EMD-based filtering (EMDF) of low-frequency noise for speech enhancement

An Empirical Mode Decomposition based filtering (EMDF) approach is presented as a post-processing stage for speech enhancement. This method is particularly effective in low frequency noise environments. Unlike previous EMD based denoising methods, this approach does not make the assumption that the contaminating noise signal is fractional Gaussian Noise. An adaptive method is developed to select the IMF index for separating the noise components from the speech based on the second-order IMF statistics. The low frequency noise components are then separated by a partial reconstruction from the IMFs. It is shown that the proposed EMDF technique is able to suppress residual noise from speech signals that were enhanced by the conventional optimallymodified log-spectral amplitude approach which uses a minimum statistics based noise estimate. A comparative performance study is included that demonstrates the effectiveness of the EMDF system in various noise environments, such as car interior noise, military vehicle noise and babble noise. In particular, improvements up to 10 dB are obtained in car noise environments. Listening tests were performed that confirm the results

Enhanced monopulse radar tracking using optimum fractional Fourier transform

Conventional monopulse radar processors are used to track a target that appears in the look direction beam width. The distortion produced when additional targets appear in the look direction beam width can cause severe erroneous outcomes from the monopulse processor. This leads to errors in the target tracking angles that may cause target mistracking. A new signal processing algorithm is presented in this paper which offers a solution to this problem. The technique is based on the use of optimal Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT) filtering. The relative performance of the new filtering method over traditional based methods is assessed using standard deviation angle estimation error (STDAE) for a range of simulated environments. The proposed system configuration succeeds in significantly cancelling additional target signals appearing in the look direction beam width even if these targets have the same Doppler frequency

Adaptive template matching algorithm based on SWAD for robust target tracking

The sum of absolute differences (SAD) is widely used in video coding and disparity computation for its simplicity. However, SAD is not very common in tracking applications owing to issues like partial occlusion and target changes, which can dramatically affect its performance. Presented is a novel adaptive template matching algorithm for target tracking, based on a sum of weighted absolute differences (SWAD). The target template is updated using an infinite impulse response filter, while a weighting kernel is adopted to reduce the effects of partial occlusion. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed tracker outperforms conventional SAD in terms of efficiency and accuracy, and its performance is comparable with more complex trackers, such as the mean shift algorith

A new multistage lattice vector quantization with adaptive subband thresholding for image compression

Lattice vector quantization (LVQ) reduces coding complexity and computation due to its regular structure. A new multistage LVQ (MLVQ) using an adaptive subband thresholding technique is presented and applied to image compression. The technique concentrates on reducing the quantization error of the quantized vectors by "blowing out" the residual quantization errors with an LVQ scale factor. The significant coefficients of each subband are identified using an optimum adaptive thresholding scheme for each subband. A variable length coding procedure using Golomb codes is used to compress the codebook index which produces a very efficient and fast technique for entropy coding. Experimental results using the MLVQ are shown to be significantly better than JPEG 2000 and the recent VQ techniques for various test images

Biomedical image sequence analysis with application to automatic quantitative assessment of facial paralysis

Facial paralysis is a condition causing decreased movement on one side of the face. A quantitative, objective, and reliable assessment system would be an invaluable tool for clinicians treating patients with this condition. This paper presents an approach based on the automatic analysis of patient video data. Facial feature localization and facial movement detection methods are discussed. An algorithm is presented to process the optical flow data to obtain the motion features in the relevant facial regions. Three classification methods are applied to provide quantitative evaluations of regional facial nerve function and the overall facial nerve function based on the House-Brackmann scale. Experiments show the radial basis function (RBF) neural network to have superior performance

Biomedical image sequence analysis with application to automatic quantitative assessment of facial paralysis

Facial paralysis is a condition causing decreased movement on one side of the face. A quantitative, objective, and reliable assessment system would be an invaluable tool for clinicians treating patients with this condition. This paper presents an approach based on the automatic analysis of patient video data. Facial feature localization and facial movement detection methods are discussed. An algorithm is presented to process the optical flow data to obtain the motion features in the relevant facial regions. Three classification methods are applied to provide quantitative evaluations of regional facial nerve function and the overall facial nerve function based on the House-Brackmann scale. Experiments show the radial basis function (RBF) neural network to have superior performance

Multi-aspect micro-Doppler signatures for attitude-independent L/N quotient estimation and its application to helicopter classification

Micro-Doppler signals returned from the main rotor of a helicopter can be used for feature extraction and helicopter classification. An intrinsic feature of a helicopter that may be extracted from the micro-Doppler signatures is the L/N quotient, where N denotes the number of rotor blades and L is the blade length. However, in monostatic radar, the L/N quotient cannot be accurately estimated due to the unknown attitude angles of non-cooperative helicopters. To solve this problem, an attitude-independent L/N quotient estimation method based on multi-aspect micro-Doppler signatures is proposed in this study. The helicopter is observed from different aspect angles, and the multi-aspect micro-Doppler signatures are jointly processed to solve the attitude angles of the helicopter and estimate the L/N quotient unambiguously. Experiments with both simulated and real data demonstrate that, the proposed method is robust with respect to the attitude of the helicopter and, therefore, significantly improves the accuracy of L/N quotient estimation compared with only using the signature observed from single-aspect angle. This implies that the proposed method has the potential to increase the success rate of helicopter classification

Detecting covariance symmetries for classification of polarimetric SAR images

The availability of multiple images of the same scene acquired with the same radar but with different polarizations, both in transmission and reception, has the potential to enhance the classification, detection and/or recognition capabilities of a remote sensing system. A way to take advantage of the full-polarimetric data is to extract, for each pixel of the considered scene, the polarimetric covariance matrix, coherence matrix, Muller matrix, and to exploit them in order to achieve a specific objective. A framework for detecting covariance symmetries within polarimetric SAR images is here proposed. The considered algorithm is based on the exploitation of special structures assumed by the polarimetric coherence matrix under symmetrical properties of the returns associated with the pixels under test. The performance analysis of the technique is evaluated on both simulated and real L-band SAR data, showing a good classification level of the different areas within the image