Sparse Signal Reconstruction using Weight Point Algorithm

In this paper we propose a new approach of the compressive sensing (CS) reconstruction problem based on a geometrical interpretation of l1-norm minimization. By taking a large l1-norm value at the initial step, the intersection of l1-norm and the constraint curves forms a convex polytope and by exploiting the fact that any convex combination of the polytope's vertexes gives a new point that has a smaller l1-norm, we are able to derive a new algorithm to solve the CS reconstruction problem. Compared to the greedy algorithm, this algorithm has better performance, especially in highly coherent environments. Compared to the convex optimization, the proposed algorithm has simpler computation requirements. We tested the capability of this algorithm in reconstructing a randomly down-sampled version of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) index. The proposed algorithm achieved a good result but only works on real-valued signals

Fast diffusion MRI based on sparse acquisition and reconstruction for long-term population imaging

Diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is a unique MRI modality to probe the diffusive molecular transport in biological tissue. Due to its noninvasiveness and its ability to investigate the living human brain at submillimeter scale, dMRI is frequently performed in clinical and biomedical research to study the brain’s complex microstructural architecture. Over the last decades large prospective cohort studies have been set up with the aim to gain new insights into the development and progression of brain diseases across the life span and to discover biomarkers for disease prediction and potentially prevention. To allow for diverse brain imaging using different MRI modalities, stringent scan time limits are typically imposed in population imaging. Nevertheless, population studies aim to apply advanced and thereby time consuming dMRI protocols that deliver high quality data with great potential for future analysis. To allow for time-efficient but also versatile diffusion imaging, this thesis contributes to the investigation of accelerating diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI), an advanced dMRI technique that acquires imaging data with high intra-voxel resolution of tissue microstructure. Combining state-of-the-art parallel imaging and the theory of compressed sensing (CS) enables the acceleration of spatial encoding and diffusion encoding in dMRI. In this way, the otherwise long acquisition times in DSI can be reduced significantly. In this thesis, first, suitable q-space sampling strategies and basis functions are explored that fulfill the requirements of CS theory for accurate sparse DSI reconstruction. Novel 3D q-space sample distributions are investigated for CS-DSI. Moreover, conventional CS-DSI based on the discrete Fourier transform is compared for the first time to CS-DSI based on the continuous SHORE (simple harmonic oscillator based reconstruction and estimation) basis functions. Based on these findings, a CS-DSI protocol is proposed for application in a prospective cohort study, the Rhineland Study. A pilot study was designed and conducted to evaluate the CS-DSI protocol in comparison with state-of-the-art 3-shell dMRI and dedicated protocols for diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and for the combined hindered and restricted model of diffusion (CHARMED). Population imaging requires processing techniques preferably with low computational cost to process and analyze the acquired big data within a reasonable time frame. Therefore, a pipeline for automated processing of CS-DSI acquisitions was implemented including both in-house developed and existing state-of-the-art processing tools. The last contribution of this thesis is a novel method for automatic detection and imputation of signal dropout due to fast bulk motion during the diffusion encoding in dMRI. Subject motion is a common source of artifacts, especially when conducting clinical or population studies with children, the elderly or patients. Related artifacts degrade image quality and adversely affect data analysis. It is, thus, highly desired to detect and then exclude or potentially impute defective measurements prior to dMRI analysis. Our proposed method applies dMRI signal modeling in the SHORE basis and determines outliers based on the weighted model residuals. Signal imputation reconstructs corrupted and therefore discarded measurements from the sparse set of inliers. This approach allows for fast and robust correction of imaging artifacts in dMRI which is essential to estimate accurate and precise model parameters that reflect the diffusive transport of water molecules and the underlying microstructural environment in brain tissue.Die diffusionsgewichtete Magnetresonanztomographie (dMRT) ist ein einzigartiges MRTBildgebungsverfahren, um die Diffusionsbewegung von Wassermolekülen in biologischem Gewebe zu messen. Aufgrund der Möglichkeit Schichtbilder nicht invasiv aufzunehmen und das lebende menschliche Gehirn im Submillimeter-Bereich zu untersuchen, ist die dMRT ein häufig verwendetes Bildgebungsverfahren in klinischen und biomedizinischen Studien zur Erforschung der komplexen mikrostrukturellen Architektur des Gehirns. In den letzten Jahrzehnten wurden große prospektive Kohortenstudien angelegt, um neue Einblicke in die Entwicklung und den Verlauf von Gehirnkrankheiten über die Lebenspanne zu erhalten und um Biomarker zur Krankheitserkennung und -vorbeugung zu bestimmen. Um durch die Verwendung unterschiedlicher MRT-Verfahren verschiedenartige Schichtbildaufnahmen des Gehirns zu ermöglich, müssen Scanzeiten typischerweise stark begrenzt werden. Dennoch streben Populationsstudien die Anwendung von fortschrittlichen und daher zeitintensiven dMRT-Protokollen an, um Bilddaten in hoher Qualität und mit großem Potential für zukünftige Analysen zu akquirieren. Um eine zeiteffizente und gleichzeitig vielseitige Diffusionsbildgebung zu ermöglichen, leistet diese Dissertation Beiträge zur Untersuchung von Beschleunigungsverfahren für die Bildgebung mittels diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI). DSI ist ein fortschrittliches dMRT-Verfahren, das Bilddaten mit hoher intra-voxel Auflösung der Gewebestruktur erhebt. Werden modernste Verfahren zur parallelen MRT-Bildgebung mit der compressed sensing (CS) Theorie kombiniert, ermöglicht dies eine Beschleunigung der räumliche Kodierung und der Diffusionskodierung in der dMRT. Dadurch können die ansonsten langen Aufnahmezeiten für DSI erheblich reduziert werden. In dieser Arbeit werden zuerst geeigenete Strategien zur Abtastung des q-space sowie Basisfunktionen untersucht, welche die Anforderungen der CS-Theorie für eine korrekte Signalrekonstruktion der dünnbesetzten DSI-Daten erfüllen. Neue 3D-Verteilungen von Messpunkten im q-space werden für die Verwendung in CS-DSI untersucht. Außerdem wird konventionell auf der diskreten Fourier-Transformation basierendes CS-DSI zum ersten Mal mit einem CS-DSI Verfahren verglichen, welches kontinuierliche SHORE (simple harmonic oscillator based reconstruction and estimation) Basisfunktionen verwendet. Aufbauend auf diesen Ergebnissen wird ein CS-DSI-Protokoll zur Anwendung in einer prospektiven Kohortenstudie, der Rheinland Studie, vorgestellt. Eine Pilotstudie wurde entworfen und durchgeführt, um das CS-DSI-Protokoll im Vergleich mit modernster 3-shell-dMRT und mit dedizierten Protokollen für diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) und für das combined hindered and restricted model of diffusion (CHARMED) zu evaluieren. Populationsbildgebung erfordert Prozessierungsverfahren mit möglichst geringem Rechenaufwand, um große akquirierte Datenmengen in einem angemessenen Zeitrahmen zu verarbeiten und zu analysieren. Dafür wurde eine Pipeline zur automatisierten Verarbeitung von CS-DSI-Daten implementiert, welche sowohl eigenentwickelte als auch bereits existierende moderene Verarbeitungsprogramme enthält. Der letzte Beitrag dieser Arbeit ist eine neue Methode zur automatischen Detektion und Imputation von Signalabfall, welcher durch schnelle Bewegungen während der Diffusionskodierung in der dMRT entsteht. Bewegungen der Probanden während der dMRT-Aufnahme sind eine häufige Ursache für Bildfehler, vor allem in klinischen oder Populationsstudien mit Kindern, alten Menschen oder Patienten. Diese Artefakte vermindern die Datenqualität und haben einen negativen Einfluss auf die Datenanalyse. Daher ist es das Ziel, fehlerhafte Messungen vor der dMRI-Analyse zu erkennen und dann auszuschließen oder wenn möglich zu ersetzen. Die vorgestellte Methode verwendet die SHORE-Basis zur dMRT-Signalmodellierung und bestimmt Ausreißer mit Hilfe von gewichteten Modellresidualen. Die Datenimputation rekonstruiert die unbrauchbaren und daher verworfenen Messungen mit Hilfe der verbleibenden, dünnbesetzten Menge an Messungen. Dieser Ansatz ermöglicht eine schnelle und robuste Korrektur von Bildartefakten in der dMRT, welche erforderlich ist, um korrekte und präzise Modellparameter zu schätzen, die die Diffusionsbewegung von Wassermolekülen und die zugrundeliegende Mikrostruktur des Gehirngewebes reflektieren

Sparse representations and harmonic wavelets for stochastic modeling and analysis of diverse structural systems and related excitations

In this thesis, novel analytical and computational approaches are proposed for addressing several topics in the field of random vibration. The first topic pertains to the stochastic response determination of systems with singular parameter matrices. Such systems appear, indicatively, when a redundant coordinate modeling scheme is adopted. This is often associated with computational cost-efficient solution frameworks and modeling flexibility for treating complex systems. Further, structures are subject to environmental excitations, such as ground motions, that typically exhibit non-stationary characteristics. In this regard, aiming at a joint time-frequency analysis of the system response a recently developed generalized harmonic wavelet (GHW)-based solution framework is employed in conjunction with tools originated form the generalized matrix inverse theory. This leads to a generalization of earlier excitation-response relationships of random vibration theory to account for systems with singular matrices. Harmonic wavelet-based statistical linearization techniques are also extended to nonlinear multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) systems with singular matrices. The accuracy of the herein proposed framework is further improved by circumventing previous “local stationarity” assumptions about the response. Furthermore, the applicability of the method is extended beyond redundant coordinate modeling applications. This is achieved by a formulation which accounts for generally constrained equations of motion pertaining to diverse engineering applications. These include, indicatively, energy harvesters with coupled electromechanical equations and oscillators subject to non-white excitations modeled via auxiliary filter equations. The second topic relates to the probabilistic modeling of excitation processes in the presence of missing data. In this regard, a compressive sampling methodology is developed for incomplete wind time-histories reconstruction and extrapolation in a single spatial dimension, as well as for related stochastic field statistics estimation. An alternative methodology based on low rank matrices and nuclear norm minimization is also developed for wind field extrapolation in two spatial dimensions. The proposed framework can be employed for monitoring of wind turbine systems utilizing information from a few measured locations as well as in the context of performance-based design optimization of structural systems. Lastly, the problem of with data-driven sparse identification methods of nonlinear dynamics is considered. In particular, utilizing measured responses a Bayesian compressive sampling technique is developed for determining the governing equations of stochastically excited structural systems exhibiting diverse nonlinear behaviors and also endowed with fractional derivative elements. Compared to alternative state-of-the-art schemes that yield deterministic estimates for the identified model, the herein developed methodology exhibits additional sparsity promoting features and is capable of quantifying the uncertainty associated with the model estimates. This provides a quantifiable degree of confidence when employing the proposed framework as a predictive tool

Acoustic tomography of the atmosphere using iterated Unscented Kalman Filter

2012 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Tomography approaches are of great interests because of their non-intrusive nature and their ability to generate a significantly larger amount of data in comparison to the in-situ measurement method. Acoustic tomography is an approach which reconstructs the unknown parameters that affect the propagation of acoustic rays in a field of interest by studying the temporal characteristics of the propagation. Acoustic tomography has been used in several different disciplines such as biomedical imaging, oceanographic studies and atmospheric studies. The focus of this thesis is to study acoustic tomography of the atmosphere in order to reconstruct the temperature and wind velocity fields in the atmospheric surface layer using the travel-times collected from several pairs of transmitter and receiver sensors distributed in the field. Our work consists of three main parts. The first part of this thesis is dedicated to reviewing the existing methods for acoustic tomography of the atmosphere, namely statistical inversion (SI), time dependent statistical inversion (TDSI), simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT), and sparse recovery framework. The properties of these methods are then explained extensively and their shortcomings are also mentioned. In the second part of this thesis, a new acoustic tomography method based on Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) is introduced in order to address some of the shortcomings of the existing methods. Using the UKF, the problem is cast as a state estimation problem in which the temperature and wind velocity fields are the desired states to be reconstructed. The field is discretized into several grids in which the temperature and wind velocity fields are assumed to be constant. Different models, namely random walk, first order 3-D autoregressive (AR) model, and 1-D temporal AR model are used to capture the state evolution in time-space . Given the time of arrival (TOA) equation for acoustic propagation as the observation equation, the temperature and wind velocity fields are then reconstructed using a fixed point iterative UKF. The focus in the third part of this thesis is on generating a meaningful synthetic data for the temperature and wind velocity fields to test the proposed algorithms. A 2-D Fractal Brownian motion (fBm)-based method is used in order to generate realizations of the temperature and wind velocity fields. The synthetic data is generated for 500 subsequent snapshots of wind velocity and temperature field realizations with spatial resolution of one meter and temporal resolution of 12 seconds. Given the location of acoustic sensors the TOA&rsquos are calculated for all the acoustic paths. In addition, white Gaussian noise is added to the calculated TOAs in order to simulate the measurement error. The synthetic data is then used to test the proposed method and the results are compared to those of the TDSI method. This comparison attests to the superiority of the proposed method in terms of accuracy of reconstruction, real-time processing and the ability to track the temporal changes in the data

Joint Spatial-Angular Sparse Coding, Compressed Sensing, and Dictionary Learning for Diffusion MRI

Neuroimaging provides a window into the inner workings of the human brain to diagnose and prevent neurological diseases and understand biological brain function, anatomy, and psychology. Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) is an emerging medical imaging modality used to study the anatomical network of neurons in the brain, which form cohesive bundles, or fiber tracts, that connect various parts of the brain. Since about 73% of the brain is water, measuring the flow, or diffusion of water molecules in the presence of fiber bundles, allows researchers to estimate the orientation of fiber tracts and reconstruct the internal wiring of the brain, in vivo. Diffusion MRI signals can be modeled within two domains: the spatial domain consisting of voxels in a brain volume and the diffusion or angular domain, where fiber orientation is estimated in each voxel. Researchers aim to estimate the probability distribution of fiber orientation in every voxel of a brain volume in order to trace paths of fiber tracts from voxel to voxel over the entire brain. Therefore, the traditional framework for dMRI processing and analysis has been from a voxel-wise vantage point with added spatial regularization considered post-hoc. In contrast, we propose a new joint spatial-angular representation of dMRI data which pairs signals in each voxel with the global spatial environment, jointly. This has the ability to improve many aspects of dMRI processing and analysis and re-envision the core representation of dMRI data from a local perspective to a global one. In this thesis, we propose three main contributions which take advantage of such joint spatial-angular representations to improve major machine learning tasks applied to dMRI: sparse coding, compressed sensing, and dictionary learning. First, we will show that we can achieve sparser representations of dMRI by utilizing a global spatial-angular dictionary instead of a purely voxel-wise angular dictionary. As dMRI data is very large in size, we provide a number of novel extensions to popular spare coding algorithms that perform efficient optimization on a global-scale by exploiting the separability of our dictionaries over the spatial and angular domains. Next, compressed sensing is used to accelerate signal acquisition based on an underlying sparse representation of the data. We will show that our proposed representation has the potential to push the limits of the current state of scanner acceleration within a new compressed sensing model for dMRI. Finally, sparsity can be further increased by learning dictionaries directly from datasets of interest. Prior dictionary learning for dMRI learn angular dictionaries alone. Our third contribution is to learn spatial-angular dictionaries jointly from dMRI data directly to better represent the global structure. Traditionally, the problem of dictionary learning is non-convex with no guarantees of finding a globally optimal solution. We derive the first theoretical results of global optimality for this class of dictionary learning problems. We hope the core foundation of a joint spatial-angular representation will open a new perspective on dMRI with respect to many other processing tasks and analyses. In addition, our contributions are applicable to any general signal types that can benefit from separable dictionaries. We hope the contributions in this thesis may be adopted in the larger signal processing, computer vision, and machine learning communities. dMRI signals can be modeled within two domains: the spatial domain consisting of voxels in a brain volume and the diffusion or angular domain, where fiber orientation is estimated in each voxel. Computationally speaking, researchers aim to estimate the probability distribution of fiber orientation in every voxel of a brain volume in order to trace paths of fiber tracts from voxel to voxel over the entire brain. Therefore, the traditional framework for dMRI processing and analysis is from a voxel-wise, or angular, vantage point with post-hoc consideration of their local spatial neighborhoods. In contrast, we propose a new global spatial-angular representation of dMRI data which pairs signals in each voxel with the global spatial environment, jointly, to improve many aspects of dMRI processing and analysis, including the important need for accelerating the otherwise time-consuming acquisition of advanced dMRI protocols. In this thesis, we propose three main contributions which utilize our joint spatial-angular representation to improve major machine learning tasks applied to dMRI: sparse coding, compressed sensing, and dictionary learning. We will show that sparser codes are possible by utilizing a global dictionary instead of a voxel-wise angular dictionary. This allows for a reduction of the number of measurements needed to reconstruct a dMRI signal to increase acceleration using compressed sensing. Finally, instead of learning angular dictionaries alone, we learn spatial-angular dictionaries jointly from dMRI data directly to better represent the global structure. In addition, this problem is non-convex and so we derive the first theories to guarantee convergence to a global minimum. As dMRI data is very large in size, we provide a number of novel extensions to popular algorithms that perform efficient optimization on a global-scale by exploiting the separability of our global dictionaries over the spatial and angular domains. We hope the core foundation of a joint spatial-angular representation will open a new perspective on dMRI with respect to many other processing tasks and analyses. In addition, our contributions are applicable to any separable dictionary setting which we hope may be adopted in the larger image processing, computer vision, and machine learning communities