Fourier‐Bessel transform and time–frequency‐based approach for detecting manoeuvring air target in sea‐clutter

Modern radars use complex waveforms to obtain high detection performance and low probabilities of interception and identification. Signals intercepted from multiple radars overlap considerably in both the time and frequency domains and are difficult to separate with primary time parameters. Time–frequency analysis (TFA), as a key signal-processing tool, can provide better insight into the signal than conventional methods. In particular, among the various types of TFA, parameterized time-frequency analysis (PTFA) has shown great potential to investigate the time–frequency features of such non-stationary signals. In this paper, we propose a procedure for PTFA to separate overlapped radar signals; it includes five steps: initiation, parameterized time-frequency analysis, demodulating the signal of interest, adaptive filtering and recovering the signal. The effectiveness of the method was verified with simulated data and an intercepted radar signal received in a microwave laboratory. The results show that the proposed method has good performance and has potential in electronic reconnaissance applications, such as electronic intelligence, electronic warfare support measures, and radar warning.

Adaptive short-time Fourier transform and synchrosqueezing transform for non-stationary signal separation

The vibration generated by industrial machines always contains nonlinear and non-stationary signals. It is expected that a desired time-frequency analysis method should have good computation efficiency, and have good resolution in both time domain and frequency domain. In this paper, the adaptive Gaussian chirplet distribution for an integrated time-frequency signature extraction of the machine vibration is presented. The adaptive Gaussian chirplet spectrogram is non-negative, has a high time-frequency resolution, and is free of cross term interference, so it offers the advantage of good localization of the vibration signal energy in the time-frequency domain. Experimental results show that the proposed method is very effective.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for the detection of road accidents by analyzing audio streams for road surveillance application. In the last decade, due to the increase in a number of people and transportation vehicles, traffic accidents have become one of a major public issue worldwide. The vast number of injuries and death due to road traffic accident reveals the story of a global crisis of road safety. A total of 52,160 road traffic accidents (RTA), 1130 injuries and 85 fatalities were registered during the year 2000, in the state of Qatar. An increase in the number of transportation vehicles around cities has risen the need for more security and safety in public environments. The most obvious reason for a person's death during accidents is the absence or prolong response time of the first aid facility, which is due to the delay in the information of the accident being reached to the police, hospital or ambulance team. In the last couple of years, several surveillance systems have been proposed based on image and video processing for automatically detecting road accidents and car crashes to ensure a quick response by emergency teams. However, in some situations such as adverse weather conditions or cluttered environments, the visual information is not sufficient enough, whereas analyzing the audio tracks can significantly improve the overall reliability of surveillance systems. In this paper we propose a novel method that automatically identifies hazardous situations such as tire skidding and car crashes in presence of background noises, by analyzing the audio streams. Previous studies show that methods for the detection, estimation, and classification of nonstationary signals can be enhanced by utilizing the time-frequency (TF) characteristics of such signals. The TF-based techniques have been proved to outperform classical techniques based on either time or frequency domains, in analyzing real-life nonstationary signals. Time-frequency distributions (TFDs) give additional information about signals that cannot be extracted from either the time domain or frequency domain representations, i.e. the instantaneous frequency of the components of a signal. In order to utilize this extra information provided by TF domain representation, the proposed approach extracts TF image features from quadratic time-frequency distributions (QTFDs), for the detection of audio anomalies. The extended modified-B distribution (EMBD) is utilized to transform a 1-dimensional audio signal into 2-dimensional TF representation which is interpreted as an image. The image descriptors based features are then extracted from the TF representation to classify visually the audio signals into background or abnormal activity patterns in the TF domain. The proposed features are based on Haralick's texture features extracted from the TF representation of audio signals considered and processed as a textured image. These features are used to characterize and hence classify audio signals into M classes. This research study demonstrates that a TF image pattern recognition approach offers significant advantages over standard signal classification methods that utilize either t-domain only or f-domain only features. The proposed method has been experimentally validated on a large open source database of sounds, including several kinds of background noise. The events to be recognized are superimposed on different background sounds of roads and traffic jam. The obtained results are compared with a recent study, utilizing the same large and complex data set of audio signals, and the same experimental setup. The overall classification results confirm the superior performance of the proposed approach with accuracy improvement up to 6%.

An empirical signal separation algorithm for multicomponent signals based on linear time-frequency analysis

Self-paced learning for instantaneous frequencies estimation in heavy noise environments

To effectively separate underdetermined convolutive mixtures, an accurate and robust underdetermined convolutive blind source separation (BSS) method in the time–frequency domain based on single source points (SSPs) is proposed. Firstly, convolutive BSS in the time domain is transformed into instantaneous BSS in the time–frequency domain by short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Secondly, hierarchical clustering is carried out after the extraction and identification of SSPs by using sparse coding technology. Thirdly, source separation in the frequency domain is obtained based on Lp norm minimization and then alignments are permutated and scales are compensated. Finally, inverse STFT is adopted to reconstruct the separated signals in the time domain. Furthermore, numerical case studies and experimental case studies on a cylindrical test bed are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Generally, this paper provides an accurate and robust underdetermined convolutive BSS technique for mixing matrix estimation, source identification and contribution evaluation, which can provide significant evidence for vibration and noise monitoring and control.

We examine the problem of blind separation of nonstationary sources in the underdetermined case, where there are more sources than sensors. Since time-frequency (TF) signal processing provides effective tools for dealing with nonstationary signals, we propose a new separation method that is based on time-frequency distributions (TFDs). The underlying assumption is that the original sources are disjoint in the time-frequency (TF) domain. The successful method recovers the sources by performing the following four main procedures. First, the spatial time-frequency distribution (STFD) matrices are computed from the observed mixtures. Next, the auto-source TF points are separated from cross-source TF points thanks to the special structure of these mixture STFD matrices. Then, the vectors that correspond to the selected auto-source points are clustered into different classes according to the spatial directions which differ among different sources; each class, now containing the auto-source points of only one source, gives an estimation of the TFD of this source. Finally, the source waveforms are recovered from their TFD estimates using TF synthesis. Simulated experiments indicate the success of the proposed algorithm in different scenarios. We also contribute with two other modified versions of the algorithm to better deal with auto-source point selection.

Conventional time-frequency Transformers primarily focus on the global features of signals in the time-frequency domain while neglecting the local features in both the time domain and frequency domain. This limitation hinders the ability of the model to effectively capture the shared features among time, frequency, and time-frequency representations. To address this issue, a Multi-Branch Joint Time-Frequency Transformer (MBJTF-Transformer) is proposed for domain generalization (DG) fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. Specifically, a time-branch Transformer is designed to extract temporal features, while a frequency-branch Transformer captures frequency-domain information. In addition, a time-frequency Transformer is employed to learn the shared representations across time, frequency, and time-frequency domains. Finally, a multi-decision fusion strategy of MBJTF-Transformer is adopted to enhance the generalization capability of the model. Experimental results on both the SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm, SCARA) dataset and the PU (Paderborn University) bearing dataset demonstrate that the proposed MBJTF-Transformer achieves superior DG performance compared to multiple state-of-the-art sequential models.

Blind signal separation method is the method that the source signals are obtained by separating only the mixed signals. Generally, separation precision is lower when the basic method of blind signal separation is used for the sound signals. It is the cause that the power of the sound signals is concentrated in the low-frequency band. For the problem, we already considered that the method of the blind signal separation using QMF. Specifically, the mixed signals are divided into two frequency bands, and we perform suitable separation for each two bands. As the result, the conventional method has higher separation precision than the basic method. However, in the low-frequency band, power spectrum is not constant for frequency. Therefore, it is expected that the separation precision is higher than the conventional method by performing the suitable separation for each of signals based on the division to several narrow frequency bands on the low-frequency band. Then, in this paper, we propose the method that has higher separation precision and we evaluate the proposed method by computer simulation.

Time–frequency analysis based on Vold-Kalman filter and higher order energy separation for fault diagnosis of wind turbine planetary gearbox under nonstationary conditions

The computer mouse is an important human-computer interaction device. But patients with physical finger disability are unable to operate this device. Surface EMG (sEMG) can be monitored by electrodes on the skin surface and is a reflection of the neuromuscular activities. Therefore, we can control limbs auxiliary equipment by utilizing sEMG classification in order to help the physically disabled patients to operate the mouse. To develop a new a method to extract sEMG generated by finger motion and apply novel features to classify sEMG. A window-based data acquisition method was presented to extract signal samples from sEMG electordes. Afterwards, a two-dimensional matrix image based feature extraction method, which differs from the classical methods based on time domain or frequency domain, was employed to transform signal samples to feature maps used for classification. In the experiments, sEMG data samples produced by the index and middle fingers at the click of a mouse button were separately acquired. Then, characteristics of the samples were analyzed to generate a feature map for each sample. Finally, the machine learning classification algorithms (SVM, KNN, RBF-NN) were employed to classify these feature maps on a GPU. The study demonstrated that all classifiers can identify and classify sEMG samples effectively. In particular, the accuracy of the SVM classifier reached up to 100%. The signal separation method is a convenient, efficient and quick method, which can effectively extract the sEMG samples produced by fingers. In addition, unlike the classical methods, the new method enables to extract features by enlarging sample signals' energy appropriately. The classical machine learning classifiers all performed well by using these features.

Time-varying filtering for nonstationary signal analysis of rotating machinery: Principle and applications

Decomposition of multichannel multicomponent nonstationary signals by combining the eigenvectors of autocorrelation matrix using genetic algorithm

Adapted linear decimation procedures for TFR analysis of non-stationary vibration signals of vehicle suspensions