Design of ternary signals for MIMO identification in the presence of noise and nonlinear distortion

A new approach to designing sets of ternary periodic signals with different periods for multi-input multi-output system identification is described. The signals are pseudo-random signals with uniform nonzero harmonics, generated from Galois field GF(q), where q is a prime or a power of a prime. The signals are designed to be uncorrelated, so that effects of different inputs can be easily decoupled. However, correlated harmonics can be included if necessary, for applications in the identification of ill-conditioned processes. A design table is given for q les 31. An example is presented for the design of five uncorrelated signals with a common period N = 168 . Three of these signals are applied to identify the transfer function matrix as well as the singular values of a simulated distillation column. Results obtained are compared with those achieved using two alternative methods

Sparsity-Aware Low-Power ADC Architecture with Advanced Reconstruction Algorithms

Compressive sensing (CS) technique enables a universal sub-Nyquist sampling of sparse and compressible signals, while still guaranteeing the reliable signal recovery. Its potential lies in the reduced analog-to-digital conversion rate in sampling broadband and/or multi-channel sparse signals, where conventional Nyquist-rate sampling are either technology impossible or extremely hardware costly. Nevertheless, there are many challenges in the CS hardware design. In coherent sampling, state-of-the-art mixed-signal CS front-ends, such as random demodulator and modulated wideband converter, suffer from high power and nonlinear hardware. In signal recovery, state-of-the-art CS reconstruction methods have tractable computational complexity and probabilistically guaranteed performance. However, they are still high cost (basis pursuit) or noise sensitive (matching pursuit). In this dissertation, we propose an asynchronous compressive sensing (ACS) front-end and advanced signal reconstruction algorithms to address these challenges. The ACS front-end consists of a continuous-time ternary encoding (CT-TE) scheme which converts signal amplitude variations into high-rate ternary timing signal, and a digital random sampler (DRS) which captures the ternary timing signal at sub-Nyquist rate. The CT-TE employs asynchronous sampling mechanism for pulsed-like input and has signal-dependent conversion rate. The DRS has low power, ease of massive integration, and excellent linearity in comparison to state-of-the-art mixed-signal CS front-ends. We propose two reconstruction algorithms. One is group-based total variation, which exploits piecewise-constant characteristics and achieves better mean squared error and faster convergence rate than the conventional TV scheme with moderate noise. The second algorithm is split-projection least squares (SPLS), which relies on a series of low-complexity and independent l2-norm problems with the prior on ternary-valued signal. The SPLS scheme has good noise robustness, low-cost signal reconstruction and facilitates a parallel hardware for real-time signal recovery. In application study, we propose multi-channel filter banks ACS front-end for the interference-robust radar. The proposed receiver performs reliable target detection with nearly 8-fold data compression than Nyquist-rate sampling in the presence of -50dBm wireless interference. We also propose an asynchronous compressed beamformer (ACB) for low-power portable diagnostic ultrasound. The proposed ACB achieves 9-fold data volume compression and only 4.4% contrast-to-noise ratio loss on the imaging results when compared with the Nyquist-rate ADCs

Efficient Multidimensional Regularization for Volterra Series Estimation

This paper presents an efficient nonparametric time domain nonlinear system identification method. It is shown how truncated Volterra series models can be efficiently estimated without the need of long, transient-free measurements. The method is a novel extension of the regularization methods that have been developed for impulse response estimates of linear time invariant systems. To avoid the excessive memory needs in case of long measurements or large number of estimated parameters, a practical gradient-based estimation method is also provided, leading to the same numerical results as the proposed Volterra estimation method. Moreover, the transient effects in the simulated output are removed by a special regularization method based on the novel ideas of transient removal for Linear Time-Varying (LTV) systems. Combining the proposed methodologies, the nonparametric Volterra models of the cascaded water tanks benchmark are presented in this paper. The results for different scenarios varying from a simple Finite Impulse Response (FIR) model to a 3rd degree Volterra series with and without transient removal are compared and studied. It is clear that the obtained models capture the system dynamics when tested on a validation dataset, and their performance is comparable with the white-box (physical) models

Study of the best linear approximation of nonlinear systems with arbitrary inputs

System identification is the art of modelling of a process (physical, biological, etc.) or to predict its behaviour or output when the environment condition or parameter changes. One is modelling the input-output relationship of a system, for example, linking temperature of a greenhouse (output) to the sunlight intensity (input), power of a car engine (output) with fuel injection rate (input). In linear systems, changing an input parameter will result in a proportional increase in the system output. This is not the case in a nonlinear system. Linear system identification has been extensively studied, more so than nonlinear system identification. Since most systems are nonlinear to some extent, there is significant interest in this topic as industrial processes become more and more complex. In a linear dynamical system, knowing the impulse response function of a system will allow one to predict the output given any input. For nonlinear systems this is not the case. If advanced theory is not available, it is possible to approximate a nonlinear system by a linear one. One tool is the Best Linear Approximation (Bla), which is an impulse response function of a linear system that minimises the output differences between its nonlinear counterparts for a given class of input. The Bla is often the starting point for modelling a nonlinear system. There is extensive literature on the Bla obtained from input signals with a Gaussian probability density function (p.d.f.), but there has been very little for other kinds of inputs. A Bla estimated from Gaussian inputs is useful in decoupling the linear dynamics from the nonlinearity, and in initialisation of parameterised models. As Gaussian inputs are not always practical to be introduced as excitations, it is important to investigate the dependence of the Bla on the amplitude distribution in more detail. This thesis studies the behaviour of the Bla with regards to other types of signals, and in particular, binary sequences where a signal takes only two levels. Such an input is valuable in many practical situations, for example where the input actuator is a switch or a valve and hence can only be turned either on or off. While it is known in the literature that the Bla depends on the amplitude distribution of the input, as far as the author is aware, there is a lack of comprehensive theoretical study on this topic. In this thesis, the Blas of discrete-time time-invariant nonlinear systems are studied theoretically for white inputs with an arbitrary amplitude distribution, including Gaussian and binary sequences. In doing so, the thesis offers answers to fundamental questions of interest to system engineers, for example: 1) How the amplitude distribution of the input and the system dynamics affect the Bla? 2) How does one quantify the difference between the Bla obtained from a Gaussian input and that obtained from an arbitrary input? 3) Is the difference (if any) negligible? 4) What can be done in terms of experiment design to minimise such difference? To answer these questions, the theoretical expressions for the Bla have been developed for both Wiener-Hammerstein (Wh) systems and the more general Volterra systems. The theory for the Wh case has been verified by simulation and physical experiments in Chapter 3 and Chapter 6 respectively. It is shown in Chapter 3 that the difference between the Gaussian and non-Gaussian Bla’s depends on the system memory as well as the higher order moments of the non-Gaussian input. To quantify this difference, a measure called the Discrepancy Factor—a measure of relative error, was developed. It has been shown that when the system memory is short, the discrepancy can be as high as 44.4%, which is not negligible. This justifies the need for a method to decrease such discrepancy. One method is to design a random multilevel sequence for Gaussianity with respect to its higher order moments, and this is discussed in Chapter 5. When estimating the Bla even in the absence of environment and measurement noise, the nonlinearity inevitably introduces nonlinear distortions—deviations from the Bla specific to the realisation of input used. This also explains why more than one realisation of input and averaging is required to obtain a good estimate of the Bla. It is observed that with a specific class of pseudorandom binary sequence (Prbs), called the maximum length binary sequence (Mlbs or the m-sequence), the nonlinear distortions appear structured in the time domain. Chapter 4 illustrates a simple and computationally inexpensive method to take advantage this structure to obtain better estimates of the Bla—by replacing mean averaging by median averaging. Lastly, Chapters 7 and 8 document two independent benchmark studies separate from the main theoretical work of the thesis. The benchmark in Chapter 7 is concerned with the modelling of an electrical Wh system proposed in a special session of the 15th International Federation of Automatic Control (Ifac) Symposium on System Identification (Sysid) 2009 (Schoukens, Suykens & Ljung, 2009). Chapter 8 is concerned with the modelling of a ‘hyperfast’ Peltier cooling system first proposed in the U.K. Automatic Control Council (Ukacc) International Conference on Control, 2010 (Control 2010)

Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity