Fractional Fourier transform dual random phase encoding of time-varying signals

Optical techniques have shown great potential in the field of information security to encode high-security images. Among several established methods, a double-random phase encryption technique (DRPE) for encoding a primary image into stationary white noise was developed by using the analogy between Fresnel diffraction patterns and the fractional Fourier transform (FrFT-DRPE). In this case, additional keys are obtained through the knowledge of the fractional orders of the FrFTs. In this work we propose an encoding setup for time-varying signals, mainly for short-haul fiber optics link applications, that can be considered as the temporal analogue of the spatial FrFT-DRPE. The behavior of the proposed method is analyzed by employing the Wigner distribution function. As a result, general expressions for both signal time width and spectral bandwidth, at all encryption stages are obtained. Numerical simulations have been carried out to illustrate the system performance. The obtained results indicate that this encryption method could be a good alternative to other well-established methods.     

Modulation and gap detection for broadband and filtered noise signals

Modulation detection thresholds (as a function of sinusoidal amplitude modulation frequency) and temporal gap detection thresholds were measured for three low-pass-filtered noise signals (fc = 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz), a high-pass-filtered noise signal (fc = 4000 Hz), and a broadband signal. The two latter noise signals were effectively low-pass filtered (fc = 6500 Hz) by the earphone. Each of the filtered signals was presented with a complementary filtered noise masker. Modulation and gap detection thresholds were lowest for the broadband and high-pass signals. Thresholds were significantly higher for the low-pass signals than for the broadband and high-pass signals. For these tasks and conditions, the high-frequency content of the noise signal was more important than was the signal bandwidth. Sensitivity (s) and time constant (tau) indices were derived from functions fitted to the modulation detection data. These indices were compared with gap detection thresholds for corresponding signals. The gap detection thresholds were correlated inversely (rho = -1.0, p less than 0.05) with s (i.e., smaller gap detection thresholds were correlated with greater sensitivity to modulation), but were not correlated significantly with tau, which was relatively invariant across signal conditions.     

Spectral integration of broadband signals in diotic and dichotic masking experiments.

The method of G?ssler [Acustica 4, 408-414 (1954)] was used to measure the audibility of multicomponent signals as a function of their bandwidth against a broadband, white-noise masker. Test signals were composed of 1 to 41 sinusoids with a spectral spacing of 10 Hz and were always spectrally centered around 400 Hz. Masker duration was 400 ms and the 300-ms signals were centered within the noise intervals. A three-interval forced-choice procedure with adaptive level adjustment was applied. NoSo, NoSm, NoS pi, and N pi So masked thresholds were obtained for four subjects. A comparison of the diotic and the three dichotic conditions yields no significant difference in the bandwidth dependence and suggests equal integration bandwidths for all conditions. However, the original results of G?ssler could not be replicated: Neither were the overall levels of signals with a bandwidth below the critical bandwidth constant nor were the results for broadband signals in accordance with a single-band model of detection. The narrow-band data are much better described by calculating the overall signal level at the output of a rounded exponential filter [Patterson et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 72, 1788-1803 (1982)] with an equivalent rectangular bandwidth of 65 Hz. For broader signal bandwidths, the signal level at threshold increases as predicted by a multiband model.     

Optical carrier Brillouin processing of microwave photonic signals

We introduce a novel concept in Brillouin signal processing based on modification of the optical carrier's magnitude and phase by stimulated Brillouin scattering-induced depletion. The technique offers wideband processing and low noise and requires only low optical power. Application to the enhancement of a 25-km high-frequency analog link is experimentally demonstrated and yields a 6.5-GHz bandwidth extension and a 13-dB reduction in the link insertion loss without intermodulation distortion.     

混沌信号自适应协同滤波去噪

混沌信号协同滤波去噪算法充分利用了混沌信号的自相似结构特征,具有良好的信噪比提升性能.针对该算法的滤波参数优化问题,考虑到最优滤波参数的选取受到信号特征、采样频率和噪声水平的影响,为提高该算法的自适应性使其更符合实际应用需求,基于排列熵提出一种滤波参数自动优化准则.依据不同噪声水平的混沌信号排列熵的不同,首先选取不同滤波参数对含噪混沌信号进行去噪,然后计算各滤波参数对应重构信号的排列熵,最后通过比较各重构信号的排列熵,选取排列熵最小的重构信号对应的滤波参数为最优滤波参数,实现滤波参数的优化.分析了不同信号特征、采样频率和噪声水平情况下滤波参数的选取规律.仿真结果表明,该参数优化准则能在不同条件下对滤波参数进行有效的自动最优化,提高了混沌信号协同滤波去噪算法的自适应性.     

A novel tunable optical oscillator for broadband signals

A tunable optical oscillator that generates signals at the micro- to millimeter-wave band for wireless communication applications is suggested. It uses directly modulated semiconductor lasers, in which sideband modes and four-wave mixing (FWM) conjugate modes are injection locked by the simple control of the applied modulation power. The signals at 15 GHz with phase noise of below ?95 dBc/Hz at an offset frequency of 100 kHz were experimentally obtained. The frequency of the generated signal is tunable, and the maximum achievable signal frequency is limited mainly by the bandwidth of the receiver.     

The effects of bandwidth on the detectability of narrow- and wideband signals

The effects of masker bandwidth on the detection of narrow- and wideband signals have been investigated. For both kinds of signals, plots of threshold as a function of masker bandwidth yielded by both narrow- and wideband signals are reasonably described with two intersecting lines. Threshold initially increase with masker bandwidth and then become independent of further increases. The rate of increase depends on the signal spectrum. The bandwidth at which the lines intersect varies with signal bandwidth and also mode of masker presentation (i.e., whether the masker is gated with the signal or is present continuously). Internal filtering is most accurate when the masker is present continuously. A model is proposed in which a listener's decisions about the presence of narrow-band signals are based upon estimates of stimulus energy within a critical band. These estimates are degraded by bandwidth-dependent processing errors. When the signal to be detected spans several critical bands (i.e., is wideband), the model forms a test statistic by summing the outputs of the relevant critical bands. The model permits the contribution of each band to the sum to vary with masker bandwidth because it incorporates a form of lateral suppression. Thresholds of narrow-band signals in gated maskers and wideband signals in gated and continuous maskers are predicted by the model. However, the model fails to account for the detectability of narrow-band signals in continuous maskers.     

Spectral loudness summation as a function of duration

Loudness was measured as a function of signal bandwidth for 10-, 100-, and 1000-ms-long signals. The test and reference signals were bandpass-filtered noise spectrally centered at 2 kHz. The bandwidth of the test signal was varied from 200 to 6400 Hz. The reference signal had a bandwidth of 3200 Hz. The reference levels were 45, 55, and 65 dB SPL. The level to produce equal loudness was measured with an adaptive, two-interval, two-alternative forced-choice procedure. A loudness matching procedure was used, where the tracks for all signal pairs to be compared were interleaved. Mean results for nine normal-hearing subjects showed that the magnitude of spectral loudness summation depends on signal duration. For all reference levels, a 6- to 8-dB larger level difference between equally loud signals with the smallest (delta f = 200 Hz) and largest (delta f = 6400 Hz) bandwidth is found for 10-ms-long signals than for the 1000-ms-long signals. The duration effect slightly decreases with increasing reference loudness. As a consequence, loudness models should include a duration-dependent compression stage. Alternatively, if a fixed loudness ratio between signals of different duration is assumed, this loudness ratio should depend on the signal spectrum.     

Noise power fluctuations and the masking of sine signals

This article is concerned with fluctuations in noise power and with the role that such fluctuations play in the masking of sine signals by noise. Several measures of noise fluctuations are discussed: the fourth moment of the waveform, the fourth moment of the envelope, and the crest factor. Relationships among these quantities are found for cases of equal-amplitude random-phase noise and Rayleigh-distributed-amplitude noise. Of particular interest is a special non-Gaussian noise called low-noise noise in which the fluctuations are small by any of our measures. The results of frozen-noise masking experiments are reported, where the noise waveform was fixed for all stimulus presentations. In separate experiments, equal-amplitude random-phase Gaussian noise, with typical fluctuations, and low-noise noise, with almost no fluctuations were used. The data show that for a noise bandwidth less than the critical bandwidth, the masked threshold is about 5 dB lower for low-noise noise than for Gaussian noise. When the noise bandwidth is larger than the critical bandwidth, the masked threshold is the same for both kinds of noise. It is concluded that noise power fluctuations increase masked threshold by about 5 dB and that filtering by the auditory system reintroduces fluctuations into broadband low-noise noise.     

Comparison of simultaneous signals obtained from a dual-field-of-view lidar and its application to noise reduction based on empirical mode decomposition

Although the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method is an effective tool for noise reduction in lidar signals, evaluating the effectiveness of the denoising method is difficult. A dual-field-of-view lidar for observing atmospheric aerosols is described. The backscattering signals obtained from two channels have different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The performance of noise reduction can be investigated by comparing the high SNR signal and the denoised low SNR signal without a simulation experiment. With this approach, the signal and noise are extracted to one intrinsic mode function (IMF) by the EMD- based denoising; thus, the threshold method is applied to the IMFs. Experimental results show that the improved threshold method can effectively perform noise reduction while preserving useful sudden-change information.     

Analytically exact correction scheme for signal extraction from noisy magnitude MR signals

An analytically exact method is proposed to extract the signal intensity and the noise variance simultaneously from noisy magnitude MR signals. This method relies on a fixed point formula of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and a correction factor. The correction factor, which is a function of SNR, establishes a fundamental link between the variance of the magnitude MR signal and the variance of the underlying Gaussian noise in the two quadrature channels. A more general but very similar method is developed for parallel signal acquisitions with multiple receiver coils. In the context of MR imaging, the proposed method can be carried out on a pixel-by-pixel basis if the mean and the standard deviation of the magnitude signal are available.     

A simulation algorithm for ultrasound liver backscattered signals

In this study, we present a simulation algorithm for the backscattered ultrasound signal from liver tissue. The algorithm simulates backscattered signals from normal liver and three different liver abnormalities. The performance of the algorithm has been tested by statistically comparing the simulated signals with corresponding signals obtained from a previous in vivo study. To verify that the simulated signals can be classified correctly we have applied a classification technique based on an artificial neural network. The acoustic features extracted from the spectrum over a 2.5 MHz bandwidth are the attenuation coefficient and the change of speed of sound with frequency (dispersion). Our results show that the algorithm performs satisfactorily. Further testing of the algorithm is conducted by the use of a data acquisition and analysis system designed by the authors, where several simulated signals are stored in memory chips and classified according to their abnormalities.     

The performance of different synthesis signals in acoustic models of cochlear implants

Synthesis (carrier) signals in acoustic models embody assumptions about perception of auditory electric stimulation. This study compared speech intelligibility of consonants and vowels processed through a set of nine acoustic models that used Spectral Peak (SPEAK) and Advanced Combination Encoder (ACE)-like speech processing, using synthesis signals which were representative of signals used previously in acoustic models as well as two new ones. Performance of the synthesis signals was determined in terms of correspondence with cochlear implant (CI) listener results for 12 attributes of phoneme perception (consonant and vowel recognition; F1, F2, and duration information transmission for vowels; voicing, manner, place of articulation, affrication, burst, nasality, and amplitude envelope information transmission for consonants) using four measures of performance. Modulated synthesis signals produced the best correspondence with CI consonant intelligibility, while sinusoids, narrow noise bands, and varying noise bands produced the best correspondence with CI vowel intelligibility. The signals that performed best overall (in terms of correspondence with both vowel and consonant attributes) were modulated and unmodulated noise bands of varying bandwidth that corresponded to a linearly varying excitation width of 0.4 mm at the apical to 8 mm at the basal channels.     

Non-linear filtering of ultrasonic signals using neural networks

Structure noise from inhomogeneous micro-structures makes the detection of flaws present in highly scattering materials difficult. Several techniques have been applied to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in order to make flaw detection easier. Linear filtering does not provide good results because both structure noise and flaw signal concentrate energy in the same frequency band. Non-linear filtering can be used to reduce the structure noise of ultrasonic signals. Therefore, neural networks are applied in this work for this purpose. In order to use neural networks for non-linear filtering, dynamic structures must be applied. The easiest way to implement a neural network with the capability of processing temporal patterns is to consider them spatial ones, applying the signal into a tapped delay line of finite extension, that is the input of a static neural network (for example, a multi-layer perceptron). In this work, a dynamic neural network has been built to filter ultrasonic signals with structure noise, and has been trained with the real-time back-propagation algorithm, using as inputs 3000 synthetic ultrasonic signals of 896 samples each. Target signals for training are the same as the ones used as inputs but without noise. The neural network is trained in order to generate as output the target signal when the noisy input one is applied. For testing the performance of the non-linear filter, a new set of 500 noisy signals has been used. The SNR improvement is about 6 dB average. The results show that this non-linear filtering method is quite useful as pre-processing stage in flaw detection systems.     

分块稀疏信号1-bit压缩感知重建方法

1-bit压缩感知理论指出:对稀疏信号进行少量线性投影并对投影信号进行1-bit量化,该1-bit信号包含足够的信息,从而能对原始信号进行高精度重建.然而,当信号难以进行稀疏表达时,传统1-bit压缩感知算法无法精确重建原始信号.前期研究表明,分块稀疏模型作为一种特殊的结构型稀疏模型,对于难以用传统稀疏模型进行表达的信号具有较好的表达作用.本文提出了一种针对分块稀疏信号的1-bit压缩感知重建方法,该方法利用分块稀疏的统计特性对信号进行数学建模,通过变分贝叶斯推断方法进行信号重建并在光电容积脉搏波(photoplethysmography)信号上进行了实验验证.实验结果表明,与现有1-bit压缩感知重建方法相比,本文方法重建精度更高,且收敛速度更快.     

Generation of fractal-spectrum signals

Development of communications systems reliably operating in an unfavorable electromagnetic environment is today a challenging problem because of a high density of interfering signals generated by numerous radioelectronic systems (especially in cities) and a large amount of electromagnetic noise of different natures. The search for new types of noise-immune signals is a key direction in designing communications system reliably operating in a noisy environment. Using a fractal wavelet signal as an example, we consider the theoretical and experimental data on synthesizing wide-band fractal signals on a 2-GHz sinusoidal carrier and discuss their basic properties. It is shown that such signals have self-similar fractal spectra and a high noise immunity and, therefore, can be applied in noise-immune communications.     

Across-ear interference from parametrically degraded synthetic speech signals in a dichotic cocktail-party listening task

Recent results have shown that listeners attending to the quieter of two speech signals in one ear (the target ear) are highly susceptible to interference from normal or time-reversed speech signals presented in the unattended ear. However, speech-shaped noise signals have little impact on the segregation of speech in the opposite ear. This suggests that there is a fundamental difference between the across-ear interference effects of speech and nonspeech signals. In this experiment, the intelligibility and contralateral-ear masking characteristics of three synthetic speech signals with parametrically adjustable speech-like properties were examined: (1) a modulated noise-band (MNB) speech signal composed of fixed-frequency bands of envelope-modulated noise; (2) a modulated sine-band (MSB) speech signal composed of fixed-frequency amplitude-modulated sinewaves; and (3) a "sinewave speech" signal composed of sine waves tracking the first four formants of speech. In all three cases, a systematic decrease in performance in the two-talker target-ear listening task was found as the number of bands in the contralateral speech-like masker increased. These results suggest that speech-like fluctuations in the spectral envelope of a signal play an important role in determining the amount of across-ear interference that a signal will produce in a dichotic cocktail-party listening task.     

Zero-crossing probability density of Doppler beat signals in the wave-period measuring system

As an effect of shot noise on the analysis of Doppler beat signals in the wave-period measuring system, the zero-crossing probability density of beat signals is studied emphasizing two parameters, namely the bandwidth of a pre-filter and the signal-to-noise ratio.     

Transmission of noise coded versus additive signals through a neuronal ensemble

Neuronal populations receive signals through temporally inhomogeneous spike trains which can be approximated by an input consisting of a time dependent mean value (additive signal) and noise with a time dependent intensity (noise coded signal). We compare the linear response of an ensemble of model neurons to these signals. Our analytical solution for the mean activity demonstrates the high efficiency of the transmission of a noise coded signal in a broad frequency band. For both kinds of signal we show that the transmission by the ensemble reveals stochastic resonance as well as a nonmonotonous dependence on the driving frequency.     

Generating sensor signals in isotropic noise fields

Researchers in the signal processing community often require sensor signals that result from a spherically or cylindrically isotropic noise field for simulation purposes. Although it has been shown that these signals can be generated using a number of uncorrelated noise sources that are uniformly spaced on a sphere or cylinder, this method is seldom used in practice. In this paper algorithms that generate sensor signals of an arbitrary one- and three-dimensional array that result from a spherically or cylindrically isotropic noise field are developed. Furthermore, the influence of the number of noise sources on the accuracy of the generated sensor signals is investigated.