<p> This thesis deals with the problem of digital communication over noisy dispersive channels. The dispersion causes the overlapping of successive received pulses thus creating intersymbol interference which severely limits the performance of conventional receivers designed to combat only additive interference or noise.</p> <p> In this thesis Bayes estimation theory has been applied to obtain a new, optimum, unrealizable receiver structure for the improved reception of noisy, dispersed, pulse amplitude-modulated (PAM) signals. By making certain approximations, a realization of this structure, known as the estimate feedback receiver or equalizer, is obtained. It consists of the combination of a matched filter and a nonlinear, recursive equalizer having, in the case of binary signals, a hyperbolic tangent nonlinearity in the feedback path. The well known decision feedback equalizer is shown to be a small noise limiting case of the estimate feedback equalizer. A saturating limiter is also considered as an approximation to the hyperbolic tangent nonlinearity.</p> <p> A new adaptive algorithm for the iterative adjustment of the estimate feedback equalizer is derived. It incorporates an extrapolation process which has the purposes of accelerating convergence of the equalizer's parameters to their optimum values and of maintaining the equalizer's frame of reference. It is constrained so that the equalizers parameters always move toward their optimum values.</p> <p> Computer simulations are used to demonstrate the properties of the adaptive estimate feedback equalizer and to compare them to those of presently known equalizers. When the estimate feedback equalizer is used, without a matched filter preceding it, to equalize phase distorted channels, its performance is seen to be superior to that of existing equalizers. The performance of an equalizer using a saturating limiter in place of the optimum hyperbolic tangent nonlinearity is seen to be almost as good as that of the estimate feedback equalizer.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p> In the past, analog circuits, discrete digital logic circuits or minicomputers have been used to implement the signal processing section of a sonar systems. More recently, microprocessor based logic circuit designs have produced a new breed of system design approach which gives designers the flexibility that has never been available through the use of analog or discrete logic circuits; however, due to the inherent slow speed of the metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) logic circuits, incorporating microprocessors in the implementation of a sonar signal processor is not feasible. With the advent of bipolar Schottky large scale integrated circuit technology, the speed performance of the microprocessors have been improved considerably, and signal processor designs employing microprocessors are now feasible. </p> <p> The main objective of this work is to design, implement, and test a real-time digital sonar signal processor for processing pulsed CW signals. With design based on the use of the bit slice microprocessor, a signal processor has been constructed that has an 8 bit input, a 16 bit output. The processor is capable of detecting 16 different Doppler shifts. Laboratory generated signals are used in the testing and the experimental results show good agreement with the theory. A possible means of expanding the existing single channel signal processor into a multichannel processor has also been outlined. </p> / Thesis / Master of Engineering (MEngr)

In this thesis, two separate problems are examines. First, sinusoidal signals are quite prevalent in practical applications. For example, any machine driven by a rotary shaft will exhibit periodic behaviour. For this reason, the estimation of sinusoidal parameters is studied extensively in the literature. Often in practical applications, there are unmodeled disturbances to the system, and the incoming measurements are noisy. Thus, estimation of the parameters of a sinusoidal signal in real-time for these conditions is of interest, calling for the use of a filter-based approach such as the Extended Kalman Filter. Considering the sinusoidal signal in its complex form, a novel approach is proposed resulting in a complex-valued filter. The resulting complex Extended Kalman Filter’s performance is evaluated in various test environments and is compared to standard approaches to the estimation problem using a Discrete Fourier Transform and standard Extended Kalman Filter. Results show that the complex Extended Kalman Filter outperforms the standard approaches in some cases in both accuracy and convergence rate. Second, research on hybrid systems has seen a large growth in interest in recent years. This is largely due to the increase of natural systems where discrete mode dynamics interact with continuous state dynamics. Switched systems are a subclass of hybrid systems that restrict their definition to continuous dynamic systems that interact with dis- crete switching events. Controller synthesis for such systems is no trivial task. Given the current trend in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning approaches, Dynamic Programming is explored as a means to approximate optimal control policies for switched systems. Discussions of discretization of the system’s state space are presented, followed by a high-level overview of an algorithm that leverages Dynamic Programming to find the approximated optimal control policies. Finally, the algorithm is applied to several examples to demonstrate its effectiveness. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Recent work has found that a frequency domain and time domain analysis of the heart rate variability signals can provide significant insights into function of the heart in healthy subjects and in patients with heart disease. Patients with congestive heart failure are an important clinical health issue and it is hoped that this work will contribute towards gaining knowledge of this debilitating pathological condition. Our laboratory has recently acquired more than three thousand 24-hour ECG tapes recorded during called Study of Left Ventricular Dysfunction (SOLVD). The SOL VD trial was conducted between 1987-1990 to test the efficacy of a medication called, Enalapril, to treat patients with heart failure. There were an equal number of patients with (group A) and without overt heart failure (group B). The work reported in this thesis describes the development of a hardware and software framework used to analyze the ECG signals recorded on these tapes. Primary objective of this work was to develop and test a system which would assist in analyzing the above tapes so as to examine if there are differences between two groups using the HRV parameters from both frequency and time domain. The research was conducted in three steps: Hardware design, software and algorithm development and finally the validation phase of the design, to test the usefulness of the overall system. The tapes were replayed on a tape recorder and the ECG was digitized at a rate corresponding to 500 samples/second. Labview software was invoked for this task. Secondly a set of algorithms were developed to perform QRS-detection and QT-interval identification. The detection algorithms involved placing critical ECG fiducials onto the ECG waveform through the use of a trained model. The model construction used patient specific pre-annotated data coupled with statistical and genetic algorithm techniques. The beat-to-beat HRV signal was thus generated using the annotation data from the ECG. Frequency domain indices were obtained using power spectral computation algorithms while time domain statistical indices were computed using standard methods. QT-interval algorithms were tested using a set of manually and automatically tagged set of beats from a sample of subjects. For the third part of this research, i.e. validation phase, we set up a test pool of 200 tapes each from patients with overt heart failure and with no heart failure, recorded at the baseline before the subjects entered the study. This phase of the study was conducted with the help of a statistician in a blinded fashion. Our results suggest that there is significant difference between frequency domain and time domain parameters computed from the HRV signals recorded from subjects belonging to group A and group B. The group A patients had a lot of ectopic beats and were challenging to analyze. These results provide a confirmation of our analytical procedures using real clinical data. The QT-analysis of the ECG signals suggest that automatic analysis of this interval is feasible using algorithms developed in this study. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Turbulence research in the laboratory has confirmed the existence of quasi-coherent structures amidst the chaos of a turbulent boundary layer. It has been observed that a quasi-periodic phenomena called “bursting” accounts for a major contribution to the turbulent Reynolds stress and the production of turbulent kinetic energy. Bursting is the term used for a sequence of events, where a low-speed streak of fluid from the near wall region lifts away from the wall, slowly at first, and then rapidly moves away from the wall as it convects downstream where it becomes unstable and breaks up violently upon interaction with the outer flow. This ejection of low speed fluid into the mean flow is responsible for locally high values of turbulent kinetic energy. Although a great deal is known about these structures in laboratory flows, little has been done to investigate if such structures are universal in turbulent flows, i.e., their existence in large Reynolds number flows such as the turbulent air flow over the ocean. It would seem, intuitively, that such structures, if present in the marine atmospheric boundary layer, would play a major role in the transfer of momentum, mass and heat across the air-sea interface. It is speculated that these motions may also be associated with large scale organized motions in wall bounded turbulent shear flows. The effort aimed at elucidating the physics underlying such structures would be invaluable in contributing to our understanding of the air-sea flux mechanism. In this dissertation, standard ejection detection schemes like the quadrant, the VITA and the modified u-level techniques have been applied to turbulent wind data measured over the ocean to confirm the existence of burst like structures. The proportions of contributions to the Reynolds stress from the four quadrants of the u’w’ plane are in close agreement with the corresponding contributions for a laboratory flow. Ejection detection followed by the grouping of ejections into bursts yielded a mean burst period of 47 s, at a height of 8.2 m above the water surface, where the mean wind velocity was 6.74 m/s. This burst period corresponds well with the peaks obtained from the autocorrelation of the streamwise velocity signal and the first moment of the stress spectrum, confirming the quasi-periodic nature of this phenomena. Furthermore, phase averages of these events show a structure which is similar to the structure of events detected in laboratory flows. The ejection periods are seen to decrease with increasing wind speed. The burst periods decrease at first with increasing wind speed and then appear to attain a constant value after a wind speed of 6-7 m/s. This has been attributed to the breakdown of the grouping algorithm at higher wind speeds. Ejection and burst frequencies exhibit no discernible dependence on the surface wave field. Ejection and sweep motions have been studied at various length scales. The original velocity signal is bandpass filtered for various frequency bands. For each band, the percentage contributions to the Reynolds stress from the quadrants of the u'w’ plane are close to the corresponding quadrant contributions of the other bands. This indicates similar turbulence structure at different scales. The velocity signals for each band have been normalized by their root mean square (RMS) value. Visualizing the signals on nondimensional time shows the signals from each band to be very similar. These results can also be interpreted as evidence for the ejection and sweep motions existing simultaneously at different scales, indicating the fractal nature of these events. Large scale motions, which appear to be associated with ejection and sweep motions, have been identified in the marine atmospheric surface layer using velocity probe measurements at multiple heights. Visualizing these velocity signals suggests that the organized features extend across the depth of the surface layer. Converting the temporal signals to spatial fluctuations suggests that these structures are inclined at an angle while convecting downstream. The inclination angle near the surface (z < 18 m) is approximately 15° and it increases with increasing height to about 45° when z = 45 m. The spatial velocity fluctuations also indicate that these organized features may be large transverse vortical arches. / Ph. D.

The hypothesis is that the recorded noise-imprints of a vehicle at an intersection can be used to identify and accurately time the driving modes of deceleration, idle, slow cruise, and acceleration. This is proven by analyzing and comparing noise-imprints of vehicles at an uncontrolled intersection marked first with a "stop" sign, and then by a "yield" and an experimental "dead slow" sign. By relating the duration of each driving mode to known relations, the overall efficiency of an intersection can be characterized. A new technique for studying various types of traffic conditions at intersections is the result. Initial noise-imprint analysis and comparison shows that a "yield" sign is to be preferred over a "stop" sign to decrease travel time, air pollution emissions, gasoline consumption, and wear-and-tear on the car. The experimental "dead slow" sign is used as a demonstration of the noise-imprint technique upon an unknown situation. The efficiency of a "dead slow" sign proved to be less than that of a "yield" sign, but still greater than that of a "stop" sign.

M.S.