Signal Processing and Propagation for Aeroacoustic Sensor Networking,” Ch

Passive sensing of acoustic sources is attractive in many respects, including the relatively low signal bandwidth of sound waves, the loudness of most sources of interest, and the inherent difficulty of disguising or concealing emitted acoustic signals. The availability of inexpensive, low-power sensing and signal-processing hardware enables application of sophisticated real-time signal processing. Among th

Active Analog Circuit Design: Laboratory Project and Assessment

It is very important that undergraduate teaching of analog circuits be rigorous, involve a laboratory component and stimulate student interest. This paper describes a three week module on active circuits that incorporates circuit design, analysis and testing. The lectures are integrated with the laboratory component and all appropriate concepts in mathematics are covered. Assessment results are based on running the project at three universities, namely, Rowan, Bucknell and Tennessee State. Quantitative results based on student surveys, a concept inventory test and faculty formulated rubrics demonstrate the accomplishment of the learning outcomes

Configuration and Assessment of a Senior Level Course in Biometric Systems

It is very important that modern topics be covered at the senior undergraduate level in order that students benefit from (1) advanced STEM concepts, (2) project based learning, (3) a systems level perspective and (4) real world applications. This will help students that proceed to graduate school and who take up employment in government or industry. This paper describes a senior level undergraduate course in biometrics, a multidisciplinary area that is highly relevant to society and which has a rapidly growing global market. The course objectives, broad learning outcomes and curricular plan are described. Assessment results based on the analysis of a concept inventory test and student surveys (target versus control group) related to the learning outcomes show that the course was very successful

Planning and Assessment of a Workshop on Undergraduate Education in Biometric Systems

Biometrics is the science of recognizing and authenticating people using their physiological features. Border and immigration control, restricted access to facilities and information systems, cybersecurity, crime investigations and forensic analysis are just a few of the primary application areas of biometrics used by commercial, government and law enforcement agencies. The global biometrics market has a compound annual growth rate of 21.3 percent. There is much research interest in different biometric systems and this has led to increasing efforts in ensuring that biometrics is taught at the undergraduate level. The authors are in the final year of an NSF TUES Type 2 grant that is based on the theme of vertically integrating biometrics experiments throughout the undergraduate curriculum. Three universities have joined together in this effort. This paper is about the planning and assessment of a 3 day workshop that is based on the NSF funded effort. Fifteen faculty from across the country participated in this workshop. Undergraduate and graduate students also attended. The key points of the workshop included invited lectures and hands-on laboratory activities. The invited lectures included a tutorial on biometrics, detailed lectures on speaker recognition and a lecture on how to assess an educational intervention. The hands-on activities were presented such that the attending faculty could take them back to their respective universities. They were based on the following learning outcomes: • Enhanced application of math skills • Enhanced software implementation skills • Enhanced interest in biometrics • Enhanced ability to analyze experimental results • Enhanced communication skills • Comprehension of the importance of vertical integration, in that students realize that their experiences are part of a flow that contributes to a unified knowledge base. The workshop assessment results are very positive with respect to organization, quality of the invited lectures, quality of the hands-on activities and the social program

Design and Performance Evaluation of a Biometric Iris Verification System

This paper describes an iris verification project focused on design and performance evaluation under both matched and mismatched training and testing conditions. Training is always performed on clean iris images. Testing is performed on both clean and noisy iris images. This project is part of a senior undergraduate course on biometric systems. In implementing an iris recognition system, students go through each step, namely, preprocessing, feature extraction, classification (training and use in rendering a decision) and performance evaluation. The Chinese Academy of Sciences - Institute of Automation(CASIA) eye image database known as the CASIA-Iris-Interval-v3 database is used to show students that robustness to mismatched training and testing conditions is a significant practical issue

Signal processing for high-resolution array imaging and adaptive beamforming

Arrays of transducer elements are used in many applications to sample the waves that propagate from radiating or reflecting sources. This dissertation is concerned with two topics in array signal processing. The first part of the dissertation focuses on techniques for imaging with sparsely-populated transducer arrays. New techniques are presented for active (transmit/receive) imaging of a reflecting scene, as well as for passive (receive-only) imaging of a spatially incoherent scene. We consider a particular class of sparse arrays called boundary arrays, which have elements located only on the boundary of a two-dimensional region. The techniques we develop allow boundary arrays to achieve the same images as more densely populated arrays. Signal processing is used to essentially fill-in the missing elements from the interior of the boundary array. The key idea that we use to develop these signal processing techniques is the coarray, which provides a convenient and unified framework for understanding active and passive imaging. The techniques are developed first for the case of narrowband imaging of far-field scenes, and then we demonstrate through computer simulations that the techniques are also very useful for wideband imaging of finite-range scenes. The second part of the dissertation deals with the problem of adaptive beamforming (ABF) and high-resolution angle of arrival (AOA) estimation in the presence of coherent signals. Many of the standard ABF and AOA estimation algorithms perform poorly in coherent signal environments, so a number of techniques have been proposed to decorrelate the signals. Some decorrelation techniques of this type include pattern diversity, spatial smoothing, adaptive spatial smoothing, and spatial filtering. We show that all of these methods can be interpreted in a unified framework based on pattern diversity. This unified interpretation clarifies the relationships between the techniques, and it points out some previously unrecognized facts. We then use the unified framework to devise an improved decorrelation technique, and we demonstrate that the new technique can perform better than the other methods. The pattern diversity framework is also extended to the case of active (transmit/receive) systems, and we interpret the transmitter-location diversity scheme and a synthetic aperture approach in this light

Parallel-recusive filter structures for the computation of discrete transforms

A general approach is presented for implementing discrete transforms as a set of first-order or second-order recursive digital filters. Clenshaw\u27s recurrence formulae are used to formulate the second-order filters. The resulting structure is suitable for efficient implementation of discrete transforms in VLSI or FPGA circuits. The general approach is applied to the discrete Legendre transform as an illustration

A project-oriented course in probability and statistics for undergraduate electrical engineering students

An introductory course in probability and statistics for third-year and fourth-year electrical engineering students is described. The course is centered around several computer-based projects that are designed to achieve two objectives. First, the projects illustrate the course topics and provide hands-on experience for the students. The second and equally important objective of the projects is to convey the relevance and usefulness of probability and statistics to practical problems that undergraduate students can appreciate. The benefit of this course as to motivate electrical engineering students to excel in the study of probability concepts, instead of viewing the subject as one more course requirement toward graduation. The authors co-teach the course, and MATLAB is used for mast of the computer-based project