A detection theoretical approach to digital communications using autoregressive process shift keying

I klassisk digital kommunikasjon overføres en bitstrøm gjennom en kanal ved å modulere parametrene til en deterministisk bærebølge. Noen kjente eksempler er amplitudemodulasjon (AM), frekvensmodulasjon (FM) og fasemodulasjon (PM). Mottakeren estimerer parametrene til det informasjonsbærende signalet og bruker en deteksjonsregel til å klassifisere den mottatte bølgeformen som en av flere mulige parametriske signaler. Konvensjonelle metoder gir ingen beskyttelse mot at ikke-autoriserte mottakere avlytter og dekoder signalet. Blant ferske metoder som tilbyr en viss beskyttelse mot avlytting finner vi såkalte spredt spektrum-teknikker og kaotiske digitale kodere. Slike teknikker krever nøyakig synkronisering mellom sender og mottaker. Selv små synkroniseringsfeil kan føre til store bitfeilrater hos mottakeren. Denne oppgaven har undersøkt et nytt konsept innen digital kommunikasjon, som er basert på å bruke realisasjoner av stokastiske prosesser som informasjonsbærende signaler. Teknikken har innebygd sikkerhet mot avlytting. Samtidig er det mulig å konstruere dekodere som er enklere enn de som brukes i spredt spektrum og kaotisk kommunikasjon. Målet med prosjektet er å undersøke noen fundamentale egenskaper ved den nye teknikken: 1) Hvordan kan vi finne et statistisk mål på avstand mellom de informasjonsbærende stokastiske prosessene? 2) Hvilken detektor skal vi bruke for å dekode informasjonssekvensen, og hvor god ytelse gir denne? 3) Hvordan skal vi velge de stokastiske prosessene

Ensemble Conformalized Quantile Regression for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

This article presents a novel probabilistic forecasting method called ensemble conformalized quantile regression (EnCQR). EnCQR constructs distribution-free and approximately marginally valid prediction intervals (PIs), which are suitable for nonstationary and heteroscedastic time series data. EnCQR can be applied on top of a generic forecasting model, including deep learning architectures. EnCQR exploits a bootstrap ensemble estimator, which enables the use of conformal predictors for time series by removing the requirement of data exchangeability. The ensemble learners are implemented as generic machine learning algorithms performing quantile regression (QR), which allow the length of the PIs to adapt to local variability in the data. In the experiments, we predict time series characterized by a different amount of heteroscedasticity. The results demonstrate that EnCQR outperforms models based only on QR or conformal prediction (CP), and it provides sharper, more informative, and valid PIs

Polarimetric Guided Nonlocal Means Covariance Matrix Estimation for Defoliation Mapping

In this study we investigate the potential for using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to provide high resolution defoliation and regrowth mapping of trees in the tundra-forest ecotone. Using aerial photographs, four areas with live forest and four areas with dead trees were identified. Quad-polarimetric SAR data from RADARSAT-2 was collected from the same area, and the complex multilook polarimetric covariance matrix was calculated using a novel extension of guided nonlocal means speckle filtering. The nonlocal approach allows us to preserve the high spatial resolution of single-look complex data, which is essential for accurate mapping of the sparsely scattered trees in the study area. Using a standard random forest classification algorithm, our filtering results in over $99.7 \%$ classification accuracy, higher than traditional speckle filtering methods, and on par with the classification accuracy based on optical data.Comment: Update to match final submitted version accepted to IGARSS 2020. 4 pages, 2 columns, 3 figure

Probability distributions for wind speed volatility characteristics: A case study of Northern Norway

The Norwegian Arctic is rich in wind resources. The development of wind power in this region can boost green energy and also promote local economies. In wind power engineering, it is a tremendous advantage to base projects on a sound understanding of the intrinsic properties of wind resources in an area. Wind speed volatility, a phenomenon that strongly affects wind power generation, has not received sufficient research attention. In this paper, a framework for studying short-term wind speed volatility with statistical analysis and probabilistic modeling is constructed for an existing wind farm in Northern Norway. It is found that unlike the characteristics of wind power volatility, wind speed volatility cannot be described by the normal distribution. The reason is that even though the probability distribution of wind speed volatility is centrally symmetric, it is much more centrally concentrated and has thicker tails. After comparing three distributions corresponding to different sampling periods, this paper suggests utilizing the t distribution, with average modeling RMSE less than 0.006 and R2 exceeding 0.995 and with the best modeling scenario of temporal resolution, the 30 mins has an RMSE of 0.0051 and an R2 of 0.997, to more accurately and effectively explore the fluctuating characteristics of wind speed

Power Flow Balancing With Decentralized Graph Neural Networks

We propose an end-to-end framework based on a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to balance the power flows in energy grids. The balancing is framed as a supervised vertex regression task, where the GNN is trained to predict the current and power injections at each grid branch that yield a power flow balance. By representing the power grid as a line graph with branches as vertices, we can train a GNN that is accurate and robust to changes in topology. In addition, by using specialized GNN layers, we are able to build a very deep architecture that accounts for large neighborhoods on the graph, while implementing only localized operations. We perform three different experiments to evaluate: i) the benefits of using localized rather than global operations and the tendency of deep GNN models to oversmooth the quantities on the nodes; ii) the resilience to perturbations in the graph topology; and iii) the capability to train the model simultaneously on multiple grid topologies and the consequential improvement in generalization to new, unseen grids. The proposed framework is efficient and, compared to other solvers based on deep learning, is robust to perturbations not only to the physical quantities on the grid components, but also to the topology

Unsupervised Image Regression for Heterogeneous Change Detection

Change detection (CD) in heterogeneous multitemporal satellite images is an emerging and challenging topic in remote sensing. In particular, one of the main challenges is to tackle the problem in an unsupervised manner. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised framework for bitemporal heterogeneous CD based on the comparison of affinity matrices and image regression. First, our method quantifies the similarity of affinity matrices computed from colocated image patches in the two images. This is done to automatically identify pixels that are likely to be unchanged. With the identified pixels as pseudotraining data, we learn a transformation to map the first image to the domain of the other image and vice versa. Four regression methods are selected to carry out the transformation: Gaussian process regression, support vector regression, random forest regression (RFR), and a recently proposed kernel regression method called homogeneous pixel transformation. To evaluate the potentials and limitations of our framework and also the benefits and disadvantages of each regression method, we perform experiments on two real data sets. The results indicate that the comparison of the affinity matrices can already be considered a CD method by itself. However, image regression is shown to improve the results obtained by the previous step alone and produces accurate CD maps despite of the heterogeneity of the multitemporal input data. Notably, the RFR approach excels by achieving similar accuracy as the other methods, but with a significantly lower computational cost and with fast and robust tuning of hyperparameters

On the Potential of Sequential and Nonsequential Regression Models for Sentinel-1-Based Biomass Prediction in Tanzanian Miombo Forests

This study derives regression models for aboveground biomass (AGB) estimation in miombo woodlands of Tanzania that utilize the high availability and low cost of Sentinel-1 data. The limited forest canopy penetration of C-band SAR sensors along with the sparseness of available ground truth restricts their usefulness in traditional AGB regression models. Therefore, we propose to use AGB predictions based on airborne laser scanning (ALS) data as a surrogate response variable for SAR data. This dramatically increases the available training data and opens for flexible regression models that capture fine-scale AGB dynamics. This becomes a sequential modeling approach, where the first regression stage has linked in situ data to ALS data and produced the AGB prediction map; we perform the subsequent stage, where this map is related to Sentinel-1 data.We develop a traditional, parametric regression model and alternative nonparametric models for this stage. The latter uses a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) to translate Sentinel-1 images into ALS-based AGB prediction maps. The convolution filters in the neural networks make them contextual. We compare the sequential models to traditional, nonsequential regression models, all trained on limited AGB ground reference data. Results show that our newly proposed nonsequential Sentinel-1-based regression model performs better quantitatively than the sequential models, but achieves less sensitivity to fine-scale AGB dynamics. The contextual cGAN-based sequential models best reproduce the distribution of ALS-based AGB predictions. They also reach a lower RMSE against in situ AGB data than the parametric sequential model, indicating a potential for further development

Polarimetric SAR Change Detection with the Complex Hotelling-Lawley Trace Statistic

Accepted manuscript version. Published version at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2016.2532320.In this paper, we propose a new test statistic for unsupervised change detection in polarimetric radar images. We work with multilook complex covariance matrix data, whose underlying model is assumed to be the scaled complex Wishart distribution. We use the complex-kind Hotelling-Lawley trace statistic for measuring the similarity of two covariance matrices. The distribution of the Hotelling-Lawley trace statistic is ap- proximated by a Fisher-Snedecor distribution, which is used to define the significance level of a false alarm rate regulated change detector. Experiments on simulated and real PolSAR data sets demonstrate that the proposed change detection method gives detections rates and error rates that are comparable with the generalized likelihood ratio test