Analysis and Prognosis of Failures in Intelligent Hybrid Systems Using Bioengineering: Gear Coupling

This work is of multidisciplinary concept, whose development is difficult to perform. Considering also that, in one of the steps, the similarity between the FRF of the vibration and acoustic signal is demonstrated. The objective of this work is the analysis and prognosis of the progression of failures of a pair of gears using the artificial immune system (AIS) of negative selection. In order to have this condition met, during the development of this work, the Wiener filter technique, the vibration and acoustic signal analysis (FRF), the application of negative selection AIS techniques for classification and grouping of signals were applied. The final result successfully demonstrates the effectiveness of the development process of this work and the robustness of the negative selection AIS algorithm.

Construction of a Computer-Aided Analysis System for Orthopedic Diseases Based on High-Frequency Ultrasound Images

The area of medical diagnosis has been transformed by computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). With the advancement of technology and the widespread availability of medical data, CAD has gotten a lot of attention, and numerous methods for predicting different pathological diseases have been created. Ultrasound (US) is the safest clinical imaging method; therefore, it is widely utilized in medical and healthcare settings with computer-aided systems. However, owing to patient movement and equipment constraints, certain artefacts make identification of these US pictures challenging. To enhance the quality of pictures for classification and segmentation, certain preprocessing techniques are required. Hence, we proposed a three-stage image segmentation method using U-Net and Iterative Random Forest Classifier (IRFC) to detect orthopedic diseases in ultrasound images efficiently. Initially, the input dataset is preprocessed using Enhanced Wiener Filter for image denoising and image enhancement. Then, the proposed segmentation method is applied. Feature extraction is performed by transform-based analysis. Finally, obtained features are reduced to optimal subset using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The classification is done using the proposed Iterative Random Forest Classifier. The proposed method is compared with the conventional performance measures like accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and dice score. The proposed method is proved to be efficient for detecting orthopedic diseases in ultrasound images than the conventional methods.

Eye Blink Artefact Removal of Single Frontal EEG Channel Algorithm using Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition and Outlier Detection

Recently, the emergence of various applications to use EEG has evolved the EEG device to become wearable with fewer electrodes. Unfortunately, the process of removing artefact becomes challenging since the conventional method requires an additional artefact reference channel or multichannel recording to be working. By focusing on frontal EEG channel recording, this paper proposed an alternative single-channel eye blink artefact removal method based on the ensemble empirical mode decomposition and outlier detection technique. The method removes the segment of the potential eyeblinks artefact on the residual of a pre-determined level of decomposition. An outlier detection technique is introduced to identify the peak of the eyeblink based on the extreme value of the residual signal. The results showed that the corrected EEG signal achieved high correlation, low RMSE and have small differences in PSD when compared to the reference clean EEG. Comparing with an adaptive Wiener filter technique, the corrected EEG signal by the proposed method had better signal-to-artefact ratio.

An Integrated Double Hybrid Fusion Approach for Image Smoothing

Often in practice, during the process of image acquisition, the acquired image gets degraded due to various factors like noise, motion blur, mis-focus of a camera, atmospheric turbulence, etc. resulting in the image unsuitable for further analysis or processing. To improve the quality of these degraded images, a double hybrid restoration filter is proposed on the two same sets of input images and the output images are fused to get a unified filter in combination with the concept of image fusion. First image set is processed by applying deconvolution using Wiener Filter (DWF) twice and decomposing the output image using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Similarly, second image set is also processed simultaneously by applying Deconvolution using Lucy–Richardson Filter (DLR) twice followed by the above procedure. The proposed filter gives a better performance as compared to DWF and DLR filters in case of both blurry as well as noisy images. The proposed filter is compared with some standard deconvolution algorithms and also some state-of-the-art restoration filters with the help of seven image quality assessment parameters. Simulation results prove the success of the proposed algorithm and at the same time, visual and quantitative results are very impressive.

Noise Reduction, Enhancement and Classification for Sonar Images

Ultrasound imaging has some problems with image properties output. These affects the specialist decision. Ultrasound noise type is the speckle noise which has a grainy pattern depending on the signal. There are two parts of this study. The first part is the enhancing of images with adaptive Weiner, Lee, Gamma and Frost filters with 3x3, 5x5, and 7x7 sliding windows. The evaluated process was achieved using signal to noise ratio (SNR), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), and maximum difference (MD) criteria. The second part consists of simulating noise in a standard image (Lina image) by adding different percentage of speckle noise from 0.01 to 0.06. The supervised classification based minimum distance method is used to evaluate the results depending on selecting four blocks located at different places on the image. Speckle noise was added with different percentage from 0.01 to 0.06 to calculate the coherent noise within the image. The coherent noise was concluded from the slope of the standard deviation with the mean for each noise. The results showed that the additive noise increased with the slide window size, while multiplicative noise did not change with the sliding window nor with increasing noise ratio. Wiener filter has the best results in enhancing the noise.

A recursive expectation-maximization algorithm for speaker tracking and separation

The problem of blind and online speaker localization and separation using multiple microphones is addressed based on the recursive expectation-maximization (REM) procedure. A two-stage REM-based algorithm is proposed: (1) multi-speaker direction of arrival (DOA) estimation and (2) multi-speaker relative transfer function (RTF) estimation. The DOA estimation task uses only the time frequency (TF) bins dominated by a single speaker while the entire frequency range is not required to accomplish this task. In contrast, the RTF estimation task requires the entire frequency range in order to estimate the RTF for each frequency bin. Accordingly, a different statistical model is used for the two tasks. The first REM model is applied under the assumption that the speech signal is sparse in the TF domain, and utilizes a mixture of Gaussians (MoG) model to identify the TF bins associated with a single dominant speaker. The corresponding DOAs are estimated using these bins. The second REM model is applied under the assumption that the speakers are concurrently active in all TF bins and consequently applies a multichannel Wiener filter (MCWF) to separate the speakers. As a result of the assumption of the concurrent speakers, a more precise TF map of the speakers’ activity is obtained. The RTFs are estimated using the outputs of the MCWF-beamformer (BF), which are constructed using the DOAs obtained in the previous stage. Next, using the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV)-BF that utilizes the estimated RTFs, the speech signals are separated. The algorithm is evaluated using real-life scenarios of two speakers. Evaluation of the mean absolute error (MAE) of the estimated DOAs and the separation capabilities, demonstrates significant improvement w.r.t. a baseline DOA estimation and speaker separation algorithm.