Signal reconstruction in structures with two channels

Doutoramento em Engenharia ElectrotécnicaEm sistemas ATM e transmissões em tempo real através de redes IP, os dados são transmitidos em pacotes de informação. Os pacotes perdidos ou muito atrasados levam à perda de informação em posições conhecidas (apagamentos). Contudo, em algumas situações as posições dos erros não são conhecidas e, portanto, a detecção dos erros tem que ser realizada usando um polinómio conhecido. A detecção e correcção de erros são estudadas para sinais digitais em códigos DFT em dois canais que apresentam muito melhor estabilidade que os respectivos códigos DFT num único canal. Para a estrutura de dois canais, um canal processa um código DFT normal, quanto que o outro canal inclui uma permutação, a razão principal para a melhoria na estabilidade. A permutação introduz aleatoriedade e é esta aleatoriedade que é responsável pela boa estabilidade destes códigos. O estudo dos códigos aleatórios vêm confirmar esta afirmação. Para sinais analógicos, foca-se a amostragem funcional e derivativa, onde um canal processa amostras do sinal e o outro processa amostras da derivada do sinal. A expansão sobreamostrada é apresentada e a recuperação de apagamentos é estudada. Neste caso, a estabilidade para a esturtura em dois canais quando a perda de amostras afecta ambos os canais é, em geral, muito pobre. Adicionalmente, a reconstrução de sinais tanto analógicos como digitais é tratada para o modelo do conversor integrate-and-fire. A reconstrução faz uso dos tempos de acção e de valores limites inerentes ao modelo e é viável por meio de um método iterativo baseado em projecções em conjuntos convexos (POCS).In ATM as in real time transmissions over IP networks, the data are transmitted packet by packet. Lost or highly delayed packets lead to lost information in known locations (erasures). However, in some situations the error locations are not known and, therefore, error detection must be performed using a known polynomial. Error detection and correction are studied for digital signals in two-channel DFT codes which presents a much better stability than their single channel counterparts. For the two-channel structure, one channel processes an ordinary DFT code, while the other channel includes an interleaver, the main reason for the improvement in stability. The interleaver introduces randomness and it is this randomness that is responsible for the good stability of these codes. The study of random codes helps confirm this statement. For analogical signals, the focus is given to function and derivative sampling, where one channel processes samples of the signal and the other processes samples of the derivative of the signal. The oversampled expansion is presented and erasure recovery is studied. In this case, the stability of the twochannel structure when sample loss affects both channels is, in general, very poor. Additionally, the reconstruction of analogical as well as digital signals is dealt with for the integrate-and-fire converter model. The reconstruction makes use of the firing times and the threshold values inherent to the model and is viable by means of an iterative method based on projections onto convex sets (POCS)

Listening to Distances and Hearing Shapes:Inverse Problems in Room Acoustics and Beyond

A central theme of this thesis is using echoes to achieve useful, interesting, and sometimes surprising results. One should have no doubts about the echoes' constructive potential; it is, after all, demonstrated masterfully by Nature. Just think about the bat's intriguing ability to navigate in unknown spaces and hunt for insects by listening to echoes of its calls, or about similar (albeit less well-known) abilities of toothed whales, some birds, shrews, and ultimately people. We show that, perhaps contrary to conventional wisdom, multipath propagation resulting from echoes is our friend. When we think about it the right way, it reveals essential geometric information about the sources--channel--receivers system. The key idea is to think of echoes as being more than just delayed and attenuated peaks in 1D impulse responses; they are actually additional sources with their corresponding 3D locations. This transformation allows us to forget about the abstract \emph{room}, and to replace it by more familiar \emph{point sets}. We can then engage the powerful machinery of Euclidean distance geometry. A problem that always arises is that we do not know \emph{a priori} the matching between the peaks and the points in space, and solving the inverse problem is achieved by \emph{echo sorting}---a tool we developed for learning correct labelings of echoes. This has applications beyond acoustics, whenever one deals with waves and reflections, or more generally, time-of-flight measurements. Equipped with this perspective, we first address the ``Can one hear the shape of a room?'' question, and we answer it with a qualified ``yes''. Even a single impulse response uniquely describes a convex polyhedral room, whereas a more practical algorithm to reconstruct the room's geometry uses only first-order echoes and a few microphones. Next, we show how different problems of localization benefit from echoes. The first one is multiple indoor sound source localization. Assuming the room is known, we show that discretizing the Helmholtz equation yields a system of sparse reconstruction problems linked by the common sparsity pattern. By exploiting the full bandwidth of the sources, we show that it is possible to localize multiple unknown sound sources using only a single microphone. We then look at indoor localization with known pulses from the geometric echo perspective introduced previously. Echo sorting enables localization in non-convex rooms without a line-of-sight path, and localization with a single omni-directional sensor, which is impossible without echoes. A closely related problem is microphone position calibration; we show that echoes can help even without assuming that the room is known. Using echoes, we can localize arbitrary numbers of microphones at unknown locations in an unknown room using only one source at an unknown location---for example a finger snap---and get the room's geometry as a byproduct. Our study of source localization outgrew the initial form factor when we looked at source localization with spherical microphone arrays. Spherical signals appear well beyond spherical microphone arrays; for example, any signal defined on Earth's surface lives on a sphere. This resulted in the first slight departure from the main theme: We develop the theory and algorithms for sampling sparse signals on the sphere using finite rate-of-innovation principles and apply it to various signal processing problems on the sphere

Proceedings of the Second International Mobile Satellite Conference (IMSC 1990)

Presented here are the proceedings of the Second International Mobile Satellite Conference (IMSC), held June 17-20, 1990 in Ottawa, Canada. Topics covered include future mobile satellite communications concepts, aeronautical applications, modulation and coding, propagation and experimental systems, mobile terminal equipment, network architecture and control, regulatory and policy considerations, vehicle antennas, and speech compression

Forensic Analysis

It is my pleasure to place before you the book ''Forensic Analysis - From Death to Justice'' which presents one of the major portions of the broad specialty of Forensic Science comprising mainly of Thanatology and Criminalistics. This book has been designed to incorporate a wide range of new ideas and unique works from all authors from topics like Forensic Engineering, Forensic Entomology and Crime Scene Investigation. I hope that it will be useful to practitioners of forensic medicine, experts, pathologists, law makers, investigating authorities, undergraduate and postgraduate medical school graduates of medicine

The Role Of Nostalgia In The Literature Of The Caribbean Diasporas – Linking Memory, Globalization And Homemaking

My dissertation, The Role of Nostalgia in the Literature of the Caribbean Diasporas – Linking Memory, Globalization and Homemaking, investigates diverse manifestations of nostalgia in the literature of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican diasporas. My study offers a comparative analysis of Esmeralda Santiago’s Cuando era puertorriqueña (1994), Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Next Year in Cuba (1995), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008). My approach to the notion of nostalgia as a syndrome of globalization offers a valuable contribution to the Caribbean diasporic narrative and by extension to the canon of the U.S. Latino/a Literature. The literary representation of nostalgia has not been fully explored in the Latin-American context, and studying its social, cultural, political, and national manifestations opens new venues of interpretation of migratory experience in the age of globalization. Through the literary analysis I examine diverse representation of the migratory experience of the Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican Hispanic groups residing within the United States. Furthermore, I propose nostalgia as a catalyst that allows observation how displaced individuals from the Caribbean reconstruct homeland, culture, identity, and language in exile or immigration through adoption of new symbols, practice of tradition, remembrance of popular culture, and appropriation of civic spaces. In my analyses, I consider the phenomenon of nostalgia as a crucial aspect of the assimilation process and formation of Latino/a culture identity as a means to explore collective memory. This frame allows me to investigate the evolving urban spaces where the Caribbean immigrants settle. Within this contextual map, my dissertation rests theoretically in the works of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Suman Gupta’s Globalization and Literature (2009), Fred Davis’s Yearning for Yesterday (1978) to explore the intersections of globalization, literature, and collective memory as a space from which nostalgia emerges. My examination brings forth the changing landscape of nostalgia in response to modernization, cultural struggles and concerns that arouse from spatial reconfigurations within urban areas, changing socio-cultural boundaries, American-Caribbean history and the diasporic movements between the Caribbean and the United States

Publications of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1978

This bibliography cites 958 externally distributed technical papers released during calendar year 1978, that resulted from scientific and engineering work performed, or managed, by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The publications are indexed by author, subject, publication type and number. A descriptive entry appears under the name of each author of each publication; an abstract is included with the entry for the primary (first-listed) author

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)