variance optimised portfolio. The thesis concludes by showing how the method also allows for a redefinition of the concept of diversification, fully integrated with the portfolio choice method. The thesis therefore contributes to the current state of the art and might lead to further research and discussion regarding the possible use of techniques like Independent Component Analysis to solve longstanding questions in theoretical and applied finance

Using Multiple Robust Parameter Design Techniques to Improve Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection Algorithm Performance

Detecting and identifying objects of interest is the goal of all remote sensing. New advances, specifically in hyperspectral imaging technology have provided the analyst with immense amounts of data requiring evaluation. Several filtering techniques or anomaly detection algorithms have been proposed. However, most new algorithms are insufficiently verified to be robust to the broad range of hyperspectral data being made available. One such algorithm, AutoGAD, is tested here via two separate robust parameter design techniques to determine optimal parameters for consistent performance on a range of data with large attribute variances. Additionally, the results of the two techniques are compared for overall effectiveness. The results of the test as well as optimal parameters for AutoGAD are presented and future research efforts proposed

Learning Identifiable Representations: Independent Influences and Multiple Views

Intelligent systems, whether biological or artificial, perceive unstructured information from the world around them: deep neural networks designed for object recognition receive collections of pixels as inputs; living beings capture visual stimuli through photoreceptors that convert incoming light into electrical signals. Sophisticated signal processing is required to extract meaningful features (e.g., the position, dimension, and colour of objects in an image) from these inputs: this motivates the field of representation learning. But what features should be deemed meaningful, and how to learn them? We will approach these questions based on two metaphors. The first one is the cocktail-party problem, where a number of conversations happen in parallel in a room, and the task is to recover (or separate) the voices of the individual speakers from recorded mixtures—also termed blind source separation. The second one is what we call the independent-listeners problem: given two listeners in front of some loudspeakers, the question is whether, when processing what they hear, they will make the same information explicit, identifying similar constitutive elements. The notion of identifiability is crucial when studying these problems, as it specifies suitable technical assumptions under which representations are uniquely determined, up to tolerable ambiguities like latent source reordering. A key result of this theory is that, when the mixing is nonlinear, the model is provably non-identifiable. A first question is, therefore, under what additional assumptions (ideally as mild as possible) the problem becomes identifiable; a second one is, what algorithms can be used to estimate the model. The contributions presented in this thesis address these questions and revolve around two main principles. The first principle is to learn representation where the latent components influence the observations independently. Here the term “independently” is used in a non-statistical sense—which can be loosely thought of as absence of fine-tuning between distinct elements of a generative process. The second principle is that representations can be learned from paired observations or views, where mixtures of the same latent variables are observed, and they (or a subset thereof) are perturbed in one of the views—also termed multi-view setting. I will present work characterizing these two problem settings, studying their identifiability and proposing suitable estimation algorithms. Moreover, I will discuss how the success of popular representation learning methods may be explained in terms of the principles above and describe an application of the second principle to the statistical analysis of group studies in neuroimaging

Redes neuronales y preprocesado de variables para modelos y sensores en bioingeniería

El propósito de esta Tesis Doctoral es proponer una alternativa viable a la aproximación de modelos y procesos en el ámbito científico y, más concretamente, en aplicaciones complejas de bioingeniería, en las cuales es imposible o muy costoso encontrar una relación directa entre las señales de entrada y de salida mediante modelos matemáticos sencillos o aproximaciones estadísticas. Del mismo modo, es interesante lograr una compactación de los datos que necesita un modelo para conseguir una predicción o clasificación en un tiempo y con un coste de implementación mínimos. Un modelo puede ser simplificado en gran medida al reducir el número de entradas o realizar operaciones matemáticas sobre éstas para transformarlas en nuevas variables. En muchos problemas de regresión (aproximación de funciones), clasificación y optimización, en general se hace uso de las nuevas metodologías basadas en la inteligencia artificial. La inteligencia artificial es una rama de las ciencias de la computación que busca automatizar la capacidad de un sistema para responder a los estímulos que recibe y proponer salidas adecuadas y racionales. Esto se produce gracias a un proceso de aprendizaje, mediante el cual se presentan ciertas muestras o �ejemplos� al modelo y sus correspondientes salidas y éste aprende a proponer las salidas correspondientes a nuevos estímulos que no ha visto previamente. Esto se denomina aprendizaje supervisado. También puede darse el caso de que tal modelo asocie las entradas con características similares entre sí para obtener una clasificación de las muestras de entrada sin necesidad de un patrón de salida. Este modelo de aprendizaje se denomina no supervisado. El principal exponente de la aplicación de la inteligencia artificial para aproximación de funciones y clasificación son las redes neuronales artificiales. Se trata de modelos que han demostrado sobradamente sus ventajas en el ámbito del modelado estadístico y de la predicción frente a otros métodos clásicos. NMateo Jiménez, F. (2012). Redes neuronales y preprocesado de variables para modelos y sensores en bioingeniería [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/16702Palanci