Engineering Commons^™

Data Fusion Based Optimal Eeg Electrode Selection For Early Diagnosis Of Alzheimer's Disease, Brian Balut

Theses and Dissertations

As medicinal and technological advances lengthen the average human life span, diseases affecting the elderly such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease are seeing increasingly growing numbers, especially in developed countries. As a result, the necessity for an accurate, inexpensive, noninvasive means of diagnosis becomes particularly important, since such a method is not readily available to the general population. One biomarker that has recently showed promise is the analysis of the electroencephalogram (EEG).

Over the course of two studies, more than 130 subjects have been recruited providing information from 16-19 EEG electrodes for each subject. These signals have been decomposed …

Ensemble Of Classifiers Based Data Fusion Of Eeg And Mri For Diagnosis Of Neurodegenerative Disorders, Tejash Patel

Theses and Dissertations

The prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are rising at an alarming rate as the average age of the population increases, especially in developing nations. The efficacy of the new medical treatments critically depends on the ability to diagnose these diseases at the earliest stages. To facilitate the availability of early diagnosis in community hospitals, an accurate, inexpensive, and noninvasive diagnostic tool must be made available. As biomarkers, the event related potentials (ERP) of the electroencephalogram (EEG) - which has previously shown promise in automated diagnosis - in addition to volumetric magnetic resonance …

Use Of Linear Predictive Features And Pattern Recognition Techniques To Develop A Vector Quantization Based Blind Snr Estimation System, Russell Paul Ondusko Iii

Theses and Dissertations

Signal-to-noise ratio is defined as the ratio of a given transmitted signal to the background noise of the transmission medium. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is a common concept found in all forms of electrical communications. The easiest way to measure the signal-to-noise ratio is through intrusive means in which a corrupt signal is compared to its original signal. This technique is inefficient and impractical because it requires the original signal and can only be used to theoretically test the noise properties of a channel rather than estimate the SNR of a communicated signal. Characteristics of speech signals can be used to …

Exploration Of Multiple Pathways For The Development Of Immersive Virtual Reality Environments, Kevin Laurence Garrison

Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this thesis is the study and recommendation of optimal techniques for developing immersive virtual environments for generic applications. The overarching objective is to ensure that virtual environments can be created and deployed, rapidly and accurately, using commercial off-the-shelf software. Specific subjective and objective criteria have been employed to determine trade-offs between multiple pathways for designing such environments and specific recommendations are made for the applicability of each. The efficacy of the techniques developed as part of this research work has been demonstrated by applying them to three widely differing areas - visualizing arbitrary 2D surface data, synthesis …

Quad General Tree Drawing Algorithm And General Trees Characterization: Towards An Environment For The Experimental Study On General Tree Drawing Algorithms, Chu Yao

Theses and Dissertations

Information visualization produces (interactive) visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition and perception; thus enabling the viewer to gain knowledge about the internal structure of the data and causal relationships in it. The visualization of information hierarchies is concerned with the presentation of abstract hierarchical information about relationships between various entities. It has many applications in diverse domains such as software engineering, information systems, biology, and chemistry. Information hierarchies are typically modeled by an abstract tree, where vertices are entities and edges represent relationships between entities. The aim of visualizing tree drawings is to automatically produce drawings of …

Integrated Approach To Airborne Laser Communication, James A. Louthain

Theses and Dissertations

Lasers offer tremendous advantages over RF communication systems in bandwidth and security, due to their ultra-high frequency and narrow spatial beamwidth. Atmospheric turbulence causes severe received power variations and high bit error rates (BERs) in airborne laser communication. Airborne optical communication systems require special considerations in size, complexity, power, and weight. Conventional adaptive optics systems correct for the phase only and cannot correct for strong scintillation, but here the two transmission paths are separated sufficiently so that the strong scintillation is \averaged out" by incoherently summing up the two beams in the receiver. This requisite separation distance is derived for …

Sub-Circuit Selection And Replacement Algorithms Modeled As Term Rewriting Systems, Eric D. Simonaire

Theses and Dissertations

Intent protection is a model of software obfuscation which, among other criteria, prevents an adversary from understanding the program’s function for use with contextual information. Relating this framework for obfuscation to malware detection, if a malware detector can perfectly normalize a program P and any obfuscation (variant) of the program O(P), the program is not intent protected. The problem of intent protection on programs can also be modeled as intent protection on combinational logic circuits. If a malware detector can perfectly normalize a circuit C and any obfuscation (variant) O(C) of the circuit, the circuit is not intent protected. In …

Multispectral Imaging For Face Recognition Over Varying Illumination, Hong Chang

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the advantage of using multispectral narrow-band images over conventional broad-band images for improved face recognition under varying illumination. To verify the effectiveness of multispectral images for improving face recognition performance, three sequential procedures are taken into action: multispectral face image acquisition, image fusion for multispectral and spectral band selection to remove information redundancy.

Several efficient image fusion algorithms are proposed and conducted on spectral narrow-band face images in comparison to conventional images. Physics-based weighted fusion and illumination adjustment fusion make good use of spectral information in multispectral imaging process. The results demonstrate that fused narrow-band images outperform …

Modeling Of Algan/Gan High Electron Mobility Transistor For Sensors And High-Temperature Circuit Applications, Sazia Afreen Eliza

Doctoral Dissertations

With the most advanced and mature technology for electronic devices, silicon (Si) based devices can be processed with practically no material defects. However, Si technology has difficulty meeting the demand for some high-power, high-speed, and high-temperature applications due to limitations in its intrinsic properties. Wide bandgap semiconductors have greater prospects compared to Si based devices. The wide band gap material system shows higher breakdown voltage, lower leakage, higher saturation velocity, larger thermal conductivity and better thermal stability suitable for high-power, high-speed, and high-temperature operations of the devices. In recent years, GaN based devices have drawn much research attention due to …

Uncertainty Minimization In Robotic 3d Mapping Systems Operating In Dynamic Large-Scale Environments, Sreenivas Rangan Sukumar

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation research is motivated by the potential and promise of 3D sensing technologies in safety and security applications. With specific focus on unmanned robotic mapping to aid clean-up of hazardous environments, under-vehicle inspection, automatic runway/pavement inspection and modeling of urban environments, we develop modular, multi-sensor, multi-modality robotic 3D imaging prototypes using localization/navigation hardware, laser range scanners and video cameras.

While deploying our multi-modality complementary approach to pose and structure recovery in dynamic real-world operating conditions, we observe several data fusion issues that state-of-the-art methodologies are not able to handle. Different bounds on the noise model of heterogeneous sensors, the …

Investigation Of Propagation Characteristics Of Twisted Hollow Waveguides For Particle Accelerator Applications, Joshua Lee Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

A new class of accelerating structures employing a uniformly twisted waveguide is investigated. Twisted waveguides of various cross-sectional geometries are considered and analyzed. It is shown that such a twisted waveguide can support waves that travel at a speed slower than the speed of light c. The slow-wave properties of twisted structures are of interest because these slow-wave electromagnetic fields can be used in applications such as electron traveling wave tubes and linear particle accelerators.

Since there is no exact closed form solution for the electromagnetic fields within a twisted waveguide or cavity, several previously proposed approximate methods are examined, …

System-On-Package Low-Power Telemetry And Signal Conditioning Unit For Biomedical Applications, Mohammad Rafiqul Haider

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent advancements in healthcare monitoring equipments and wireless communication technologies have led to the integration of specialized medical technology with the pervasive wireless networks. Intensive research has been focused on the development of medical wireless networks (MWN) for telemedicine and smart home care services. Wireless technology also shows potential promises in surgical applications. Unlike conventional surgery, an expert surgeon can perform the surgery from a remote location using robot manipulators and monitor the status of the real surgery through wireless communication link. To provide this service each surgical tool must be facilitated with smart electronics to accrue data and transmit …

Hardware Development Of An Ultra-Wideband System For High Precision Localization Applications, Cemin Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

A precise localization system in an indoor environment has been developed. The developed system is based on transmitting and receiving picosecond pulses and carrying out a complete narrow-pulse, signal detection and processing scheme in the time domain. The challenges in developing such a system include: generating ultra wideband (UWB) pulses, pulse dispersion due to antennas, modeling of complex propagation channels with severe multipath effects, need for extremely high sampling rates for digital processing, synchronization between the tag and receivers’ clocks, clock jitter, local oscillator (LO) phase noise, frequency offset between tag and receivers’ LOs, and antenna phase center variation. For …

Mrf Stereo Matching With Statistical Estimation Of Parameters, Mohammad Shafikul Huq

Doctoral Dissertations

For about the last ten years, stereo matching in computer vision has been treated as a combinatorial optimization problem. Assuming that the points in stereo images form a Markov Random Field (MRF), a variety of combinatorial optimization algorithms has been developed to optimize their underlying cost functions. In many of these algorithms, the MRF parameters of the cost functions have often been manually tuned or heuristically determined for achieving good performance results. Recently, several algorithms for statistical, hence, automatic estimation of the parameters have been published. Overall, these algorithms perform well in labeling, but they lack in performance for handling …

Stochastic Modeling And Estimation Of Wireless Channels With Application To Ultra Wide Band Systems, Yanyan Li

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis is concerned with modeling of both space and time variations of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) indoor channels. The most common empirically determined amplitude distribution in many UWB environments is Nakagami distribution. The latter is generalized to stochastic diffusion processes which capture the dynamics of UWB channels. In contrast with the traditional models, the statistics of the proposed models are shown to be time varying, but converge in steady state to their static counterparts.

System identification algorithms are used to extract various channel parameters using received signal measurement data, which are usually available at the receiver. The expectation maximization …

Transmission Error Analysis And Avoidance For Ieee 802.15.4 Wireless Sensors On Rotating Structures, Jobin Jacob

All Theses

Wireless sensors are increasingly adopted in manufacturing and vehicular systems for monitoring critical components under continuous operation. Many such components move rapidly and frequently in metallic containments with challenging radio propagation characteristics.
For wireless sensors mounted on rotating structures, previous studies identified an eminent increase in packet transmission errors at higher rotation speeds. Such errors were found to occur at specific locations around the rotating spindle's periphery and such locations depended sensitively on sensor location and surrounding geometry. This thesis presents a systematic study of the expected packet error rates due to such errors, and analytically derives the first transmission …

Synchrophasor's Application In State Estimation, Linwood Ross

All Theses

This thesis presents an investigation into the effect of synchrophasor measurements on the accuracy of a state estimator. Two state estimation algorithms have been developed in Matlab and tested on several systems. The first state estimator is the traditional non-linear estimator that is currently being used by most utilities. The second estimator is a hybrid linear state estimator. A bad data detection algorithm has been developed as well to determine the effect of synchrophasor measurements in bad data detection. A total of seven different systems are used for testing the proposed algorithms. Six systems are used in testing the bad …

Multi-Channel Real-Time Communication In Wireless Sensor Network, Nitish Kumar Jha

Masters Theses

Many radio chips used in today's sensor mote hardware can work at different frequencies. Recently, several multi-channel communication protocols have been proposed to improve network throughput and reduce packet loss for wireless sensor networks. However, existing work does not provide explicit guarantees for application-specified end-to-end communication delays, which are critical to many real-time applications such as surveillance and disaster response. On the other hand, those radio chips also have adaptable transmission power which allows a trade-off between communication delays and energy efficiency.

This work proposes two multi-channel real-time communication protocols. One of the protocols features a node-based channel assignment policy …

Real-Time Automatic Linear Feature Detection In Images, Guang Zeng

All Dissertations

Linear feature detection in digital images is an important low-level operation in
computer vision that has many applications. In remote sensing tasks, it can be used
to extract roads, railroads, and rivers from satellite or low-resolution aerial images,
which can be used for the capture or update of data for geographic information and
navigation systems. In addition, it is useful in medical imaging for the extraction of
blood vessels from an X-ray angiography or the bones in the skull from a CT or MR
image. It also can be applied in horticulture for underground plant root detection in
minirhizotron images. …

Aperture Coupling And Penetration In Various Configurations, Jason Keen

All Dissertations

The problem of a slot in a perfectly conducting surface is addressed for a variety of configurations using both integral equation and transmission line techniques. The use of Bethe hole theory to model short slots is discussed and utilized where appropriate. Primary problems of discussion are a slot array, wires coupling through slots in a ground plane, and wires coupling through slots in a bent ground plane. Additionally, the use of the extended BLT formulation for incorporation of slot effects in a transmission line problem is addressed. In this manuscript, the work of Bethe is extended to include cross-aperture coupling …

Circuit Modules For Six-Port Reflectometer On Chip, Chaojiang Li

All Theses

Broadband signal generator is an indispensable module for broadband Six-Port Reflectometer (SPR). To integrate a whole SPR system on a chip, the source must be compact. In this thesis, a three-stage voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), using two parallel weak invertor-chain oscillators and sense amplifiers, is proposed and designed in a 0.13 µm CMOS process. These two parallel weak inverter-chain oscillators extend the low frequency operating range and the sense amplifiers expand the high frequency operation. The measurement results show that the oscillator can be tuned from 430 MHz to 12 GHz, which satisfies the targeted SPR operating frequency range.
In order …

Development Of A Quadrotor Testbed For Control And Sensor Development, Abhishek Bhargava

All Theses

A quadrotor is an under actuated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which uses thrust from four rotors to provide six degrees of freedom. This thesis outlines the development of a general purpose test bed that can be used for sensor and control algorithm development. The system includes the means to simulate a proposed controller and then a hardware in the loop implementation using the same software. The test bed was assembled and verified with a linear controller for both attitude and position control using feedback from an IMU (Inertial measurement Unit) and a Global Position System (GPS) sensor.
The linear controller …

A Study Of Switched-Capacitor Filters, Kacie Thomas

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper presents the basic principles of the switched-capacitor circuit. In order to become more acquainted with the workings and design of filters and switched-capacitor filters specifically, an example filter was designed based on a set of parameters. It was constructed starting in the passive stage, then the active stage and finally the switched-capacitor filter was generated. All of these circuits were also simulated using SwitcherCAD and Saber. Then, a switched-capacitor filter designed by Auburn University was redesigned using the same process as the example circuit. It was also simulated in all three stages. The results from this design are …

Limitations Of A True Random Number Generator In A Field Programmable Gate Array, Jennifer L. Brady

Theses and Dissertations

Random number generators are used in many areas of engineering, computer science, most notably in simulations and cryptographic applications. There are true random number generators (TRNG) and pseudo random number generators (PRNG). Only a true random number generator is secure because the output bits are non-repeating and nonreproducible. As society has become more dependent on electronic technology the need for true random number generators has increased due to processes that require encryption in everyday use. A fast true random number generator on a field programmable gate array presents digital designers with the ability to have the generator on chip. Since …

An Integrated Routing And Distributed Scheduling Approach For Hybrid Ieee 802.16e Mesh Networks For Vehicular Broadband Communications, Rahul Amin

All Theses

An integrated routing and distributed scheduling approach for fast deployable IEEE 802.16e networks is presented where distributed base stations with dual radios form a mesh backhaul and subscriber stations communicate through these base stations. The mesh backhaul is formed via an IEEE 802.16e mesh mode radio on each base station, while the subscriber stations communicate with base stations via PMP mode radios. The proposed routing scheme divides the deployed network into several routing zones. Each routing zone contains several base stations that form the mesh backhaul with one base station equipped with either a fiber, satellite or any other point-to-point …

Experiments In Distributed Multi-Robot Coordination, Larry Dale Ballard

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Consensus control algorithms for multi-agent systems are an area of much research. Several consensus control laws are experimentally validated on a multi-robot testbed in this thesis. A graphical user interface (GUI) is developed that simplies use of the testbed, as well as allows the execution of the testbed programs to be divided across multiple computers. This not only provides a more powerful computing environment, but a more realistic communication environment for the testbed. A method for a time varying or dynamic formation is both proposed and experimentally validated on the testbed. This research also explores a method for dynamic group …

Design Of Tunable Edge-Coupled Microstrip Bandpass Filters, Srinidhi V. Kaveri

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis is a study of tunability of edge-coupled filters. Microstrip edge-coupled bandpass filters are planar structures and have advantages such as easy design procedures and simple integration into circuits.

Three tuning techniques were implemented. The first technique involved the loading of one open end of each coupled into tunable capacitors. The second technique used a tunable resonator in series with the edge-coupled blocks. The final design made use of tunable feedback sections.

A detailed mathematical analysis of each design was performed. MATLAB code based on the analyses was written. The MATLAB simulations were compared to Agilent Advanced Design System …

A C To Register Transfer Level Algorithm Using Structured Circuit Templates: A Case Study With Simulated Annealing, Jonathan D. Phillips

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A tool flow is presented for deriving simulated annealing accelerator circuits on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) from C source code by exploring architecture solutions that conform to a preset template through scheduling and mapping algorithms. A case study carried out on simulated annealing-based Autonomous Mission Planning and Scheduling (AMPS) software used for autonomous spacecraft systems is explained. The goal of the research is an automated method for the derivation of a hardware design that maximizes performance while minimizing the FPGA footprint. Results obtained are compared with a peer C to register transfer level (RTL) logic tool, a state-of-the-art …

Student Achievement And Affective Traits In Electrical Engineering Laboratories Using Traditional And Computer-Based Instrumentation, Matthew D. Lammi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Distance education has the ability to transcend distance and time, reaching students anywhere at any time, particularly those underrepresented in engineering. Engineering is a practice-oriented profession requiring an interweaving of scientific theory and applied hands-on activities. Despite the need for distance education in engineering, few studies have systematically investigated the impact of student achievement and attitude in distance engineering laboratories. This quasi-experimental research addressed that need by studying the cognitive and affective domains of achievement in engineering laboratories while employing computer-based and traditional oscilloscopes. The students from two courses, electrical engineering for nonmajors and electronic fundamentals, were randomly assigned into …

High Speed Wavelength Tuning Of Sgdbr Lasers For Optical Coherence Tomography Applications, Benjamin Maher

Master's Theses

The application of Sample Grated Distributed Bragg Reflector (SGDBR) wavelength tunable lasers for swept-wavelength Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is explored. OCT is a method of measuring reflectivity versus distance into samples under test with a focused infrared light source. Swept wavelength OCT requires a laser light source that is capable of sweeping its wavelength quickly over the entire wavelength range of the tunable laser. Fast sweeping of the laser's wavelength enables real-time imaging of a wide surface area of the surface under test. This thesis will show that SGDBR lasers can be designed to meet the fast wavelength ramp speeds …