A new algorithm for detection of longitudinal crack-like indications in radiographic images is developed in this work. Conventional local detection techniques give unsatisfactory results for this task due to the low signal to noise ratio (SNR ~ 1) of crack-like indications in radiographic images. The usage of global features of crack-like indications provides the necessary noise resistance, but this is connected with prohibitive computational complexities of detection and difficulties in a formal description of the indication shape. Conventionally, the excessive computational complexity of the solution is reduced by usage of heuristics. The heuristics to be used, are selected on a trial and error basis, are problem dependent and do not guarantee the optimal solution. Not following this way is a distinctive feature of the algorithm developed here. Instead, a global characteristic of crack-like indication (the estimation function) is used, whose maximum in the space of all possible positions, lengths and shapes can be found exactly, i.e. without any heuristics. The proposed estimation function is defined as a sum of a posteriori information gains about hypothesis of indication presence in each point along the whole hypothetical indication. The gain in the information about hypothesis of indication presence results from the analysis of the underlying image in the local area. Such an estimation function is theoretically justified and exhibits a desirable behaviour on changing signals. The developed algorithm is implemented in the C++ programming language and testet on synthetic as well as on real images. It delivers good results (high correct detection rate by given false alarm rate) which are comparable to the performance of trained human inspectors. / In dieser Arbeit wurde ein neuer Algorithmus zur Detektion rissartiger Anzeigen in der digitalen Radiographie entwickelt. Klassische lokale Detektionsmethoden versagen wegen des geringen Signal-Rausch-Verhältnisses (von ca. 1) der Rissanzeigen in den Radiographien. Die notwendige Resistenz gegen Rauschen wird durch die Benutzung von globalen Merkmalen dieser Anzeigen erzielt. Das ist aber mit einem undurchführbaren Rechenaufwand sowie Problemen bei der formalen Beschreibung der Rissform verbunden. Üblicherweise wird ein übermäßiger Rechenaufwand bei der Lösung vergleichbarer Probleme durch Anwendung von Heuristisken reduziert. Dazu benuzte Heuristiken werden mit der Versuchs-und-Irrtums-Methode ermittelt, sind stark problemangepasst und können die optimale Lösung nicht garantieren. Das Besondere dieser Arbeit ist anderer Lösungsansatz, der jegliche Heuristik bei der Suche nach Rissanzeigen vermeidet. Ein globales wahrscheinlichkeitstheoretisches Merkmal, hier Schätzfunktion genannt, wird konstruiert, dessen Maximum unter allen möglichen Formen, Längen und Positionen der Rissanzeige exakt (d.h. ohne Einsatz jeglicher Heuristik) gefunden werden kann. Diese Schätzfunktion wird als die Summe des a posteriori Informationsgewinns bezüglich des Vorhandenseins eines Risses im jeden Punkt entlang der hypothetischen Rissanzeige definiert. Der Informationsgewinn entsteht durch die Überprüfung der Hypothese der Rissanwesenheit anhand der vorhandenen Bildinformation. Eine so definierte Schätzfunktion ist theoretisch gerechtfertigt und besitzt die gewünschten Eigenschaften bei wechselnder Anzeigenintensität. Der Algorithmus wurde in der Programmiersprache C++ implementiert. Seine Detektionseigenschaften wurden sowohl mit simulierten als auch mit realen Bildern untersucht. Der Algorithmus liefert gute Ergenbise (hohe Detektionsrate bei einer vorgegebenen Fehlalarmrate), die jeweils vergleichbar mit den Ergebnissen trainierter menschlicher Auswerter sind.

This thesis provides theoretical and practical solutions to two problems raised by digital photography of moving scenes, and infrared photography. Until recently photographing moving objects could only be done using short exposure times. Yet, two recent groundbreaking works have proposed two new designs of camera allowing arbitrary exposure times. The flutter shutter of Agrawal et al. creates an invertible motion blur by using a clever shutter technique to interrupt the photon flux during the exposure time according to a well chosen binary sequence. The motion-invariant photography of Levin et al. gets the same result by accelerating the camera at a constant rate. Both methods follow computational photography as a new paradigm. The conception of cameras is rethought to include sophisticated digital processing. This thesis proposes a method for evaluating the image quality of these new cameras. The leitmotiv of the analysis is the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of the image after deconvolution. It gives the efficiency of these new camera design in terms of image quality. The theory provides explicit formulas for the SNR. It raises two paradoxes of these cameras, and resolves them. It provides the underlying motion model of each flutter shutter, including patented ones. A shorter second part addresses the the main quality problem in infrared video imaging, the non-uniformity. This perturbation is a time-dependent noise caused by the infrared sensor, structured in columns. The conclusion of this work is that it is not only possible but also efficient and robust to perform the correction on a single image. This permits to ensure the absence of ''ghost artifacts'', a classic of the literature on the subject, coming from inadequate processing relative to the acquisition model.

Interference and jamming severely disrupt our ability to communicate by decreasing the effective signal-to-noise ratio and by making parameter estimation difficult at the receiver. The objective of this research work is to design robust wireless systems and algorithms to suppress the adverse effects of non-intentional co-channel interference (CCI) or intentional jamming. In particular, we develop chip-combining schemes with timing, channel, and noise-power estimation techniques, all of which mitigate CCI or jamming. We also exploit the spatial diversity and iterative receiver techniques for this purpose. Most of the existing timing estimation algorithms are robust against either large frequency offsets or CCI, but not against both at the same time. Hence, we develop a new frame boundary estimation method that is robust in the presence of severe co-channel interference and large carrier-frequency offsets. To solve the high peak-to-average-power ratio problem of a multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system and enhance its robustness against fading and jamming, we propose a constant-envelope MC-CDMA system employing cyclic delay diversity (CDD) as transmit diversity. We analyze the diversity order, coding gain, and bit-error rate upper bound. We also propose a blind, accurate, and computationally efficient signal-to-noise ratio estimator for the proposed system. We propose a configurable robust anti-jam receiver that estimates the frequency- or time-domain jammer state information (JSI) and uses it for chip combining in the corresponding domain. A soft-JSI-based chip-combining technique is proposed that outperforms conventional hard-JSI-based chip combining. We also derive a chip combiner that provides sufficient statistics to the decoder. Channel estimation is necessary for coherent signal detection and JSI estimation. Conversely, knowledge of the jamming signal power and JSI of different subcarriers can improve the accuracy of the channel estimates. Hence, we propose joint iterative estimation of the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel coefficients, jamming power, and JSI for a coded MC-CDMA MIMO system operating under jamming and a time-varying frequency-selective fading channel. Finally, we reduce the computational complexity of the JSI-based anti-jam receivers by introducing an expectation-maximization-based joint channel and noise-covariance estimator that does not need either the subcarrier JSI or the individual powers of the AWGN and jamming signal.

This project presents the description, design and the implementation of a 4-channel microphone array that is an adaptive sub-band generalized side lobe canceller (GSC) beam former uses for video conferencing, hands-free telephony etc, in a noisy environment for speech enhancement as well as noise suppression. The side lobe canceller evaluated with both Least Mean Square (LMS) and Normalized Least Mean Square (NLMS) adaptation. A testing structure is presented; which involves a linear 4-microphone array connected to collect the data. Tests were done using one target signal source and one noise source. In each microphone’s, data were collected via fractional time delay filtering then it is divided into sub-bands and applied GSC to each of the subsequent sub-bands. The overall Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) improvement is determined from the main signal and noise input and output powers, with signal-only and noise-only as the input to the GSC. The NLMS algorithm significantly improves the speech quality with noise suppression levels up to 13 dB while LMS algorithm is giving up to 10 dB. All of the processing for this thesis is implemented on a computer using MATLAB and validated by considering different SNR measure under various types of blocking matrix, different step sizes, different noise locations and variable SNR with noise. / Mamun Ahmed E-mail: mamuncse99cuet@yahoo.com

Frequency-domain scheduling, multiple antenna techniques, and rate adaptation enable next generation orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular systems such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) to achieve significantly higher downlink spectral efficiencies. However, this comes at the expense of increased feedback overhead on the uplink. LTE uses a pragmatic combination of several techniques to reduce the channel state feedback required by a frequency-domain scheduler. In subband-level feedback scheme specified in LTE, the user reduces feedback by only reporting the channel quality indicator (CQI) computed over groups of resource blocks called subbands. LTE also specifies an alternate user selected subband feedback scheme, in which the feedback overhead is reduced even further by making each user feed back the indices of the best M subbands and only one CQI value averaged over all the M subbands. The coarse frequency granularity of the feedback in the above schemes leads to an occasional incorrect determination of rate by the scheduler for some resource blocks. The overall throughput of LTE depends on the method used to generate the CQI and the statistics of the channel, which depends on the multiple antenna technique used. In this thesis, we develop closed-form expressions for the throughput achieved by the user selected and subband-level CQI feedback schemes of LTE. The comprehensive analysis quantifies the joint effects of four critical components on the overall system throughput, namely, scheduler, multiple antenna mode, CQI feedback scheme, and CQI generation method. The performance of a wide range of schedulers, namely, round robin, greedy, and proportional fair schedulers and several multiple antenna diversity modes such as receive antenna diversity and open-and closed-loop transmit diversity is analyzed. The analysis clearly brings out the dependence of the overall system throughput on important parameters such as number of resource blocks per subband and the rate adaptation thresholds. The effect of the coarse subband-level frequency granularity of feedback is explicitly captured. The analysis provides an independent theoretical reference and a quick system parameter optimization tool to an LTE system designer. It also helps us theoretically understand the behavior of OFDMA feedback reduction techniques when operated under practical system constraints. Another contribution of this thesis is a new statistical model for the effective exponential SNR mapping (EESM), which is a highly non-linear mapping that is widely used in the design, analysis, and simulation of OFDMA systems. The statistical model is shown to be both accurate and analytically tractable, and plays a crucial role in facilitating the analysis of the throughput of LTE when EESM is used to generate the CQI.

This master thesis solves the problem of estimating the quality of ECG signals. The main objective of the work is to implement a self-assessment of the quality assessment method based on the studied methods for estimating the quality of the ECG signal. The theoretical part of the thesis contains mainly the description of the electrical activity of the heart, cardiac anatomy, and physiology, electrocardiography, various types of ECG signal interference and methods describing the estimation of ECG signal quality. The practical part deals with the application of individual methods for estimating the quality of ECG signals. The SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) calculation is used to continuously estimate the quality of the ECG. Signal quality can also be judged based on statistical functions, adaptive filtering, or by analyzing independent components. The proposed method is based on the calculation of the correlation coefficient between the adaptive template and the disturbed signal. The robustness of the method was verified on artificially created ECG signals with different noise levels and then on real signals from the MIT-BIH database.

This semestral thesis deals with methods for continuous estimation of the quality of the ECG signal. The theoretical part includes the functional anatomy of the heart, the basics of electrocardiography, the types of noise that can be found in the ECG records, and a description of several methods for the continuous estimation of the ECG signal quality. Next here are some approaches to segmenting ECG signals based on their quality. The practical part deals with the implementation of two methods. The first method is the SNR estimation method based on the Wiener filter. The second method is the method of segmentation of ECG signals based on their quality. Both methods were tested on artificial and real signals.

This diploma thesis deals with the topic of the ECG quality evaluation. The theoretical part of the thesis contains an overview of the methods, which were studied and an explanation of the basic principles connected with the quality evaluation of the ECG signals. The practical part deals with the implementation of three selected methods, one of which is the continuous evaluation of signal quality by means of SNR (signal to noise ratio) calculation. The results of these methods are further discussed and compared.

This diploma thesis deals with pause identification with degraded speech signal. The speech characteristics and the conception of speech signal processing are described here. The work aim was to create the reliable recognizing method to establish speech and non-speech segments of speech signal with and without degraded speech signal. The five empty pause detectors were realized in computing environment MATLAB. There was the energetic detector in time domain, two-step detector in spectral domain, one-step integral detector, two-step integral detector and differential detector in cepstrum. The spectral detector makes use of energetic characteristics of speech signal in first step and statistic analysis in second step. Cepstral detectors make use of integral or differential algorithms. The detectors robustness was tested for different types of speech degradation and different values of Signal to Noise Ratio. The test of influence different speech degradation was conducted to compare non-speech detection for detectors by ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) Curves.

The thesis deals with the biological data averaging applied to a periodical and repetitive signal, specifically to an ECG signals. There were used signals from MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database and ÚBMI database. Averaging was realized with constant, floating and exponential Windows, where was used the method of addition of the filtered residue. This method is intended to capture the slow variations from the input to the output signal. The outcomes of these methods can be used as a basis for further work, or function as an example of principled methods. Methods and its outcomes were created in Matlab.