Multitaper Estimation of the Coherence Spectrum in low SNR

A pseudo coherence estimate using multitapers is presented. The estimate has better localization for sinusoids and is shown to have lower variance for disturbances compared to the usual coherence estimator. This makes it superior in terms of finding coherent frequencies between two sinusoidal signals; even when observed in low SNR. Different sets of multitapers are investigated and the weights of the final coherence estimate are adjusted for a low-biased estimate of a single sinusoid. The proposed method is more computationally efficient than data dependent methods, and does still give comparable results

Robust feature representation for classification of bird song syllables

A novel feature set for low-dimensional signal representation, designed for classification or clustering of non-stationary signals with complex variation in time and frequency, is presented. The feature representation of a signal is given by the first left and right singular vectors of its ambiguity spectrum matrix. If the ambiguity matrix is of low rank, most signal information in time direction is captured by the first right singular vector while the signal’s key frequency information is encoded by the first left singular vector. The resemblance of two signals is investigated by means of a suitable similarity assessment of the signals’ respective singular vector pair. Application of multitapers for the calculation of the ambiguity spectrum gives an increased robustness to jitter and background noise and a consequent improvement in performance, as compared to estimation based on the ordinary single Hanning window spectrogram. The suggested feature-based signal compression is applied to a syllable-based analysis of a song from the bird species Great Reed Warbler and evaluated by comparison to manual auditive and/or visual signal classification. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms well-known approaches based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and spectrogram cross-correlation

Scaled reassigned spectrograms applied to linear transducer signals

This study evaluates the applicability of scaled reassigned spectrograms (ReSTS) on ultrasound radio frequency data obtained with a clinical linear array ultrasound transducer. The ReSTS's ability to resolve axially closely spaced objects in a phantom is compared to the classical cross-correlation method with respect to the ability to resolve closely spaced objects as individual reflectors using ultrasound pulses with different lengths. The results show that the axial resolution achieved with the ReSTS was superior to the cross-correlation method when the reflected pulses from two objects overlap. A novel B-mode imaging method, facilitating higher image resolution for distinct reflectors, is proposed

Sparse Semi-Parametric Estimation of Harmonic Chirp Signals

In this work, we present a method for estimating the parameters detailing an unknown number of linear, possibly harmonically related, chirp signals, using an iterative sparse reconstruction framework. The proposed method is initiated by a re-weighted group-sparsity approach, followed by an iterative relaxation-based refining step, to allow for high resolution estimates. Numerical simulations illustrate the achievable performance, offering a notable improvement as compared to other recent approaches. The resulting estimates are found to be statistically efficient, achieving the corresponding Cram´er-Rao lower bound

Sparse Semi-Parametric Chirp Estimator

In this work, we present a method for estimating the parameters detailing an unknown number of linear chirp signals, using an iterative sparse reconstruction framework. The proposed method is initiated by a re-weighted Lasso approach, and then use an iterative relaxation-based refining step to allow for high resolution estimates. The resulting estimates are found to be statistically efficient, achieving the Cramér-Rao lower bound. Numerical simulations illustrate the achievable performance, offering a notable improvement as compared to other recent approaches

Comparing spectrum estimators in speaker verification under additive noise degradation

Bu çalışma, 25-30 Mart 2012 tarihleri arasında Kyoto[Japonya]’da düzenlenen IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing’da bildiri olarak sunulmuştur.Different short-term spectrum estimators for speaker verification under additive noise are considered. Conventionally, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are computed from discrete Fourier transform (DFT) spectra of windowed speech frames. Recently, linear prediction (LP) and its temporally weighted variants have been substituted as the spectrum analysis method in speech and speaker recognition. In this paper, 12 different short-term spectrum estimation methods are compared for speaker verification under additive noise contamination. Experimental results conducted on NIST 2002 SRE show that the spectrum estimation method has a large effect on recognition performance and stabilized weighted LP (SWLP) and minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) methods yield approximately 7 % and 8 % relative improvements over the standard DFT method at -10 dB SNR level of factory and babble noises, respectively in terms of equal error rate (EER).Inst Elect & Elect Engineers, Signal Processing SocIEE

A Welch Method Approximation of the Thomson Multitaper Spectrum Estimator

The Thomson multitaper estimator has become successful for spectrum analysis in many application areas. From the aspect of efficient implementation, the so called Welch or WOSA- Weighted Overlap Segment Averaging, has advantages. In the Welch estimator, the same, time-shifted, window is applied to the data-sequence. In this submission, the aim is to find a Welch estimator structure which has a similar performance as the Thomson multitaper estimator. Such a estimator might be more advantageous from real-time computation aspects as the spectra can be estimated when data samples are available and a running average will produce the subsequent averaged spectra. The approach is to restructure the corresponding co- variance matrix of the Thomson estimator to the structure of a Welch estimator and to find a mean square error approxi- mation of the covariance matrix. The resulting window of the Welch estimator should however fulfill the usual properties of a spectrum estimator, such as low-pass structure and well suppressed sidelobes

Optimization of weighting factors in the peak matched multiple window method

Peak matched multiple windows are found as the Karhunen-Loeve basis functions of a predefined peaked spectrum. With a penalty function, an optimization procedure can be constrained with resulting control of sidelobes. Weighting factors, included in the averaging of the periodograms, can be designed to fulfill certain constraints. Desirable properties are low variance and small bias. This paper presents a discussion of minimization of variance at the peak compared with the optimization that also include the neighbourhood of the peak

Mean square error optimal weighting for multitaper cepstrum estimation

The aim of this paper is to find a multitaper-based spectrum estimator that is mean square error optimal for cepstrum coefficient estimation. The multitaper spectrum estimator consists of windowed periodograms which are weighted together, where the weights are optimized using the Taylor expansion of the log-spectrum variance and a novel approximation for the log-spectrum bias. A thorough discussion and evaluation are also made for different bias approximations for the log-spectrum of multitaper estimators. The optimized weights are applied together with the sinusoidal tapers as the multitaper estimator. Comparisons of the cepstrum mean square error are made of some known multitaper methods as well as with the parametric autoregressive estimator for simulated speech signals

Classification of bird song syllables using singular vectors of the multitaper spectrogram

Classification of song similarities and differences in one bird species is a subtle problem where the actual answer is more or less unknown. In this paper, the singular vectors when decomposing the multitaper spectrogram are proposed to be used as feature vectors for classification. The advantage is especially for signals consisting of several components which have stochastic variations in the amplitudes as well as the time- and frequency locations. The approach is evaluated and compared to other methods for simulated data and bird song syllables recorded from the great reed warbler. The results show that in classification where there are strong similar components in all the signals but where the structure of weaker components are differing between the classes, the singular vectors decomposing the multitaper spectrogram could be useful as features