Stochastic resonance in chua's circuit driven by alpha-stable noise

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Izmir, 2012Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 75-80)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishx, 80 leavesThe main aim of this thesis is to investigate the stochastic resonance (SR) in Chua's circuit driven by alpha-stable noise which has better approximation to a real-world signal than Gaussian distribution. SR is a phenomenon in which the response of a nonlinear system to a sub-threshold (weak) input signal is enhanced with the addition of an optimal amount of noise. There have been an increasing amount of applications based on SR in various fields. Almost all studies related to SR in chaotic systems assume that the noise is Gaussian, which leads researchers to investigate the cases in which the noise is non-Gaussian hence has infinite variance. In this thesis, the spectral power amplification which is used to quantify the SR has been evaluated through fractional lower order Wigner Ville distribution of the response of a system and analyzed for various parameters of alpha-stable noise. The results provide a visible SR effect in Chua’s circuit driven by symmetric and skewed-symmetric alpha-stable noise distributions. Furthermore, a series of simulations reveal that the mean residence time that is the average time spent by the trajectory in an attractor can vary depending on different alpha-stable noise parameters

Fast watermarking of MPEG-1/2 streams using compressed-domain perceptual embedding and a generalized correlator detector

A novel technique is proposed for watermarking of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 compressed video streams. The proposed scheme is applied directly in the domain of MPEG-1 system streams and MPEG-2 program streams (multiplexed streams). Perceptual models are used during the embedding process in order to avoid degradation of the video quality. The watermark is detected without the use of the original video sequence. A modified correlation-based detector is introduced that applies nonlinear preprocessing before correlation. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is able to withstand several common attacks. The resulting watermarking system is very fast and therefore suitable for copyright protection of compressed video

Data-driven multivariate and multiscale methods for brain computer interface

This thesis focuses on the development of data-driven multivariate and multiscale methods for brain computer interface (BCI) systems. The electroencephalogram (EEG), the most convenient means to measure neurophysiological activity due to its noninvasive nature, is mainly considered. The nonlinearity and nonstationarity inherent in EEG and its multichannel recording nature require a new set of data-driven multivariate techniques to estimate more accurately features for enhanced BCI operation. Also, a long term goal is to enable an alternative EEG recording strategy for achieving long-term and portable monitoring. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and local mean decomposition (LMD), fully data-driven adaptive tools, are considered to decompose the nonlinear and nonstationary EEG signal into a set of components which are highly localised in time and frequency. It is shown that the complex and multivariate extensions of EMD, which can exploit common oscillatory modes within multivariate (multichannel) data, can be used to accurately estimate and compare the amplitude and phase information among multiple sources, a key for the feature extraction of BCI system. A complex extension of local mean decomposition is also introduced and its operation is illustrated on two channel neuronal spike streams. Common spatial pattern (CSP), a standard feature extraction technique for BCI application, is also extended to complex domain using the augmented complex statistics. Depending on the circularity/noncircularity of a complex signal, one of the complex CSP algorithms can be chosen to produce the best classification performance between two different EEG classes. Using these complex and multivariate algorithms, two cognitive brain studies are investigated for more natural and intuitive design of advanced BCI systems. Firstly, a Yarbus-style auditory selective attention experiment is introduced to measure the user attention to a sound source among a mixture of sound stimuli, which is aimed at improving the usefulness of hearing instruments such as hearing aid. Secondly, emotion experiments elicited by taste and taste recall are examined to determine the pleasure and displeasure of a food for the implementation of affective computing. The separation between two emotional responses is examined using real and complex-valued common spatial pattern methods. Finally, we introduce a novel approach to brain monitoring based on EEG recordings from within the ear canal, embedded on a custom made hearing aid earplug. The new platform promises the possibility of both short- and long-term continuous use for standard brain monitoring and interfacing applications

Smart helmet: wearable multichannel ECG & EEG

Modern wearable technologies have enabled continuous recording of vital signs, however, for activities such as cycling, motor-racing, or military engagement, a helmet with embedded sensors would provide maximum convenience and the opportunity to monitor simultaneously both the vital signs and the electroencephalogram (EEG). To this end, we investigate the feasibility of recording the electrocardiogram (ECG), respiration, and EEG from face-lead locations, by embedding multiple electrodes within a standard helmet. The electrode positions are at the lower jaw, mastoids, and forehead, while for validation purposes a respiration belt around the thorax and a reference ECG from the chest serve as ground truth to assess the performance. The within-helmet EEG is verified by exposing the subjects to periodic visual and auditory stimuli and screening the recordings for the steady-state evoked potentials in response to these stimuli. Cycling and walking are chosen as real-world activities to illustrate how to deal with the so-induced irregular motion artifacts, which contaminate the recordings. We also propose a multivariate R-peak detection algorithm suitable for such noisy environments. Recordings in real-world scenarios support a proof of concept of the feasibility of recording vital signs and EEG from the proposed smart helmet

Hypothesis Testing Using Spatially Dependent Heavy-Tailed Multisensor Data

The detection of spatially dependent heavy-tailed signals is considered in this dissertation. While the central limit theorem, and its implication of asymptotic normality of interacting random processes, is generally useful for the theoretical characterization of a wide variety of natural and man-made signals, sensor data from many different applications, in fact, are characterized by non-Gaussian distributions. A common characteristic observed in non-Gaussian data is the presence of heavy-tails or fat tails. For such data, the probability density function (p.d.f.) of extreme values decay at a slower-than-exponential rate, implying that extreme events occur with greater probability. When these events are observed simultaneously by several sensors, their observations are also spatially dependent. In this dissertation, we develop the theory of detection for such data, obtained through heterogeneous sensors. In order to validate our theoretical results and proposed algorithms, we collect and analyze the behavior of indoor footstep data using a linear array of seismic sensors. We characterize the inter-sensor dependence using copula theory. Copulas are parametric functions which bind univariate p.d.f. s, to generate a valid joint p.d.f. We model the heavy-tailed data using the class of alpha-stable distributions. We consider a two-sided test in the Neyman-Pearson framework and present an asymptotic analysis of the generalized likelihood test (GLRT). Both, nested and non-nested models are considered in the analysis. We also use a likelihood maximization-based copula selection scheme as an integral part of the detection process. Since many types of copula functions are available in the literature, selecting the appropriate copula becomes an important component of the detection problem. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated numerically on simulated data, as well as using indoor seismic data. With appropriately selected models, our results demonstrate that a high probability of detection can be achieved for false alarm probabilities of the order of 10^-4. These results, using dependent alpha-stable signals, are presented for a two-sensor case. We identify the computational challenges associated with dependent alpha-stable modeling and propose alternative schemes to extend the detector design to a multisensor (multivariate) setting. We use a hierarchical tree based approach, called vines, to model the multivariate copulas, i.e., model the spatial dependence between multiple sensors. The performance of the proposed detectors under the vine-based scheme are evaluated on the indoor footstep data, and significant improvement is observed when compared against the case when only two sensors are deployed. Some open research issues are identified and discussed

SαS noise suppression for OFDM wireless communication in rayleight channel

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a form of multi-carrier transmission technique widely used in the modern wireless network to achieve high-speed data transmission with good spectral efficiency. However, in impulsive noise environement BER performances of these systems, originally designed for a Gaussian noise model, are much degraded. In this paper, a new symmetric-alpha-stable (SαS) noise suppression technique based conjointly on adaptive modulation, convolutional coding (AMC) and Recursive Least Square (RLS) filtering is presented. The proposed scheme is applied on OFDM system in Rayleigh fading channel. The transmissions are analyzed under different combinations of digital modulation schemes (BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM, 64-QAM) and convolutional code rates (1/2, 2/3, 3/4). Simulation results show that our proposed hybrid technique provides effective impulsive noise cancelation in OFDM system and exhibits better BER performance

Nonlinear consensus+innovations under correlated heavy-tailed noises: Mean square convergence rate and asymptotics

We consider distributed recursive estimation of consensus+innovations type in the presence of heavy-tailed sensing and communication noises. We allow that the sensing and communication noises are mutually correlated while independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) in time, and that they may both have infinite moments of order higher than one (hence having infinite variances). Such heavy-tailed, infinite-variance noises are highly relevant in practice and are shown to occur, e.g., in dense internet of things (IoT) deployments. We develop a consensus+innovations distributed estimator that employs a general nonlinearity in both consensus and innovations steps to combat the noise. We establish the estimator's almost sure convergence, asymptotic normality, and mean squared error (MSE) convergence. Moreover, we establish and explicitly quantify for the estimator a sublinear MSE convergence rate. We then quantify through analytical examples the effects of the nonlinearity choices and the noises correlation on the system performance. Finally, numerical examples corroborate our findings and verify that the proposed method works in the simultaneous heavy-tail communication-sensing noise setting, while existing methods fail under the same noise conditions