Accurate Classification of Partial Discharge Phenomena in Power Transformers in the Presence of Noise

The objective of this research is to accurately classify different types of Partial Discharge (PD) phenomenon that occurs in transformers in the presence of noise. A PD is an electrical discharge or spark that bridges a small portion of the insulation in electrical equipment, which causes progressive deterioration of high voltage equipment and could potentially lead to flashover. The data for the study is generated from a laboratory setup and it is 300 time series signals each with 2016 attributes corresponding to 3 types of PDs; namely: Porcelain, Cable and Corona. The data is collected from two sensors with different bandwidths, in which Channel A signals refer to the data collected from the higher frequency sensor and signals from Channel B refer to data of the lower frequency sensor. Different feature engineering approaches are investigated in order to find the set of the most discriminant features which help to achieve high levels of classification accuracy for Channel A and Channel B signals. First, features that describe the shape and pulse of signals in the time domain are extracted. Then frequency domain based statistical features are generated. In comparison with classification accuracies using frequency domain features, time domain based features gave higher accuracy of more than 90% on average for both channels in the absence of noise while frequency domain features allowed classification accuracy up to 80% on average. However, in the presence of noise, both methods degraded. To overcome this, Regularization techniques were applied on the features from the frequency domain which helped to maintain classification accuracy even in the presence of high levels of noise

Classification of EMI discharge sources using time–frequency features and multi-class support vector machine

This paper introduces the first application of feature extraction and machine learning to Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) signals for discharge sources classification in high voltage power generating plants. This work presents an investigation on signals that represent different discharge sources, which are measured using EMI techniques from operating electrical machines within power plant. The analysis involves Time-Frequency image calculation of EMI signals using General Linear Chirplet Analysis (GLCT) which reveals both time and frequency varying characteristics. Histograms of uniform Local Binary Patterns (LBP) are implemented as a feature reduction and extraction technique for the classification of discharge sources using Multi-Class Support Vector Machine (MCSVM). The novelty that this paper introduces is the combination of GLCT and LBP applications to develop a new feature extraction algorithm applied to EMI signals classification. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated to be successful with excellent classification accuracy being achieved. For the first time, this work transfers expert's knowledge on EMI faults to an intelligent system which could potentially be exploited to develop an automatic condition monitoring system

Partial discharge feature extraction based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition and sample entropy

Partial Discharge (PD) pattern recognition plays an important part in electrical equipment fault diagnosis and maintenance. Feature extraction could greatly affect recognition results. Traditional PD feature extraction methods suffer from high-dimension calculation and signal attenuation. In this study, a novel feature extraction method based on Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) and Sample Entropy (SamEn) is proposed. In order to reduce the influence of noise, a wavelet method is applied to PD de-noising. Noise Rejection Ratio (NRR) and Mean Square Error (MSE) are adopted as the de-noising indexes. With EEMD, the de-noised signal is decomposed into a finite number of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). The IMFs, which contain the dominant information of PD, are selected using a correlation coefficient method. From that, the SamEn of selected IMFs are extracted as PD features. Finally, a Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) is utilized for pattern recognition using the features extracted. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method combines excellent properties of both EEMD and SamEn. The recognition results are encouraging with satisfactory accuracy

Partial discharge denoising for power cables

Partial discharge (PD) diagnostics is considered a major and effective tool for the monitoring of insulating conditions of power cables. As such, a large amount of off-line or online PD measurements have been deployed in power cables during the past decades. However, challenges still exist in PD diagnostics for power cables. Noise is one of the challenges involved in PD measurement. This thesis develops new algorithms based on the characteristics of both PD signals and noise to improve the effectiveness of wavelet-based PD denoising. In the meantime, it presents new findings in the application of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) in PD denoising. Wavelet-based technique has received high attention in the area of PD denoising, it still faces challenges, however, in wavelet selection, decomposition scale determination, and noise estimation. It is therefore the first area of interest in this thesis to improve the effectiveness of existing wavelet-based technique in PD detection by incorporating proposed algorithms. These new algorithms were developed based on the difference of entropy between transformed PD signals and noise, and the sparsity of transformed PD signals corrupted by noise. One concern commonly expressed by critics of wavelet-based technique is a pre-defined wavelet is applied in wavelet-based technique. EMD is an algorithm that can decompose a signal based on the signal itself. Thus, the second area of interest in this thesis is to further investigate the application of EMD in PD denoising; a technique that does not require the selection of a pre-defined signal to represent the "unknown" signal of interest. A new method for relative mode selection (RMS) was proposed based on the entropy of each intrinsic mode function (IMF). Although this new method cannot outperform the existing ones, it reveals that RMS is not as important as claimed in the application of EMD in signal denoising. Also, PD signals, especially those with lower magnitudes, can receive serious distortion through EMD-based denoising. Finally, comparisons between wavelet-based and EMD-based denoising were implemented in the following aspects, i.e., executing time, distortion, effectiveness, adaptivity and robustness. Results unveil that improved wavelet-based technique is more preferable as it can present better performance in PD denoising.Partial discharge (PD) diagnostics is considered a major and effective tool for the monitoring of insulating conditions of power cables. As such, a large amount of off-line or online PD measurements have been deployed in power cables during the past decades. However, challenges still exist in PD diagnostics for power cables. Noise is one of the challenges involved in PD measurement. This thesis develops new algorithms based on the characteristics of both PD signals and noise to improve the effectiveness of wavelet-based PD denoising. In the meantime, it presents new findings in the application of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) in PD denoising. Wavelet-based technique has received high attention in the area of PD denoising, it still faces challenges, however, in wavelet selection, decomposition scale determination, and noise estimation. It is therefore the first area of interest in this thesis to improve the effectiveness of existing wavelet-based technique in PD detection by incorporating proposed algorithms. These new algorithms were developed based on the difference of entropy between transformed PD signals and noise, and the sparsity of transformed PD signals corrupted by noise. One concern commonly expressed by critics of wavelet-based technique is a pre-defined wavelet is applied in wavelet-based technique. EMD is an algorithm that can decompose a signal based on the signal itself. Thus, the second area of interest in this thesis is to further investigate the application of EMD in PD denoising; a technique that does not require the selection of a pre-defined signal to represent the "unknown" signal of interest. A new method for relative mode selection (RMS) was proposed based on the entropy of each intrinsic mode function (IMF). Although this new method cannot outperform the existing ones, it reveals that RMS is not as important as claimed in the application of EMD in signal denoising. Also, PD signals, especially those with lower magnitudes, can receive serious distortion through EMD-based denoising. Finally, comparisons between wavelet-based and EMD-based denoising were implemented in the following aspects, i.e., executing time, distortion, effectiveness, adaptivity and robustness. Results unveil that improved wavelet-based technique is more preferable as it can present better performance in PD denoising

Radio Location of Partial Discharge Sources: A Support Vector Regression Approach

Partial discharge (PD) can provide a useful forewarning of asset failure in electricity substations. A significant proportion of assets are susceptible to PD due to incipient weakness in their dielectrics. This paper examines a low cost approach for uninterrupted monitoring of PD using a network of inexpensive radio sensors to sample the spatial patterns of PD received signal strength. Machine learning techniques are proposed for localisation of PD sources. Specifically, two models based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are developed: Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Least-Squares Support Vector Regression (LSSVR). These models construct an explicit regression surface in a high dimensional feature space for function estimation. Their performance is compared to that of artificial neural network (ANN) models. The results show that both SVR and LSSVR methods are superior to ANNs in accuracy. LSSVR approach is particularly recommended as practical alternative for PD source localisation due to it low complexity

A Study of the Detection of Defects in Ceramic Insulators Based on Radio Frequency Signatures.

The presence of defects in outdoor insulators ultimately results in the initiation of partial discharge (PD) activity. Because insulation failure and the consequent breakdown of power equipment can occur due to the cumulative adverse effects of partial discharges, it is important to detect PD activity in its early stages. Current techniques used in PD off-line analyses are not suitable for detecting defective insulators in the field. The work presented in this thesis involved the investigation of a number of cases of insulator defects, with the goal of developing an online RF-based PD technique for monitoring ceramic disc insulators that exhibit a variety of defects. The first three classes examined were an intentionally cracked ceramic insulator disc; a disc with a hole through the cap, which creates internal discharges; and a completely broken insulator disc. The fourth class involved an external corona noise using a point-to-plane setup. The defective discs were considered individually and were also incorporated into strings of 2, 3, and 4 insulators as a means of capturing the radiated RF signatures under external high voltage AC power. The captured RF pulses were processed in order to extract statistical, spectral, and wavelet packet based features. Feature reduction and selection is carried out and classification results pertaining to each feature-set type were obtained. To classify the discharges arising from different types of defects, an artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm was applied to the extracted features, and recognition rates of more than 90% were reported for each class. In addition, the position of the defective insulator within the string was varied and high defect classification results exceeding 90% were reported regardless of the position

Bio-motivated features and deep learning for robust speech recognition

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorIn spite of the enormous leap forward that the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies has experienced over the last five years their performance under hard environmental condition is still far from that of humans preventing their adoption in several real applications. In this thesis the challenge of robustness of modern automatic speech recognition systems is addressed following two main research lines. The first one focuses on modeling the human auditory system to improve the robustness of the feature extraction stage yielding to novel auditory motivated features. Two main contributions are produced. On the one hand, a model of the masking behaviour of the Human Auditory System (HAS) is introduced, based on the non-linear filtering of a speech spectro-temporal representation applied simultaneously to both frequency and time domains. This filtering is accomplished by using image processing techniques, in particular mathematical morphology operations with an specifically designed Structuring Element (SE) that closely resembles the masking phenomena that take place in the cochlea. On the other hand, the temporal patterns of auditory-nerve firings are modeled. Most conventional acoustic features are based on short-time energy per frequency band discarding the information contained in the temporal patterns. Our contribution is the design of several types of feature extraction schemes based on the synchrony effect of auditory-nerve activity, showing that the modeling of this effect can indeed improve speech recognition accuracy in the presence of additive noise. Both models are further integrated into the well known Power Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC). The second research line addresses the problem of robustness in noisy environments by means of the use of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs)-based acoustic modeling and, in particular, of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures. A deep residual network scheme is proposed and adapted for our purposes, allowing Residual Networks (ResNets), originally intended for image processing tasks, to be used in speech recognition where the network input is small in comparison with usual image dimensions. We have observed that ResNets on their own already enhance the robustness of the whole system against noisy conditions. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate that their combination with the auditory motivated features devised in this thesis provide significant improvements in recognition accuracy in comparison to other state-of-the-art CNN-based ASR systems under mismatched conditions, while maintaining the performance in matched scenarios. The proposed methods have been thoroughly tested and compared with other state-of-the-art proposals for a variety of datasets and conditions. The obtained results prove that our methods outperform other state-of-the-art approaches and reveal that they are suitable for practical applications, specially where the operating conditions are unknown.El objetivo de esta tesis se centra en proponer soluciones al problema del reconocimiento de habla robusto; por ello, se han llevado a cabo dos líneas de investigación. En la primera líınea se han propuesto esquemas de extracción de características novedosos, basados en el modelado del comportamiento del sistema auditivo humano, modelando especialmente los fenómenos de enmascaramiento y sincronía. En la segunda, se propone mejorar las tasas de reconocimiento mediante el uso de técnicas de aprendizaje profundo, en conjunto con las características propuestas. Los métodos propuestos tienen como principal objetivo, mejorar la precisión del sistema de reconocimiento cuando las condiciones de operación no son conocidas, aunque el caso contrario también ha sido abordado. En concreto, nuestras principales propuestas son los siguientes: Simular el sistema auditivo humano con el objetivo de mejorar la tasa de reconocimiento en condiciones difíciles, principalmente en situaciones de alto ruido, proponiendo esquemas de extracción de características novedosos. Siguiendo esta dirección, nuestras principales propuestas se detallan a continuación: • Modelar el comportamiento de enmascaramiento del sistema auditivo humano, usando técnicas del procesado de imagen sobre el espectro, en concreto, llevando a cabo el diseño de un filtro morfológico que captura este efecto. • Modelar el efecto de la sincroní que tiene lugar en el nervio auditivo. • La integración de ambos modelos en los conocidos Power Normalized Cepstral Coefficients (PNCC). La aplicación de técnicas de aprendizaje profundo con el objetivo de hacer el sistema más robusto frente al ruido, en particular con el uso de redes neuronales convolucionales profundas, como pueden ser las redes residuales. Por último, la aplicación de las características propuestas en combinación con las redes neuronales profundas, con el objetivo principal de obtener mejoras significativas, cuando las condiciones de entrenamiento y test no coinciden.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Multimedia y ComunicacionesPresidente: Javier Ferreiros López.- Secretario: Fernando Díaz de María.- Vocal: Rubén Solera Ureñ

An application of an auditory periphery model in speaker identification

The number of applications of automatic Speaker Identification (SID) is growing due to the advanced technologies for secure access and authentication in services and devices. In 2016, in a study, the Cascade of Asymmetric Resonators with Fast Acting Compression (CAR FAC) cochlear model achieved the best performance among seven recent cochlear models to fit a set of human auditory physiological data. Motivated by the performance of the CAR-FAC, I apply this cochlear model in an SID task for the first time to produce a similar performance to a human auditory system. This thesis investigates the potential of the CAR-FAC model in an SID task. I investigate the capability of the CAR-FAC in text-dependent and text-independent SID tasks. This thesis also investigates contributions of different parameters, nonlinearities, and stages of the CAR-FAC that enhance SID accuracy. The performance of the CAR-FAC is compared with another recent cochlear model called the Auditory Nerve (AN) model. In addition, three FFT-based auditory features – Mel frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC), Frequency Domain Linear Prediction (FDLP), and Gammatone Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (GFCC), are also included to compare their performance with cochlear features. This comparison allows me to investigate a better front-end for a noise-robust SID system. Three different statistical classifiers: a Gaussian Mixture Model with Universal Background Model (GMM-UBM), a Support Vector Machine (SVM), and an I-vector were used to evaluate the performance. These statistical classifiers allow me to investigate nonlinearities in the cochlear front-ends. The performance is evaluated under clean and noisy conditions for a wide range of noise levels. Techniques to improve the performance of a cochlear algorithm are also investigated in this thesis. It was found that the application of a cube root and DCT on cochlear output enhances the SID accuracy substantially