NASA Tech Briefs, July 2011

Topics covered include: 1) Collaborative Clustering for Sensor Networks; 2) Teleoperated Marsupial Mobile Sensor Platform Pair for Telepresence Insertion Into Challenging Structures; 3) Automated Verification of Spatial Resolution in Remotely Sensed Imagery; 4) Electrical Connector Mechanical Seating Sensor; 5) In Situ Aerosol Detector; 6) Multi-Parameter Aerosol Scattering Sensor; 7) MOSFET Switching Circuit Protects Shape Memory Alloy Actuators; 8) Optimized FPGA Implementation of Multi-Rate FIR Filters Through Thread Decomposition; 9) Circuit for Communication Over Power Lines; 10) High-Efficiency Ka-Band Waveguide Two-Way Asymmetric Power Combiner; 11) 10-100 Gbps Offload NIC for WAN, NLR, and Grid Computing; 12) Pulsed Laser System to Simulate Effects of Cosmic Rays in Semiconductor Devices; 13) Flight Planning in the Cloud; 14) MPS Editor; 15) Object-Oriented Multi Disciplinary Design, Analysis, and Optimization Tool; 16) Cryogenic-Compatible Winchester Connector Mount and Retaining System for Composite Tubes; 17) Development of Position-Sensitive Magnetic Calorimeters for X-Ray Astronomy; 18) Planar Rotary Piezoelectric Motor Using Ultrasonic Horns; 19) Self-Rupturing Hermetic Valve; 20) Explosive Bolt Dual-Initiated from One Side; 21) Dampers for Stationary Labyrinth Seals; 22) Two-Arm Flexible Thermal Strap; 23) Carbon Dioxide Removal via Passive Thermal Approaches; 24) Polymer Electrolyte-Based Ambient Temperature Oxygen Microsensors for Environmental Monitoring; 25) Pressure Shell Approach to Integrated Environmental Protection; 26) Image Quality Indicator for Infrared Inspections; 27) Micro-Slit Collimators for X-Ray/Gamma-Ray Imaging; 28) Scatterometer-Calibrated Stability Verification Method; 29) Test Port for Fiber-Optic-Coupled Laser Altimeter; 30) Phase Retrieval System for Assessing Diamond Turning and Optical Surface Defects; 31) Laser Oscillator Incorporating a Wedged Polarization Rotator and a Porro Prism as Cavity Mirror; 32) Generic, Extensible, Configurable Push-Pull Framework for Large-Scale Science Missions; 33) Dynamic Loads Generation for Multi-Point Vibration Excitation Problems; 34) Optimal Control via Self-Generated Stochasticity; 35) Space-Time Localization of Plasma Turbulence Using Multiple Spacecraft Radio Links; 36) Surface Contact Model for Comets and Asteroids; 37) Dust Mitigation Vehicle; 38) Optical Coating Performance for Heat Reflectors of the JWST-ISIM Electronic Component; 39) SpaceCube Demonstration Platform; 40) Aperture Mask for Unambiguous Parity Determination in Long Wavelength Imagers; 41) Spaceflight Ka-Band High-Rate Radiation-Hard Modulator; 42) Enabling Disabled Persons to Gain Access to Digital Media; 43) Cytometer on a Chip; 44) Principles, Techniques, and Applications of Tissue Microfluidics; and 45) Two-Stage Winch for Kites and Tethered Balloons or Blimps

Design methods for 60GHz beamformers in CMOS

The 60GHz band is promising for applications such as high-speed short-range wireless personal-area network (WPAN), real-time video streaming at rates of several-Gbps, automotive radar, and mm-Wave imaging, since it provides a large amount of bandwidth that can freely (i.e. without a license) be used worldwide. However, transceivers at 60GHz pose several additional challenges over microwave transceivers. In addition to the circuit design challenges of implementing high performance 60GHz RF circuits in mainstream CMOS technology, the path loss at 60GHz is significantly higher than at microwave frequencies because of the smaller size of isotropic antennas. This can be overcome by using phased array technology. This thesis studies the new concepts and design techniques that can be used for 60GHz phased array systems. It starts with an overview of various applications at mm-wave frequencies, such as multi-Gbps radio at 60GHz, automotive radar and millimeter-wave imaging. System considerations of mm-wave receivers and transmitters are discussed, followed by the selection of a CMOS technology to implement millimeter-wave (60GHz) systems. The link budget of a 60GHz WPAN is analyzed, which leads to the introduction of phased array techniques to improve system performance. Different phased array architectures are studied and compared. The system requirements of phase shifters are discussed. Several types of conventional RF phase shifters are reviewed. A 60GHz 4-bit passive phase shifter is designed and implemented in a 65nm CMOS technology. Measurement results are presented and compared to published prior art. A 60GHz 4-bit active phase shifter is designed and integrated with low noise amplifier and combiner for a phased array receiver. This is implemented in a 65nm CMOS technology, and the measurement results are presented. The design of a 60GHz 4-bit active phase shifter and its integration with power amplifier is also presented for a phased array transmitter. This is implemented in a 65nm CMOS technology. The measurement results are also presented and compared to reported prior art. The integration of a 60GHz CMOS amplifier and an antenna in a printed circuit-board (PCB) package is investigated. Experimental results are presented and discussed

Theory and Algorithms for Reliable Multimodal Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Signal Processing

Modern engineering systems collect large volumes of data measurements across diverse sensing modalities. These measurements can naturally be arranged in higher-order arrays of scalars which are commonly referred to as tensors. Tucker decomposition (TD) is a standard method for tensor analysis with applications in diverse fields of science and engineering. Despite its success, TD exhibits severe sensitivity against outliers —i.e., heavily corrupted entries that appear sporadically in modern datasets. We study L1-norm TD (L1-TD), a reformulation of TD that promotes robustness. For 3-way tensors, we show, for the first time, that L1-TD admits an exact solution via combinatorial optimization and present algorithms for its solution. We propose two novel algorithmic frameworks for approximating the exact solution to L1-TD, for general N-way tensors. We propose a novel algorithm for dynamic L1-TD —i.e., efficient and joint analysis of streaming tensors. Principal-Component Analysis (PCA) (a special case of TD) is also outlier responsive. We consider Lp-quasinorm PCA (Lp-PCA) for

A COMPUTATION METHOD/FRAMEWORK FOR HIGH LEVEL VIDEO CONTENT ANALYSIS AND SEGMENTATION USING AFFECTIVE LEVEL INFORMATION

VIDEO segmentation facilitates e±cient video indexing and navigation in large digital video archives. It is an important process in a content-based video indexing and retrieval (CBVIR) system. Many automated solutions performed seg- mentation by utilizing information about the \facts" of the video. These \facts" come in the form of labels that describe the objects which are captured by the cam- era. This type of solutions was able to achieve good and consistent results for some video genres such as news programs and informational presentations. The content format of this type of videos is generally quite standard, and automated solutions were designed to follow these format rules. For example in [1], the presence of news anchor persons was used as a cue to determine the start and end of a meaningful news segment. The same cannot be said for video genres such as movies and feature films. This is because makers of this type of videos utilized different filming techniques to design their videos in order to elicit certain affective response from their targeted audience. Humans usually perform manual video segmentation by trying to relate changes in time and locale to discontinuities in meaning [2]. As a result, viewers usually have doubts about the boundary locations of a meaningful video segment due to their different affective responses. This thesis presents an entirely new view to the problem of high level video segmentation. We developed a novel probabilistic method for affective level video content analysis and segmentation. Our method had two stages. In the first stage, a®ective content labels were assigned to video shots by means of a dynamic bayesian 0. Abstract 3 network (DBN). A novel hierarchical-coupled dynamic bayesian network (HCDBN) topology was proposed for this stage. The topology was based on the pleasure- arousal-dominance (P-A-D) model of a®ect representation [3]. In principle, this model can represent a large number of emotions. In the second stage, the visual, audio and a®ective information of the video was used to compute a statistical feature vector to represent the content of each shot. Affective level video segmentation was achieved by applying spectral clustering to the feature vectors. We evaluated the first stage of our proposal by comparing its emotion detec- tion ability with all the existing works which are related to the field of a®ective video content analysis. To evaluate the second stage, we used the time adaptive clustering (TAC) algorithm as our performance benchmark. The TAC algorithm was the best high level video segmentation method [2]. However, it is a very computationally intensive algorithm. To accelerate its computation speed, we developed a modified TAC (modTAC) algorithm which was designed to be mapped easily onto a field programmable gate array (FPGA) device. Both the TAC and modTAC algorithms were used as performance benchmarks for our proposed method. Since affective video content is a perceptual concept, the segmentation per- formance and human agreement rates were used as our evaluation criteria. To obtain our ground truth data and viewer agreement rates, a pilot panel study which was based on the work of Gross et al. [4] was conducted. Experiment results will show the feasibility of our proposed method. For the first stage of our proposal, our experiment results will show that an average improvement of as high as 38% was achieved over previous works. As for the second stage, an improvement of as high as 37% was achieved over the TAC algorithm

High Speed Human Action Recognition using a Photonic Reservoir Computer

The recognition of human actions in videos is one of the most active research fields in computer vision. The canonical approach consists in a more or less complex preprocessing stages of the raw video data, followed by a relatively simple classification algorithm. Here we address recognition of human actions using the reservoir computing algorithm, which allows us to focus on the classifier stage. We introduce a new training method for the reservoir computer, based on "Timesteps Of Interest", which combines in a simple way short and long time scales. We study the performance of this algorithm using both numerical simulations and a photonic implementation based on a single non-linear node and a delay line on the well known KTH dataset. We solve the task with high accuracy and speed, to the point of allowing for processing multiple video streams in real time. The present work is thus an important step towards developing efficient dedicated hardware for video processing

Algorithms for Fault Detection and Diagnosis

Due to the increasing demand for security and reliability in manufacturing and mechatronic systems, early detection and diagnosis of faults are key points to reduce economic losses caused by unscheduled maintenance and downtimes, to increase safety, to prevent the endangerment of human beings involved in the process operations and to improve reliability and availability of autonomous systems. The development of algorithms for health monitoring and fault and anomaly detection, capable of the early detection, isolation, or even prediction of technical component malfunctioning, is becoming more and more crucial in this context. This Special Issue is devoted to new research efforts and results concerning recent advances and challenges in the application of “Algorithms for Fault Detection and Diagnosis”, articulated over a wide range of sectors. The aim is to provide a collection of some of the current state-of-the-art algorithms within this context, together with new advanced theoretical solutions

Multi-wavelength, multi-beam, photonic based sensor for object discrimination and positioning

Over the last decade, substantial research efforts have been dedicated towards the development of advanced laser scanning systems for discrimination in perimeter security, defence, agriculture, transportation, surveying and geosciences. Military forces, in particular, have already started employing laser scanning technologies for projectile guidance, surveillance, satellite and missile tracking; and target discrimination and recognition. However, laser scanning is relatively a new security technology. It has previously been utilized for a wide variety of civil and military applications. Terrestrial laser scanning has found new use as an active optical sensor for indoors and outdoors perimeter security. A laser scanning technique with moving parts was tested in the British Home Office - Police Scientific Development Branch (PSDB) in 2004. It was found that laser scanning has the capability to detect humans in 30m range and vehicles in 80m range with low false alarm rates. However, laser scanning with moving parts is much more sensitive to vibrations than a multi-beam stationary optic approach. Mirror device scanners are slow, bulky and expensive and being inherently mechanical they wear out as a result of acceleration, cause deflection errors and require regular calibration. Multi-wavelength laser scanning represent a potential evolution from object detection to object identification and classification, where detailed features of objects and materials are discriminated by measuring their reflectance characteristics at specific wavelengths and matching them with their spectral reflectance curves. With the recent advances in the development of high-speed sensors and high-speed data processors, the implementation of multi-wavelength laser scanners for object identification has now become feasible. A two-wavelength photonic-based sensor for object discrimination has recently been reported, based on the use of an optical cavity for generating a laser spot array and maintaining adequate overlapping between tapped collimated laser beams of different wavelengths over a long optical path. While this approach is capable of discriminating between objects of different colours, its main drawback is the limited number of security-related objects that can be discriminated. This thesis proposes and demonstrates the concept of a novel photonic based multi-wavelength sensor for object identification and position finding. The sensor employs a laser combination module for input wavelength signal multiplexing and beam overlapping, a custom-made curved optical cavity for multi-beam spot generation through internal beam reflection and transmission and a high-speed imager for scattered reflectance spectral measurements. Experimental results show that five different laser wavelengths, namely 473nm, 532nm, 635nm, 670nm and 785nm, are necessary for discriminating various intruding objects of interest through spectral reflectance and slope measurements. Various objects were selected to demonstrate the proof of concept. We also demonstrate that the object position (coordinates) is determined using the triangulation method, which is based on the projection of laser spots along determined angles onto intruding objects and the measurement of their reflectance spectra using an image sensor. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of the multi-wavelength spectral reflectance sensor to simultaneously discriminate between different objects and predict their positions over a 6m range with an accuracy exceeding 92%. A novel optical design is used to provide additional transverse laser beam scanning for the identification of camouflage materials. A camouflage material is chosen to illustrate the discrimination capability of the sensor, which has complex patterns within a single sample, and is successfully detected and discriminated from other objects over a 6m range by scanning the laser beam spots along the transverse direction. By using more wavelengths at optimised points in the spectrum where different objects show different optical characteristics, better discrimination can be accomplished

Equalization and detection for digital communication over nonlinear bandlimited satellite communication channels

This dissertation evaluates receiver-based methods for mitigating the effects due to nonlinear bandlimited signal distortion present in high data rate satellite channels. The effects of the nonlinear bandlimited distortion is illustrated for digitally modulated signals. A lucid development of the low-pass Volterra discrete time model for a nonlinear communication channel is presented. In addition, finite-state machine models are explicitly developed for a nonlinear bandlimited satellite channel. A nonlinear fixed equalizer based on Volterra series has previously been studied for compensation of noiseless signal distortion due to a nonlinear satellite channel. This dissertation studies adaptive Volterra equalizers on a downlink-limited nonlinear bandlimited satellite channel. We employ as figure of merits performance in the mean-square error and probability of error senses. In addition, a receiver consisting of a fractionally-spaced equalizer (FSE) followed by a Volterra equalizer (FSE-Volterra) is found to give improvement beyond that gained by the Volterra equalizer. Significant probability of error performance improvement is found for multilevel modulation schemes. Also, it is found that probability of error improvement is more significant for modulation schemes, constant amplitude and multilevel, which require higher signal to noise ratios (i.e., higher modulation orders) for reliable operation. The maximum likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) receiver for a nonlinear satellite channel, a bank of matched filters followed by a Viterbi detector, serves as a probability of error lower bound for the Volterra and FSE-Volterra equalizers. However, this receiver has not been evaluated for a specific satellite channel. In this work, an MLSD receiver is evaluated for a specific downlink-limited satellite channel. Because of the bank of matched filters, the MLSD receiver may be high in complexity. Consequently, the probability of error performance of a more practical suboptimal MLSD receiver, requiring only a single receive filter, is evaluated