Iranian Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Automatic signal type identification (ASTI) is an important topic for both the civilian and military domains. Most of the proposed identifiers can only recognize a few types of digital signal and usually need high levels of SNRs. This paper presents a new high efficient technique that includes a variety of digital signal types. In this technique, a combination of higher order moments and higher order cumulants (up to eighth) are proposed as the effective features. A hierarchical support vector machine based structure is proposed as the classifier. In order to improve the performance of identifier, a genetic algorithm is used for parameters selection of the classifier. Simulation results show that the proposed technique is able to identify the different types of digital signal (e.g. QAM128, ASK8, and V29) with high accuracy even at low SNRs.

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Accurate gender classification is useful in speech and speaker recognition as well as speech emotion classification, because a better performance has been reported when separate acoustic models are employed for males and females. Gender classification is also apparent in face recognition, video summarization, human-robot interaction, etc. Although gender classification is rather mature in applications dealing with images, it is still in its infancy in speech processing. Age classification, on the other hand, is also concerned as a useful tool in different applications, like issuing different permission levels for different aging groups. This paper concentrates on a comparative study of gender and age classification algorithms applied to speech signal. Experimental results are reported for the Danish Emotional Speech database (DES) and English Language Speech Database for Speaker Recognition (ELSDSR). The Bayes classifier using sequential floating forward selection (SFFS) for feature selection, probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs), support vector machines (SVMs), the K nearest neighbor (K-NN) and Gaussian mixture model (GMM), as different classifiers, are empirically compared in order to determine the best classifier for gender and age classification when speech signal is processed. It is proven that gender classification can be performed with an accuracy of 95% approximately using speech signal either from both genders or male and female separately. The accuracy for age classification is about 88%.

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The aim of this study is to introduce a new methodology for isolation of ectopic rhythms of ambulatory electrocardiogram (ECG) holter data via appropriate statistical analyses imposing reasonable computational burden. First, the events of the ECG signal are detected and delineated using a robust wavelet-based algorithm. Then, using Binary Neyman-Pearson Radius test, an appropriate classifier is designed to categorize ventricular complexes into "Normal + Premature Atrial Contraction (PAC)" and "Premature Ventricular Contraction (PVC)" beats. Afterwards, an innovative measure is defined based on wavelet transform of the delineated P-wave namely as P-Wave Strength Factor (PSF) used for the evaluation of the P-wave power. Finally, ventricular contractions pursuing weak P-waves are categorized as PAC complexes however, those ensuing strong P-waves are specified as normal complexes. The discriminant quality of the PSF-based feature space was evaluated by a modified learning vector quantization (MLVQ) classifier trained with the original QRS complexes and corresponding Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) dyadic scale. Also, performance of the proposed Neyman-Pearson Classifier (NPC) is compared with the MLVQ and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers using a common feature space. The processing speed of the proposed algorithm is more than 176,000 samples/sec showing desirable heart arrhythmia classification performance. The performance of the proposed two-lead NPC algorithm is compared with MLVQ and SVM classifiers and the obtained results indicate the validity of the proposed method. To justify the newly defined feature space (σi1, σi2, PSFi), a NPC with the proposed feature space and a MLVQ classification algorithm trained with the original complex and its corresponding DWT as well as RR interval are considered and their performances were compared with each other. An accuracy difference about 0.15% indicates acceptable discriminant quality of the properly selected feature elements. The proposed algorithm was applied to holter data of the DAY general hospital (more than 1,500,000 beats) and the average values of Se = 99.73% and P+ = 99.58% were achieved for sensitivity and positive predictivity, respectively.

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Differential base station sometimes is not capable of sending correction information for minutes, due to radio interference or loss of signals. To overcome the degradation caused by the loss of Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) Pseudo-Range Correction (PRC), predictions of PRC is possible. In this paper, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Genetic Algorithms (GAs) will be incorporated for predicting DGPS PRC information. The Genetic Algorithm is employed to feature subset selection. Online training for real-time prediction of the PRC enhances the continuity of service on the differential correction signals and therefore improves the positioning accuracy in Real Time DGPS. Given a set of data received from low cost GPS module, the GASVM can predict the PRC precisely when the PRC signal is lost for a short period of time. This method which is introduced for the first time for prediction of PRC is compared to other recently published methods. The experiments show that the total RMS prediction error of GASVM is less than 0.06m for on step and 0.16m for 10 second ahead cases

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The Nonparametric Speech Kernel (NSK), a nonparametric kernel technique, is presented in this study as a novel way to improve Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). The method aims to effectively reduce the size of speech features to improve recognition accuracy. The proposed approach addresses the need for efficient and compact low-dimensional features for speech emotion recognition. Having acknowledged the intrinsic distinctions between speech and picture data, we have refined the Kernel Nonparametric Weighted Feature Extraction (KNWFE) formulation to suggest NSK, which is especially intended for speech emotion identification. The output of NSK can be used as input features for deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), or hybrid architectures. In deep learning, NSK can also be used as a kernel function for kernel-based methods such as kernelized support vector machines (SVM) or kernelized neural networks. Our tests demonstrate that NSK outperforms current techniques, outperforming the best-tested approach by 5.02% and 3.05%, respectively, with an average accuracy of 96.568% for the Persian speech emotion dataset and 82.56% for the Berlin speech emotion dataset.

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In recent years, due to the widespread applications of DC power-based appliances, the researchers attention to the adoption of DC microgrids are continuously increasing. Nevertheless, protection of the DC microgrid is still a major challenge due to a number of protection issues, such as pole-to-ground and pole-to-pole faults, absence of a zero crossing signal, magnitude of the fault current during grid-connected and islanded mode, bidirectional behaviour of converters, and failure of the converters due to enormous electrical stress in the converter switches which are integrated in the microgrid.  Failure of the converter switches can interrupt the charging of the electrical vehicles in the charging stations which can affect transportation facilities. In addition to the above mentioned issues protection of the DC microgrid is more challenging when fault parameters are varying due to dissimilar grounding conditions and varying operational dynamics of the renewable sources of energy. Motivated by the above challenges a support vector machine and ensemble of k-nearest neighbor based protection scheme has been proposed in this paper to accurately detect and classify faults under both of the modes of operation. Results in the section 5 indicate that performance of the protection scheme is greater as compared to other algorithms.

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Cardiovascular arrhythmia is indeed one of the most prevalent cardiac issues globally. In this paper, the primary objective was to develop and evaluate an automated classification system. This system utilizes a comprehensive database of electro- cardiogram (ECG) data, with a particular focus on improving the detection of minority arrhythmia classes.
In this study, the focus was on investigating the performance of three different supervised machine learning models in the context of arrhythmia detection. These models included Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR) and Random Forest (RF). An analysis was conducted using real inter-patient electrocardiogram (ECG) records, which is a more realistic scenario in a clinical environment where ECG data comes from various patients.
The study evaluated the models’ performances based on four important metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score. After thorough experimentation, the results highlighted that the Random Forest (RF) classifier outperformed the other methods in all of the metrics used in the experiments. This classifier achieved an impressive accuracy of 0.94, indicating its effectiveness in accurately detecting arrhythmia in diverse ECG signals collected from different patients.