Generally speaking, a communication channel refers to a medium through which an information-bearing signal is corrupted by noise and distortion. A communication channel may result from data storage over time or data transmission through space. A primary task for communication engineers is to mathematically characterize the channel to facilitate the design of appropriate detection and coding systems. In this dissertation, two different channel modeling challenges for ultra-high density magnetic storage are investigated: two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) and bit-patterned magnetic recording (BPMR). In the case of TDMR, we characterize the error mechanisms during the write/read process of data on a TDMR medium by a finite-state machine, and then design a state-based detector that provides soft decisions for use by an outer decoder. In the case of BPMR, we employ an insertion/deletion (I/D) model. We propose a LDPC-CRC product coding scheme that enables the error detection without the involvement of Marker codes specifically designed for an I/D channel. We also propose a generalized Gilbert-Elliott (GE) channel to approximate the I/D channel in the sense of an equivalent I/D event rate. A lower bound of the channel capacity for the BPMR channel is derived, which supports our claim that commonly used error-correction codes are effective on the I/D channel under the assumption that I/D events are limited to a finite length. Another channel model we investigated is perpendicular magnetic recording model. Advanced signal processing for the pattern-dependent-noise-predictive channel detectors is our focus. Specifically, we propose an adaptive scheme for a hardware design that reduces the complexity of the detector and the truncation/saturation error caused by a fix-point representation of values in the detector. Lastly, we designed a sequence detector for compressively sampled Bluetooth signals, thus allowing data recovery via sub-Nyquist sampling. This detector skips the conventional step of reconstructing the original signal from compressive samples prior to detection. We also propose an adaptive design of the sampling matrix, which almost achieves Nyquist sampling performance with a relatively high compression ratio. Additionally, this adaptive scheme can automatically choose an appropriate compression ratio as a function of E(b)/N₀ without explicit knowledge of it.

Παρουσιάζεται μία εναλλακτική μέθοδος έμμεσου προσδιορισμού της θλιπτικής (μονοαξονικής) αντοχής των πετρωμάτων με βάση μία τροποποιημένη μορφή της δοκιμής επιφανειακής διείσδυσης. Χρησιμοποιήθηκαν δύο έμβολα με σφαιρικά άκρα με ακτίνες 1,585mm και 5mm. Τα αποτελέσματα συγκρίνονται με αυτά της διαδεδομένης μεθόδου σημειακής φόρτισης. Αποδεικνύεται πειραματικά ότι για τα τρία ασβεστολιθικά πετρώματα που μελετήθηκαν, η δοκιμή επιφανειακής διείσδυσης δίνει σημαντικά ακριβέστερα αποτελέσματα και μπορεί να εφαρμοστεί τόσο στο εργαστήριο όσο και στο πεδίο. Επιπλέον αποδείχθηκε ότι η δοκιμή προσφέρει την δυνατότητα μη καταστροφικού ελέγχου των δοκιμίων ιδιαίτερα με το άκρο με την μικρή σφαίρα. / An alternative indirect method to determine the unconfined compressive strength of rocks based on a modified Indentation (Punch) test is presented. Two indenters with spherical tips of 1.585mm and 5mm were used. The results are compared with those of the Point Load test that is commonly used in practice. It is experimentally proved that for the three calcareous rock materials tested, this method gives significantly more accurate results and can be applied to the laboratory as well as in situ. In addition it has been proved that this test offers the possibility of non destructive testing especially when the small spherical tip is used.

Seismic imaging involves the solution of an inverse-scattering problem during which the energy of (extremely) large data volumes is collapsed onto the Earth's reflectors. We show how the ideas from 'compressive sampling' can alleviate this task by exploiting the curvelet transform's 'wavefront-set detection' capability and 'invariance' property under wave propagation. First, a wavelet-vaguellete technique is reviewed, where seismic amplitudes are recovered from complete data by diagonalizing the Gramm matrix of the linearized scattering problem. Next, we show how the recovery of seismic wavefields from incomplete data can be cast into a compressive sampling problem, followed by a proposal to compress wavefield extrapolation operators via compressive sampling in the modal domain. During the latter approach, we explicitly exploit the mutual incoherence between the eigenfunctions of the Helmholtz operator and the curvelet frame elements that compress the extrapolated wavefield. This is joint work with Gilles Hennenfent, Peyman Moghaddam, Tim Lin, Chris Stolk and Deli Wang.

This work was carried out to study the effect of shot-peening on the fatigue behaviour of carbon steels. Differently heat treated medium and high carbon steel specimens were selected. Medium carbon steels, AISI 1141 and AISI 1151, were respectively air cooled and quenched-tempered. A high carbon steel, C70S6 (AISI 1070), was air cooled. The other material was a powder metal (0.5% C) steel. Each group of steels was divided into two. One was shot-peened. The other half remained in their original conditions. All were fatigue tested under fully reversed (R=-1) tension-compression loading conditions. Microhardness tests were carried out on both the grip and gage sections of selected non shot-peened and shot-peened specimens to determine the hardness profile and effect of cycling. Shot-peening was found to be deeper on one side of each specimen. Compressive residual stress profiles and surface roughness measurements were provided. Shot-peening increased the surface roughness from 0.26±0.03µm to 3.60±0.44µm. Compressive residual stresses induced by shot-peening reached a maximum of -463.9MPa at a depth of 0.1mm.The fatigue limit (N≈106 cycles) and microhardness profiles of the non shot-peened and shot-peened specimens were compared to determine the material behaviour changes after shot-peening and cycling. Also their fatigue properties were related to the manufacturing process including heat and surface treatments. Comparing the grip and gage microhardness profiles of each steel showed that neither cyclic softening nor hardening occurred in the non shot-peened condition. Cyclic softening was apparent in the shot-peened regions of all steels except powder metal (PM) steel. The amount of softening in the shot-peened region was 55.0% on the left side and 73.0% on the right in the AISI 1141 steel , 46.0% on the left side and 55.0% on the right in the C70S6AC steel and 31.0% on the right side in AISI 1151QT steel. Softening was accompanied by a decrease in the depth of surface hardness. It is suggested that although the beneficial effects of shot peening, compressive residual stresses and work hardening, were offset by surface roughness, crack initiation was more likely to occur below the surface. Surface roughness was not a significant factor in controlling the fatigue lives of AISI 1141AC and C70S6 steels, since they were essentially the same for the non shot-peened and shot-peened conditions. Shot-peening had very little effect on the push-pull fatigue limit of C70S6 steel (-2.1%), and its effect on AISI 1141AC steel was relatively small (6.0%). However, the influence of shot-peening on the AISI 1151QT and PM steels was more apparent. The fatigue limit of the PM steel increased 14.0% whereas the fatigue limit of the AISI 1151QT steel decreased 11.0% on shot peening.

Betonas – viena seniausių statybinių medžiagų pasaulyje. Netgi Egipto piramidžių perdangos yra betoninės (t.y. 3600 metų p.m.e.), dalis Didžiosios Kinijos sienos yra betoninė (300 metų p.m.e.), keletas statinių Indijoje, Romoje ir kitose vietose. Šiuo metu pagrindinės šiuolaikinės statybinės medžiagos yra betonas ir gelžbetonis. Pastaraisiais metais betono gamyba siekia apie 6 milijardus m3 ir jokios kitos statybinės medžiagos pasaulyje tokiais kiekiais nėra gaminamos. Betonas ir gelžbetonis – labai plačiai naudojama kelių, hidrotechnikos statinių, požeminių tunelių, namų ir t.t. statybai. Lietuvoje įvairiais laikotarpiais buvo statomi įvairūs HTS. Svarbesnėms jų priklauso užtvankos, kurių paskirtis užtvenkti upę, upelį ar kanalą. Daugiausia šalyje yra pastatyta žemės užtvankų su betoninėmis ir gelžbetoninėmis konstrukcijomis. Kupiškio rajone yra 14 žemių užtvankų, įtrauktų į potencialiai pavojingų hidrotechnikos statinių sąrašą (Lietuvos, 2001). Daugiausia jų pastatyta 1973 m.- 1986 m. Šiuo laikotarpiu pastatyta 10 užtvankų. Didžiausias patvankos aukštis 13 m. Dominuoja šachtinio tipo perteklinio vandens pralaidos, iš 14 tik viena slenkstinė. Hidrotechnikos statiniai naudojami sudėtingomis sąlygomis. Juos veikia atmosfera, vandens aplinka, ledas, ižas, žema temperatūra, atmosferiniai krituliai, vėjas, saulės radiacija ir kt. Daugumoje tirtų hidrotechnikos statinių vyksta paviršinė ir vidinė korozija, pastebimi plyšiai, atskirų elementų nuosėdžiai. Hidrotechnikos statinių... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / There are many hydraulic structures in Lithuania and in most of them concrete and reinforced concrete is used. Erosion in most concrete and reinforced concrete structures has been started already and it is very important to do research, investigations and determine stage of corrosion. The main task of this work is to determine the state of earth dams’ concrete and reinforced concrete structures, as well as to determinate durability and compressive strength of concrete. In Kupiškis district 5 earth dams were researched and technical conditions were determined using non-destructive and destructive methods. Achieved results. It was determined that in 52% of investigated concrete constructions concrete compressive strength was less than in those shown in technical project. By using scale o defentiveness is determited that 16 % of researched constructions are in good condition, 38 % - in middle stage and 46 % are in very bad stage.

Nors gelžbetonis yra patvari statybinė medžiaga, tačiau iš šios medžiagos pastatytose konstrukcijose labai dažnai pirma laiko atsiranda įvairių pažaidų ir jos pradeda irti. Tyrimų objektas – Virbališkių hidromazge esantys hidrotechnikos statiniai. Virbališkių hidromazgas yra netoli Kačerginės Nemuno žiedo, šalia Dievogalos upelio vagos. Šio darbo metu buvo nustatyta ir įvertinta hidrotechnikos statinių būklė vizualiai. Naudojant neardančius metodus, nustatytas gelžbetoninių konstrukcijų betono stipris gniuždant c (MPa), įvertint hidromazge esančiu atraminių sienų projektinį bei esamą patikimumą, nustatyti kaip galėjo kisti konstrukcijos patikimumas sumažinus arba padidinus armatūros skerspjūvio plotą, bei padidinus arba sumažinus atstumus tarp strypų. Atlikus vizualinius Virbališkių hidromazgo tyrimus pastebėta, kad visos hidromazge esančios konstrukcijos turi pažaidų, bei konstrukcijų neatitikimo su projektu t.y. atraminėse sienose įrengta dvigubai mažiau deformacinių siūlių negu, kad jų buvo suprojektuota (6 suprojektuotos, įrengtos 3 deformacinės siūlės), žemutiniame bjefe įrengtas šlaitų tvirtinimas buvo numatytas iš surenkamų gelžbetoninių plokščių, o įrengta iš monolitinio betono.. Atlikus betono stiprio nustatymo tyrimus neardančiaisiais metodais su Šmidto plaktuku gauta, kad konstrukcijos atitinka statybos metu galiojusias normas, taip pat projekte numatytas betono klases hidromazgo konstrukcijoms. Atlikus patikimumo skaičiavimus gauta, kad konstrukcija šiai... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Although reinforced concrete is a durable building material, but very often early defects occur in such structures and they begin to decay. The object of research – hydraulic structures in Virbališkis hydroscheme. Virbališkis hydroscheme is situated near Kačerginė Nemunas ring, near the Dievogala stream bed. The visual condition of hydraulic structures has been identified and evaluated in this work. The concrete compressive strength of reinforced concrete structures  c (MPa) was defined using non – destructive methods, the actual and design reliability of retaining walls located in the hydroscheme were estimated, the reliability of the structure after the increase or decrease of the cross-sectional area of reinforcement as well as after the decrease or increase of the distance between the rods was defined. After the visual surveys of Virbališkis hydroscheme it was found that all the constructions situated in the hydrosheme have defects and non-compliance with the construction project, i.e., only half of the expansion joints were arranged in the retaining walls (6 designed and only 3 expansion joints were arranged). Reinforcemen of the slopes arranged in the downstream dam had to be from prefabricated reinforced concrete panels however, it was equipped with a monolithic concrete. After the fulfiment of concrete strength tests using non-destructive... [to full text]

The brittleness of concrete has always been a safety and economic issue of great concern. The low tensile strength of concrete is the cause of its intrinsic brittle nature. This is critical considering the amount of concrete used for the construction of highways, buildings, and other facilities. The mechanical properties of concrete must be improved to provide upgraded construction. Crack resistant and durable concrete has always been a major goal for engineers. Many approaches have been tried to make concrete a better construction material. Fiber reinforcement is an approach which has been shown to improve the quality and durability of concrete. The focus of this research is to develop a mix design of fiber reinforced concrete and then test these materials for both compressive and tensile strength after casting into cubes. The effect of polyvinyl alcohol fibers on the mechanical properties of concrete was also studied. The impacts of moisture and the stress applied on the fibers were determined using Raman spectroscopy.

With the increasing demand of video applications in wireless networks, how to better support video transmission over wireless networks has drawn much attention to the research community. Time-varying and error-prone nature of wireless channel makes video transmission in wireless networks a challenging task to provide the users with satisfactory watching experience. For different video applications, we choose different video coding techniques accordingly. E.g., for Internet video streaming, we choose standardized H.264 video codec; for video transmission in sensor networks or multicast, we choose simple and energy-conserving video coding technique based on compressive sensing. Thus, the challenges for different video transmission applications are different. Therefore, This dissertation tackles video transmission problem in three different applications. First, for dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH), we investigate the streaming strategy. Specifically, we focus on the rate adaptation algorithm for streaming scalable video (H.264/SVC) in wireless networks. We model the rate adaptation problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), aiming to find an optimal streaming strategy in terms of user-perceived quality of experience (QoE) such as playback interruption, average playback quality and playback smoothness. We then obtain the optimal MDP solution using dynamic programming. However, the optimal solution requires the knowledge of the available bandwidth statistics and has a large number of states, which makes it difficult to obtain the optimal solution in real time. Therefore, we further propose an online algorithm which integrates the learning and planning process. The proposed online algorithm collects bandwidth statistics and makes streaming decisions in real time. A reward parameter has been defined in our proposed streaming strategy, which can be adjusted to make a good trade-off between the average playback quality and playback smoothness.We also use a simple testbed to validate our proposed algorithm. Second, for video transmission in wireless sensor networks, we consider a wireless sensor node monitoring the environment and it is equipped with a compressive-sensing based, single-pixel image camera and other sensors such as temperature and humidity sensors. The wireless node needs to send the data out in a timely and energy efficient way. This transmission control problem is challenging in that we need to jointly consider perceived video quality, quality variation, power consumption and transmission delay requirements, and the wireless channel uncertainty. We address the above issues by first building a rate-distortion model for compressive sensing video. Then we formulate the deterministic and stochastic optimization problems and design the transmission control algorithm which jointly performs rate control, scheduling and power control. Third, we propose a low-complex, scalable video coding architecture based on compressive sensing (SVCCS) for wireless unicast and multicast transmissions. SVCCS achieves good scalability, error resilience and coding efficiency. SVCCS encoded bitstream is divided into base and enhancement layers. The layered structure provides quality and temporal scalability. While in the enhancement layer, the CS measurements provide fine granular quality scalability. We also investigate the rate allocation problem for multicasting SVCCS encoded bitstream to a group of receivers with heterogeneous channel conditions. Specifically, we study how to allocate rate between the base and enhancement layer to improve the overall perceived video quality for all the receivers. / Graduate / 0984 / siyxiang@ece.uvic.ca

Reconstruction of continuous signals from a number of their discrete samples is central to digital signal processing. Digital devices can only process discrete data and thus processing the continuous signals requires discretization. After discretization, possibility of unique reconstruction of the source signals from their samples is crucial. The classical sampling theory provides bounds on the sampling rate for unique source reconstruction, known as the Nyquist sampling rate. Recently a new sampling scheme, Compressive Sensing (CS), has been formulated for sparse signals. CS is an active area of research in signal processing. It has revolutionized the classical sampling theorems and has provided a new scheme to sample and reconstruct sparse signals uniquely, below Nyquist sampling rates. A signal is called (approximately) sparse when a relatively large number of its elements are (approximately) equal to zero. For the class of sparse signals, sparsity can be viewed as prior information about the source signal. CS has found numerous applications and has improved some image acquisition devices. Interesting instances of CS can happen, when apart from sparsity, side information is available about the source signals. The side information can be about the source structure, distribution, etc. Such cases can be viewed as extensions of the classical CS. In such cases we are interested in incorporating the side information to either improve the quality of the source reconstruction or decrease the number of the required samples for accurate reconstruction. A general CS problem can be transformed to an equivalent optimization problem. In this thesis, a special case of CS with side information about the feasible region of the equivalent optimization problem is studied. It is shown that in such cases uniqueness and stability of the equivalent optimization problem still holds. Then, an efficient reconstruction method is proposed. To demonstrate the practical value of the proposed scheme, the algorithm is applied on two real world applications: image deblurring in optical imaging and surface reconstruction in the gradient field. Experimental results are provided to further investigate and confirm the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed scheme.

A Cyber-Physical System integrates computations and dynamics of physical processes. It is an engineering discipline focused on technology with a strong foundation in mathematical abstractions. It shares many of these abstractions with engineering and computer science, but still requires adaptation to suit the dynamics of the physical world. In such a dynamic system, mobility management is one of the key issues against developing a new service. For example, in the study of a new mobile network, it is necessary to simulate and evaluate a protocol before deployment in the system. Mobility models characterize mobile agent movement patterns. On the other hand, they describe the conditions of the mobile services. The focus of this thesis is on mobility modeling in cyber-physical systems. A macroscopic model that captures the mobility of individuals (people and vehicles) can facilitate an unlimited number of applications. One fundamental and obvious example is traffic profiling. Mobility in most systems is a dynamic process and small non-linearities can lead to substantial errors in the model. Extensive research activities on statistical inference and filtering methods for data modeling in cyber-physical systems exist. In this thesis, several methods are employed for multimodal data fusion, localization and traffic modeling. A novel energy-aware sparse signal processing method is presented to process massive sensory data. At baseline, this research examines the application of statistical filters for mobility modeling and assessing the difficulties faced in fusing massive multi-modal sensory data. A statistical framework is developed to apply proposed methods on available measurements in cyber-physical systems. The proposed methods have employed various statistical filtering schemes (i.e., compressive sensing, particle filtering and kernel-based optimization) and applied them to multimodal data sets, acquired from intelligent transportation systems, wireless local area networks, cellular networks and air quality monitoring systems. Experimental results show the capability of these proposed methods in processing multimodal sensory data. It provides a macroscopic mobility model of mobile agents in an energy efficient way using inconsistent measurements.