Engineering Commons^™

Power-Weighted Lpc Formant Estimation, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

A power-weighted formant frequency estimation procedure based on Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) is presented. It works by pre-emphasizing the dominant spectral components of an input signal, which allows a subsequent estimation step to extract formant frequencies with greater accuracy. The accuracy of traditional LPC formant estimation is improved by this new power-weighted formant estimator for different classes of synthetic signals and for speech. Power-weighted LPC significantly and reliably outperforms LPC and variants of LPC at the task of formant estimation using the VTR formants dataset, a database consisting of the Vocal Tract Resonance (VTR) frequency trajectories obtained by human experts …

Predicting Quality Of Delivery Metrics For Adaptive Video Codec Sessions, Obinna Izima, Ruairí De Fréin, Mark Davis

Conference papers

Predicting video quality will continue to be an active area of research given the dominance of video traffic for years to come. Network service practitioners that are poised to handle the strain on the existing limited bandwidth constraints are better placed to be SLA-compliant. The dynamic and time-varying nature of cloud-hosted services require improved techniques to realize accurate models of the systems. To address this challenge: (1) we propose Codec-aware Network Adaptation Agent (cNAA), an online light-weight data learning engine that achieves accurate and correct predictions of quality of delivery (QoD) metrics, namely jitter for video services. cNAA achieves this …

New Robust Lpc-Based Method For Time-Resolved Morphology Of High-Noise Multiple Frequency Signals, Jin Xu, Mark Davis, Ruairi De Frein

Conference papers

This paper introduces a new time-resolved spectral analysis method based on the Linear Prediction Coding (LPC) method that is particularly suited to the study of the dynamics of low Signal-to-noise Ratio (SNR) signals comprising multiple frequency components. One of the challenges of the time-resolved spectral method is that they are limited by the Heisenberg-Gabor uncertainty principle. Consequently, there is a trade-off between the temporal and spectral resolution. Most of the previous studies are time-averaged methods. The proposed method is a parameterisation method which can directly extract the dominant formants. The method is based on a $z$-plane analysis of the poles …

Long-Term Durability Of Solar Photovoltaic Modules, Chibuisi Chinasaokwu Okorieimoh, Brian Norton

Conference papers

Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels experience long-term performance degradation resulting in lower like-per-like efficiencies and performance ratios when compared with their initial performance. Manufacturers of solar photovoltaic modules usually guarantee the life span for more than 20 years. It is therefore necessary to track and mitigate degradation of PV modules over this period to satisfy such guarantees and beyond this period to identify maintenance and repair requirements. Degradation of solar PV modules makes them less efficient, less reliable and, ultimately, inoperative. This paper reviews relevant literature to discuss:

• Causes of efficiency reductions in photovoltaic cells

• Ways to achieve long-term durability of …

A Proactive-Restoration Technique For Sdns, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

Failure incidents result in temporarily preventing the network from delivering services properly. Such a deterioration in services called service unavailability. The traditional fault management techniques, i.e. protection and restoration, are inevitably concerned with service unavailability due to the convergence time that is required to achieve the recovery when a failure occurs. However, with the global view feature of software-defined networking a failure prediction is becoming attainable, which in turn reduces the service interruptions that originated by failures. In this paper, we propose a proactive restoration technique that reconfigure the vulnerable routes which are likely to be affected if the …

New Robust Lpc-Based Method For Time-Resolved Morphology Of High-Noise Multiple Frequency Signals, Jin Xu, Ruairí De Fréin, Mark Davis

Conference papers

This paper introduces a new time-resolved spectral analysis method based on the Linear Prediction Coding (LPC) method that is particularly suited to the study of the dynamics of low Signal-to-noise Ratio (SNR) signals comprising multiple frequency components. One of the challenges of the time-resolved spectral method is that they are limited by the Heisenberg-Gabor uncertainty principle. Consequently, there is a trade-off between the temporal and spectral resolution. Most of the previous studies are time-averaged methods. The proposed method is a parameterisation method which can directly extract the dominant formants. The method is based on a z-plane analysis of the poles …

Remedying Sound Source Separation Via Azimuth Discrimination And Re-Synthesis, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

Commercially recorded music since the 1950s has been mixed down from many input sound sources to a two-channel reproduction of these sources. The effect of this approach is to assign sources to locations in a stereo field using a pan-position for each source. The Adress algorithm is a popular way of extracting individual music sound sources from a stereo mixture. A drawback of the Adress algorithm is that when time-frequency components in the stereo mixture are shared between two or more sources, calculating the inter-aural intensity scaling parameter for each source for that time-frequency component is challenging. We show how …

Remedying Sound Source Separation Via Azimuth Discrimination And Re-Synthesis, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

Commercially recorded music since the 1950s has been mixed down from many input sound sources to a two- channel reproduction of these sources. The effect of this approach is to assign sources to locations in a stereo field using a pan- position for each source. The Adress algorithm is a popular way of extracting individual music sound sources from a stereo mixture. A drawback of the Adress algorithm is that when time- frequency components in the stereo mixture are shared between two or more sources, calculating the inter-aural intensity scaling parameter for each source for that time-frequency component is challenging. …

Millimetre-Wave Planar Bruce Array Antenna, Zeeshan Ahmed, Manh Ha Hoang, Patrick Mcevoy, Max Ammann

Conference papers

A tri-band mm-wave planar Bruce array antenna for fifth generation communications (5G) is presented. The 16-element planar Bruce array antenna is simulated and fabricated on Rogers RT/Duroid 5880 substrate with thickness of 0.254 mm. For a compact and simple structure, the antenna has a highly directional fan-beam radiation pattern at broadside and peak realized gain of 14.0 dBi.

Deep Learning Towards Intelligent Vehicle Fault Diagnosis, Mohammed Al-Zeyadi, Javier Andreu-Perez, Hani Hagras, Chris Royce, Darren Smith, Piotr Rzonsowski, Ali Malik

Conference papers

Recently, the rapid development of automotive industries has given rise to large multidimensional datasets both in the production sites and after-sale services. Fault diagnostic systems are one of the services that the automotive industries provide. As a consequence of the rapid development of cars features, traditional rule-based diagnostic systems became very limited. Therefore, more sophisticated AI approaches need to be investigated towards more efficient solutions. In this paper, we focus on utilising deep learning so as to build a diagnostic system that is able to estimate the required services in an efficient and effective way. We propose a new model, …

A Statistically Significant Test To Evaluate The Order Or Disorder For A Binary String Of A Finite Length, Jonathan Blackledge, N. Mosola

Conference papers

—This paper addresses a basic problem in regard to the analysis of a finite binary string or bit stream (of compact support), namely, how to tell whether the string is representative of non-random or intelligible information (involving some form of periodicity, for example), whether it is the product of an entirely random process or whether it is something in between thetwo.Thisproblemhasapplicationsthatincludecryptanalysis, quantitative finance, machine learning, artificial intelligence and other forms of signal and image processing involving the general problem of how to distinguishing real noise from information embedded in noise, for example. After providing a short introductiontotheproblem,wefocusontheapplicationofinformation entropy for solving …

A Preliminary Study Of A Graphene Fractal Sierpinski Antenna, Alberto Boretti, Lorenzo Rosa, Jonathan Blackledge, Stefania Castelletto

Conference papers

We provide a preliminary study of a Graphene fractal antenna operating at THz frequencies with the opportunity to modulate the emission. There are a number of advantages of the fractal design, namely multiband/wideband ability, and, a smaller, lighter and simpler configuration for higher gain, that can benefit from the coupling with Graphene, the thinnest and strongest of materials exhibiting very high electrical conductivity and tunability. This paper proposes a conceptual background for the study and presents some preliminary results on the electromagnetic emission simulations undertaken

Digital Image Exchange Using A No-Key(S) Protocol With Phase-Only Encryption,, Jonathan Blackledge, N. Mosola

Conference papers

This paper considers an algorithm for transferring a digital image over an open network using a No-key(s) Protocol or Three-Way Pass and phase-only encryption/decryption. After providing a short study on the theoretical background to the method, an algorithm is presented on a step-by-step basis. Cryptanalysis is undertaken for the three intercept and single intercept cases, when it is assumed that the encrypted data is intercepted in its entirety for each pass or for any single pass, respectively. The algorithm focuses on the exchange of a JPEG image although in principle, the approach is independent of the format of the image …

Meaningful Age-Friendly Design. Case Studies On Enabling Assistive Technology., Matteo Zallio, Damon Berry, Larry J. Leifer

Conference papers

The world population is steadily ageing and the World Health Organization recently stated that 8.5 percent of people worldwide are aged 65 and over. This cohort is projected to account for 1.6 billion people by 2050. Assistive Technology has been developed over previous decades with a particular aim to support people with disabilities. With the evolution of the market and the introduction of wearable technologies and IoT-based (Internet of Things) appliances, Assistive Technology has been influenced by the discipline of Age-Friendly Design, which has been applied to meaningfully improve the autonomy of a larger segment of the population, including older …

Modern Techniques For Discovering Digital Steganography, Michael Hegarty, Anthony Keane

Conference papers

Digital steganography can be difficult to detect and as such is an ideal way of engaging in covert communications across the Internet. This research paper is a work-in-progress report on instances of steganography that were identified on websites on the Internet including some from the DarkWeb using the application of new methods of deep learning algorithms. This approach to the identification of Least Significant Bit (LSB) Steganography using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has demonstrated some efficiency for image classification. The CNN algorithm was trained using datasets of images with known steganography and then applied to datasets with images to identify …