Denoising of quadrature ultrasound Doppler signal from bi-directional flow based on matching pursuit

Denoising of Doppler signal is a preliminary and important step in medical ultrasound imaging. To denoise quadrature Doppler signal from bi-directional flow, we propose a novel method based on matching pursuit in this paper. The proposed method is an iterative decomposition algorithm which decomposes the original Doppler signal into a linear expansion of atoms in a time-frequency dictionary. The time-frequency dictionary is similar to Fourier transform domain and the atoms are similar to orthogonal bases in Fourier transform. In each step of the iteration, the atom which gives the largest inner product with the analyzed signal is selected from the dictionary, and the contribution of this atom is subtracted from the Doppler signal. This process is repeated on the residue until the SNR reaches the maximum. The linear expansion of the selected atoms is the denoised signal. Simulations were conducted on a simulation model with a sampling rate of 12.8 kHz. When the original SNRs are 0 dB, 2 dB, 4 dB, 6 dB, 8 dB, 10 dB, the proposed method can improve the SNR for 7.9 dB, 7.8 dB, 7.5 dB, 7.3 dB, 7.05 dB, 6.8 dB respectively, reduce the root mean square error (RMSE) of the mean frequency waveform to 0.0441 kHz, 0.0303 kHz, 0.0245 kHz, 0.0215 kHz, 0.0161 kHz, 0.0125 kHz respectively, and suppress the RMSE of the spectral width waveform to 0.1774 kHz, 0.0591 kHz, 0.0486 kHz, 0.0170 kHz, 0.0145 kHz, 0.0117 kHz respectively. Preliminary in vivo evaluation was also carried out on a healthy 33-year-old male using B-K medical A/S 3535 ultrasound scanner, and the results showed that the proposed method can effectively enhance the Doppler spectrogram.     

Treatment of MZI sensor signal with an improved wavelet neighboring coefficients

In order to gain the wavelength drift of Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) sensor system, achieve the measurement of ambient environment parameters precisely, so, need to treatment optical fiber sensing signal with noise. Firstly, introduce the method of neighborhood wavelet coefficient by analyzing the drawback of traditional wavelet de-noising methods. Secondly, an improved threshold is putted forward based on neighboring coefficients in this paper which is to overcome the shortcomings of traditional wavelet methods. Finally, the threshold function proposed by this paper deal with MZI sensing noisy signal together with improved threshold. The simulation result shows that the new method can get the better signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) and root of mean square error (MSE) simultaneously and gain the reconstruction signal of the higher correlation coefficient (CC). Compared with the soft and hard threshold method, its SNR increases by 2–4 db, and compared with NeighCoeff, its SNR improves by 1.2 db. The peak error is 1.6 pm. So, the system can meet the requirement of improving sensor detection precision.     

Coded excitation for ultrasound tissue harmonic imaging

Coded excitation can improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in ultrasound tissue harmonic imaging (THI). However, it could suffer from the increased sidelobe artifact caused by incomplete pulse compression due to the spectral overlap between the fundamental and harmonic components of ultrasound signal after nonlinear propagation in tissues. In this paper, three coded tissue harmonic imaging (CTHI) techniques based on bandpass filtering, power modulation and pulse inversion (i.e., CTHI-BF, CTHI-PM, and CTHI-PI) were evaluated by measuring the peak range sidelobe level (PRSL) with varying frequency bandwidths. From simulation and in vitro studies, the CTHI-PI outperforms the CTHI-BF and CTHI-PM methods in terms of the PRSL, e.g., −43.5 dB vs. −24.8 dB and −23.0 dB, respectively.     

激光主动探测中回波信号的小波去噪方法

在分析激光主动探测中回波信号的噪声特性和小波变换去噪原理的基础上，提出了一种基于最大信噪比准则的小渡阈值去噪方法。首先用最大信噪比准则对小波变换系数进行阈值选取，然后采用软阂值方法对小波系数进行量化处理后再重构。仿真结果表明最大信噪比准则小波去噪方法改善信噪比效果十分显著，检测下限达到-16．2dB。证明了该方法在激光主动探测系统回波信号检测中的有效性。     

Signal enhancement of a novel multi-address coding lidar backscatters based on a combined technique of demodulation and wavelet de-noising

Multi-address coding (MAC) lidar is a novel lidar system recently developed by our laboratory. By applying a new combined technique of multi-address encoding, multiplexing and decoding, range resolution is effectively improved. In data processing, a signal enhancement method involving laser signal demodulation and wavelet de-noising in the downlink is proposed to improve the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of raw signal and the capability of remote application. In this paper, the working mechanism of MAC lidar is introduced and the implementation of encoding and decoding is also illustrated. We focus on the signal enhancement method and provide the mathematical model and analysis of an algorithm on the basis of the combined method of demodulation and wavelet de-noising. The experimental results and analysis demonstrate that the signal enhancement approach improves the SNR of raw data. Overall, compared with conventional lidar system, MAC lidar achieves a higher resolution and better de-noising performance in long-range detection.     

A study of the spectral characteristics of traffic noise attenuation by vegetation belts in Delhi

Traffic noise attenuation at different 1/3-octave frequencies is measured at three vegetation sites and a control site in Delhi, the capital city of India. The study indicates that attenuation generally increases with frequency. At low frequencies, maxima (between 10 and 16 dB) in relative attenuation are observed in the frequency interval between 315 and 400 Hz. Comparatively greater relative attenuation (>20 dB) is observed in the high frequency range between 10 and 12.5 kHz. A significantly higher relative attenuation of more than 24 dB is observed characteristically at 3.15 kHz at all the vegetation sites. The results indicate that vegetation belts could be used as effective barriers for traffic noise control along the roadsides.     

Coded tissue harmonic imaging with nonlinear chirp signals

Coded tissue harmonic imaging with pulse inversion (CTHI-PI) based on a linear chirp signal can improve the signal-to-noise ratio with minimizing the peak range sidelobe level (PRSL), which is the main advantage over CTHI with bandpass filtering (CTHI-BF). However, the CTHI-PI technique could suffer from motion artifacts due to decreasing frame rate caused by two firings of opposite phase signals for each scanline. In this paper, a new CTHI method based on a nonlinear chirp signal (CTHI-NC) is presented, which can improve the separation of fundamental and harmonic components without sacrificing frame rate. The nonlinear chirp signal is designed to minimize the PRSL value by optimizing its frequency sweep rate and time duration. The performance of the CTHI-NC method was evaluated by measuring the PRSL and mainlobe width after compression. From the in vitro experiments, the CTHI-NC provided the PRSL of −40.6 dB and the mainlobe width of 2.1 μs for the transmit quadratic nonlinear chirp signal with the center frequency of 2.1 MHz, the fractional bandwidth at −6 dB of 0.6 and the time duration of 15 μs. These results indicate that the proposed method could be used for improving frame rates in CTHI while providing comparable image quality to CTHI-PI.     

Experimental study of SOA-based NRZ-to-PRZ conversion and distortion elimination of amplified NRZ signal using spectral filtering

We experimentally study both reshaping of nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) signal and NRZ to pseudoreturn-to-zero (PRZ) format conversion based on self-phase modulation of a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) and detuning an optical bandpass filter (OBF). When an OBF with 1 nm bandwidth is blue shifted by 0.8 nm, the distortion of the amplified NRZ signal at 10 Gbit/s is shown to be eliminated completely. When an OBF with 0.32 nm bandwidth is red shifted by 0.42 nm from the carrier frequency, NRZ-to-PRZ conversion at 10 Gbit/s is obtained. A holding beam is used to suppress the SOA noise and improve the output extinction ratio (ER). The output ER of both the reshaped NRZ and the converted PRZ is larger than 10 dB when the signal wavelength is longer than 1540 nm, and an input power dynamic range from −7 dBm to 2 dBm is obtained at a signal wavelength of 1563.6 nm. The average power of the reshaped NRZ signal is about 3 dBm at an input power dynamic range of 13 dB. The amplitude fluctuation of the converted PRZ signal is around 1.6 dB.     

Impact of 2OD and 3OD on SRS- and XPM-induced crosstalk in SCM-WDM optical transmission link

In this paper, the impact of second-order dispersion (2OD), third-order dispersion (3OD) and modulation frequency over stimulated Raman scattering (SRS)- and cross-phase modulation (XPM)-induced crosstalk in sub-carrier-multiplexed (SCM) wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) transmission link has been analyzed. It has been observed that there is significant effect of 2OD, 3OD and modulation frequency on the SRS- and XPM-induced crosstalk in a SCM-WDM transmission link. Here the results for SRS- and XPM-induced crosstalk have been reported with independent and combined higher-order dispersion. It has been observed that XPM-induced crosstalk lies between [−52.8 to −45.3] and [−94.7 to −78.6] dB in the presence of 2OD and 3OD respectively for modulation frequencies varied from 500 MHz to 2.0 GHz, while it is in the range of [−94.4 to −84] and [−128.5 to −117] dB when both SRS and XPM are taken into consideration.     

On the carrier generation and HD signal transmission using the millimeter-wave radio over fiber system

The dual sideband optical carrier suppression (DSB-OCS) technique is employed in the optical carrier generation for 40 GHz radio over fiber (ROF) system. A dual electrode Mach-Zehnder modulator (DE-MZM) with the minimum transmission bias (MiTB) technique is employed to build the system. The results show that, a 40 GHz carrier is successfully generated with the amplitude up to −29 dBm and signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 35 dB and a high definition (HD) signal is successfully transmitted using the system. Finally, the bit error rate (BER) measurement is carried out for the system with 1.25 Gbps OOK signal showing an error free 40 GHz ROF system with almost no penalty between the back to back and 20 km fiber for a BER of 10⁻⁹.     

Optical wavelet de-noising applied in multi-span nonlinear fiber links

In this work, optical wavelet de-noising with several different types of wavelets such as db4, coif4 and dmey wavelet was applied at the end of the 40 Gbit/s multi-span intensity-modulated fiber communication systems. The results of numerical simulations carried out in different fiber links demonstrated that the optical wavelet de-noising method could remove the random amplitude fluctuation induced by the interaction of EDFA’s ASE noise and optical fiber’s dispersion and nonlinearity. The SNR and BER curves of the optical bit sequence without and with optical wavelet de-noising in dispersion compensation fiber link were plotted to show the effectiveness of the wavelet de-noising in the fiber-optic communication systems and wavelet de-noising with demy wavelet can achieve better result than with other type wavelet.     

Gaussian wavelet based dynamic filtering (GWDF) method for medical ultrasound systems

In this paper, a novel dynamic filtering method using Gaussian wavelet filters is proposed to remove noise from ultrasound echo signal. In the proposed method, a mother wavelet is first selected with its central frequency (CF) and frequency bandwidth (FB) equal to those of the transmitted signal. The actual frequency of the received signal at a given depth is estimated through the autocorrelation technique. Then the mother wavelet is dilated using the ratio between the transmitted central frequency and the actual frequency as the scale factor. The generated daughter wavelet is finally used as the dynamic filter at this depth. Frequency-demodulated Gaussian wavelet is chosen in this paper because its power spectrum is well-matched with that of the transmitted ultrasound signal. The proposed method is evaluated by simulations using Field II program. Experiments are also conducted out on a standard ultrasound phantom using a 192-element transducer with the center frequency of 5 MHz. The phantom contains five point targets, five circular high scattering regions with diameters of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 mm respectively, and five cysts with diameters of 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 mm respectively. Both simulation and experimental results show that optimal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be obtained and useful information can be extracted along the depth direction irrespective of the diagnostic objects.     

Adaptive unsaturated OFDM multimode fiber communication technique based on zero padding

In order to overcome the deterioration of system performance induced by the subcarriers at or near the deep fading nulls in high frequency band-pass regions of multimode fiber, we first propose adaptive unsaturated OFDM technique based on zero padding in this paper. In our proposed method, the subcarriers with low SNR (at or near deep fading nulls) are turned off by zero padding, and data originally transmitted by those subcarriers will be transferred to new subcarriers with high SNR which have been created at high frequency by the adjusting of IFFT points. The results show that the technique proposed can accomplish transmission of 10 Gbps data rate over 1 km multimode with the BER of 4.61e−3 when the OSNR is 20 dB.     

An investigation of a fiber-optic air-backed mandrel hydrophone

In this work, a optical-fiber air-backed mandrel hydrophone is proposed and investigated both analytically and experimentally. The two-dimensional and three-dimensional quasistatically theoretical models of the hydrophone is created and compared, and the phase sensitivity of the hydrophone is analyzed. The theoretical result of phase sensitivity with three-dimensional model is −153.3 dB re rad/μPa. Twenty-two hydrophones of this type according to the model presented are constructed and tested. The experiment results show that experimental results of mean values of phase sensitivity are about −153 ± 0.5 dB re rad/μPa and have the close agreement with the estimation of theoretical models. The size of the fiber sensor is ∅12 × 55 mm, the normal phase sensitivity achieves −308 dB re 1 μPa⁻¹, the 3 dB effective bandwidth of the frequency response is 30 kHz, and the responsivity decreases less than 0.5 dB when static pressure is 2 MPa (200 m water depth). The hydrophone is easy to constructed at low cost with simple structure, and some new type of it with the required performances could be designed according to the model presented.     

Enhanced microwave absorption in ZnO/carbonyl iron nano-composites by coating dielectric material

The microwave absorption properties of zinc oxide/carbonyl iron composite nanoparticles fabricated by high energy ball milling were studied at 0-20 GHz. Experiments showed that ZnO as a kind of dielectric material coating carbonyl iron particles made the bandwidth of reflection loss (RL)<−5 dB expanding to the low frequency, and enhanced absorption effect obviously. For a 3 mm thickness absorber of ZnO/carbonyl iron after 30 h milling, the values of RL<−5 dB and RL<−8 dB were obtained in the frequency range from 7.0 GHz to 17.8 GHz and from 9.8 dB to 14.9 dB, respectively, and its strongest RL peak was −29.34 dB at 13.59 GHz. The magnetic loss of carbonyl iron particles and the dielectric loss of ZnO particles were the main mechanisms of microwave absorption for the composites.     

Multi component LFM signal detection and parameter estimation based on EEMD–FRFT

This paper studied multi component LFM signal detection and parameter estimation under the noise circumstance of various signal-to-noise ratios. Based on the analysis of fractional Fourier transform detection and parameter estimation on simple component LFM signal, this paper proposed the method of multi component LFM signal detection and parameter estimation based on EEMD–FRFT (Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition–Fractional Fourier transform), and this method was that with the EEMD algorithm, from the frequency domain decompose the analyzable signal to narrow-bandwidth components, whose center frequency changed from high to low, then accurately estimate the parameter and detect the signal of each component out of the pseudo-component with FrFT. This method solved the problem of mode aliasing of signal decomposition; meanwhile, the problem of detecting the multi component LFM signal would be simplified as the problem of one-dimensional search in small scope, which could reduce the amount of operation and improved the detection accuracy. A simulation computation for multi component LFM signal of various SNR (signal-to-noise ratios) was made and the result showed that the error of parameter estimation was less than 5% in the case of SNR not less than −10 dB.     

Performance evaluation of 16 channel DWDM radio-over-fiber link

In this article, generation of DWDM-RoF signal utilizing an SOA-MZI multichannel frequency up-conversion is demonstrated. The simulation results of a 16 channel, 10 km DWDM-RoF link at baseband signal of 500 Mbps, over the wavelength range 1545.80–1552.20 nm are reported. BER of the order of e⁻¹⁸ and Q factor above 18 dB over the entire bandwidth signify negligible crosstalk and error free transmission of radio signal.     

Novel power MOSFET-based expander for high frequency ultrasound systems

The function of an expander is to obstruct the noise signal transmitted by the pulser so that it does not pass into the transducer or receive electronics, where it can produce undesirable ring-down in an ultrasound imaging application. The most common type is a diode-based expander, which is essentially a simple diode-pair, is widely used in pulse-echo measurements and imaging applications because of its simple architecture. However, diode-based expanders may degrade the performance of ultrasonic transducers and electronic components on the receiving and transmitting sides of the ultrasound systems, respectively. Since they are non-linear devices, they cause excessive signal attenuation and noise at higher frequencies and voltages. In this paper, a new type of expander that utilizes power MOSFET components, which we call a power MOSFET-based expander, is introduced and evaluated for use in high frequency ultrasound imaging systems. The performance of a power MOSFET-based expander was evaluated relative to a diode-based expander by comparing the noise figure (NF), insertion loss (IL), total harmonic distortion (THD), response time (RT), electrical impedance (EI) and dynamic power consumption (DPC). The results showed that the power MOSFET-based expander provided better NF (0.76 dB), IL (−0.3 dB) and THD (−62.9 dB), and faster RT (82 ns) than did the diode-based expander (NF (2.6 dB), IL (−1.4 dB), THD (−56.0 dB) and RT (119 ns)) at 70 MHz. The −6 dB bandwidth and the peak-to-peak voltage of the echo signal received by the transducer using the power MOSFET-based expander improved by 17.4% and 240% compared to the diode-based expander, respectively. The new power MOSFET-based expander was shown to yield lower NF, IL and THD, faster RT and lower ring down than the diode-based expander at the expense of higher dynamic power consumption.     

Polymer optical fibre Bragg gratings based fibre laser

For the first time the fibre laser constructed from a polymer optical fibre Bragg grating is reported. The single frequency laser with the peak power of −5 dBm and signal to noise ratio greater than 45 dB has been achieved. Further examination demonstrates the excellent characteristics of the fibre laser. First, the fibre laser can be easily tuned over 35 nm by the simple axial tension method. Second, the fibre laser has the high strain sensitivity of 1.48 pm/με with the dynamic measurement range as large as 2.37%.     

Microwave absorption properties of one thin sheet employing carbonyl-iron powder and chlorinated polyethylene

To solve more and more serious electromagnetic interference problem, one thin microwave absorbing sheet employing carbonyl-iron powder (CIP) and chlorinated polyethylene (CPE) was prepared. The pattern, static magnetic properties and phase of CIP were characterized by scanning electron microscope (SEM), vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD), respectively. The electromagnetic parameters of CIP were measured in the frequency range of 2-18 GHz, and the electromagnetic loss mechanisms of the powder were discussed. The microwave absorption properties of composite sheets with different thicknesses and CIP ratios in matrix were investigated by measuring reflection loss (RL) in 2-18 GHz frequency range using the arch method. The results showed that appropriate CIP content and thickness could greatly improve microwave absorption properties in lower frequency range. For the sample with the weight ratio (CIP:CPE) of 16:1 and 1.5 mm thickness, the bandwidth (RL below −10 dB) achieved 1.1 GHz (2-3.1 GHz), and the minimum reflection loss value was obtained −13.2 dB at 2.2 GHz. This suggested that CIP/CPE composites could be applied as thin microwave absorbers in S-band (2-4 GHz).