This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.

Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.

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Description
Electrical neural activity detection and tracking have many applications in medical research and brain computer interface technologies. In this thesis, we focus on the development of advanced signal processing algorithms to track neural activity and on the mapping of these algorithms onto hardware to enable real-time tracking. At the heart

Electrical neural activity detection and tracking have many applications in medical research and brain computer interface technologies. In this thesis, we focus on the development of advanced signal processing algorithms to track neural activity and on the mapping of these algorithms onto hardware to enable real-time tracking. At the heart of these algorithms is particle filtering (PF), a sequential Monte Carlo technique used to estimate the unknown parameters of dynamic systems. First, we analyze the bottlenecks in existing PF algorithms, and we propose a new parallel PF (PPF) algorithm based on the independent Metropolis-Hastings (IMH) algorithm. We show that the proposed PPF-IMH algorithm improves the root mean-squared error (RMSE) estimation performance, and we demonstrate that a parallel implementation of the algorithm results in significant reduction in inter-processor communication. We apply our implementation on a Xilinx Virtex-5 field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform to demonstrate that, for a one-dimensional problem, the PPF-IMH architecture with four processing elements and 1,000 particles can process input samples at 170 kHz by using less than 5% FPGA resources. We also apply the proposed PPF-IMH to waveform-agile sensing to achieve real-time tracking of dynamic targets with high RMSE tracking performance. We next integrate the PPF-IMH algorithm to track the dynamic parameters in neural sensing when the number of neural dipole sources is known. We analyze the computational complexity of a PF based method and propose the use of multiple particle filtering (MPF) to reduce the complexity. We demonstrate the improved performance of MPF using numerical simulations with both synthetic and real data. We also propose an FPGA implementation of the MPF algorithm and show that the implementation supports real-time tracking. For the more realistic scenario of automatically estimating an unknown number of time-varying neural dipole sources, we propose a new approach based on the probability hypothesis density filtering (PHDF) algorithm. The PHDF is implemented using particle filtering (PF-PHDF), and it is applied in a closed-loop to first estimate the number of dipole sources and then their corresponding amplitude, location and orientation parameters. We demonstrate the improved tracking performance of the proposed PF-PHDF algorithm and map it onto a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA platform to show its real-time implementation potential. Finally, we propose the use of sensor scheduling and compressive sensing techniques to reduce the number of active sensors, and thus overall power consumption, of electroencephalography (EEG) systems. We propose an efficient sensor scheduling algorithm which adaptively configures EEG sensors at each measurement time interval to reduce the number of sensors needed for accurate tracking. We combine the sensor scheduling method with PF-PHDF and implement the system on an FPGA platform to achieve real-time tracking. We also investigate the sparsity of EEG signals and integrate compressive sensing with PF to estimate neural activity. Simulation results show that both sensor scheduling and compressive sensing based methods achieve comparable tracking performance with significantly reduced number of sensors.
ContributorsMiao, Lifeng (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Immunosignaturing is a medical test for assessing the health status of a patient by applying microarrays of random sequence peptides to determine the patient's immune fingerprint by associating antibodies from a biological sample to immune responses. The immunosignature measurements can potentially provide pre-symptomatic diagnosis for infectious diseases or detection of

Immunosignaturing is a medical test for assessing the health status of a patient by applying microarrays of random sequence peptides to determine the patient's immune fingerprint by associating antibodies from a biological sample to immune responses. The immunosignature measurements can potentially provide pre-symptomatic diagnosis for infectious diseases or detection of biological threats. Currently, traditional bioinformatics tools, such as data mining classification algorithms, are used to process the large amount of peptide microarray data. However, these methods generally require training data and do not adapt to changing immune conditions or additional patient information. This work proposes advanced processing techniques to improve the classification and identification of single and multiple underlying immune response states embedded in immunosignatures, making it possible to detect both known and previously unknown diseases or biothreat agents. Novel adaptive learning methodologies for un- supervised and semi-supervised clustering integrated with immunosignature feature extraction approaches are proposed. The techniques are based on extracting novel stochastic features from microarray binding intensities and use Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture models to adaptively cluster the immunosignatures in the feature space. This learning-while-clustering approach allows continuous discovery of antibody activity by adaptively detecting new disease states, with limited a priori disease or patient information. A beta process factor analysis model to determine underlying patient immune responses is also proposed to further improve the adaptive clustering performance by formatting new relationships between patients and antibody activity. In order to extend the clustering methods for diagnosing multiple states in a patient, the adaptive hierarchical Dirichlet process is integrated with modified beta process factor analysis latent feature modeling to identify relationships between patients and infectious agents. The use of Bayesian nonparametric adaptive learning techniques allows for further clustering if additional patient data is received. Significant improvements in feature identification and immune response clustering are demonstrated using samples from patients with different diseases.
ContributorsMalin, Anna (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Lacroix, Zoé (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
The continuous time-tagging of photon arrival times for high count rate sources isnecessary for applications such as optical communications, quantum key encryption, and astronomical measurements. Detection of Hanbury-Brown and Twiss (HBT) single photon correlations from thermal sources, such as stars, requires a combination of high dynamic range, long integration times, and low systematics

The continuous time-tagging of photon arrival times for high count rate sources isnecessary for applications such as optical communications, quantum key encryption, and astronomical measurements. Detection of Hanbury-Brown and Twiss (HBT) single photon correlations from thermal sources, such as stars, requires a combination of high dynamic range, long integration times, and low systematics in the photon detection and time tagging system. The continuous nature of the measurements and the need for highly accurate timing resolution requires a customized time-to-digital converter (TDC). A custom built, two-channel, field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based TDC capable of continuously time tagging single photons with sub clock cycle timing resolution was characterized. Auto-correlation and cross-correlation measurements were used to constrain spurious systematic effects in the pulse count data as a function of system variables. These variables included, but were not limited to, incident photon count rate, incoming signal attenuation, and measurements of fixed signals. Additionally, a generalized likelihood ratio test using maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) was derived as a means to detect and estimate correlated photon signal parameters. The derived GLRT was capable of detecting correlated photon signals in a laboratory setting with a high degree of statistical confidence. A proof is presented in which the MLE for the amplitude of the correlated photon signal is shown to be the minimum variance unbiased estimator (MVUE). The fully characterized TDC was used in preliminary measurements of astronomical sources using ground based telescopes. Finally, preliminary theoretical groundwork is established for the deep space optical communications system of the proposed Breakthrough Starshot project, in which low-mass craft will travel to the Alpha Centauri system to collect scientific data from Proxima B. This theoretical groundwork utilizes recent and upcoming space based optical communication systems as starting points for the Starshot communication system.
ContributorsHodges, Todd Michael William (Author) / Mauskopf, Philip (Thesis advisor) / Trichopoulos, George (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
With the rapid development of reflect-arrays and software-defined meta-surfaces, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been envisioned as promising technologies for next-generation wireless communication and sensing systems. These surfaces comprise massive numbers of nearly-passive elements that interact with the incident signals in a smart way to improve the performance of such

With the rapid development of reflect-arrays and software-defined meta-surfaces, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been envisioned as promising technologies for next-generation wireless communication and sensing systems. These surfaces comprise massive numbers of nearly-passive elements that interact with the incident signals in a smart way to improve the performance of such systems. In RIS-aided communication systems, designing this smart interaction, however, requires acquiring large-dimensional channel knowledge between the RIS and the transmitter/receiver. Acquiring this knowledge is one of the most crucial challenges in RISs as it is associated with large computational and hardware complexity. For RIS-aided sensing systems, it is interesting to first investigate scene depth perception based on millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) sensing. While mmWave MIMO sensing systems address some critical limitations suffered by optical sensors, realizing these systems possess several key challenges: communication-constrained sensing framework design, beam codebook design, and scene depth estimation challenges. Given the high spatial resolution provided by the RISs, RIS-aided mmWave sensing systems have the potential to improve the scene depth perception, while imposing some key challenges too. In this dissertation, for RIS-aided communication systems, efficient RIS interaction design solutions are proposed by leveraging tools from compressive sensing and deep learning. The achievable rates of these solutions approach the upper bound, which assumes perfect channel knowledge, with negligible training overhead. For RIS-aided sensing systems, a mmWave MIMO based sensing framework is first developed for building accurate depth maps under the constraints imposed by the communication transceivers. Then, a scene depth estimation framework based on RIS-aided sensing is developed for building high-resolution accurate depth maps. Numerical simulations illustrate the promising performance of the proposed solutions, highlighting their potential for next-generation communication and sensing systems.
ContributorsTaha, Abdelrahman (Author) / Alkhateeb, Ahmed (Thesis advisor) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Michelusi, Nicolò (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in sharing available bandwidth to avoid spectrum congestion. With an ever-increasing number wireless users, it is critical to develop signal processing based spectrum sharing algorithms to achieve cooperative use of the allocated spectrum among multiple systems in order to reduce

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in sharing available bandwidth to avoid spectrum congestion. With an ever-increasing number wireless users, it is critical to develop signal processing based spectrum sharing algorithms to achieve cooperative use of the allocated spectrum among multiple systems in order to reduce interference between systems. This work studies the radar and communications systems coexistence problem using two main approaches. The first approach develops methodologies to increase radar target tracking performance under low signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) conditions due to the coexistence of strong communications interference. The second approach jointly optimizes the performance of both systems by co-designing a common transmit waveform.

When concentrating on improving radar tracking performance, a pulsed radar that is tracking a single target coexisting with high powered communications interference is considered. Although the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on the covariance of an unbiased estimator of deterministic parameters provides a bound on the estimation mean squared error (MSE), there exists an SINR threshold at which estimator covariance rapidly deviates from the CRLB. After demonstrating that different radar waveforms experience different estimation SINR thresholds using the Barankin bound (BB), a new radar waveform design method is proposed based on predicting the waveform-dependent BB SINR threshold under low SINR operating conditions.

A novel method of predicting the SINR threshold value for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is proposed. A relationship is shown to exist between the formulation of the BB kernel and the probability of selecting sidelobes for the MLE. This relationship is demonstrated as an accurate means of threshold prediction for the radar target parameter estimation of frequency, time-delay and angle-of-arrival.



For the co-design radar and communications system problem, the use of a common transmit waveform for a pulse-Doppler radar and a multiuser communications system is proposed. The signaling scheme for each system is selected from a class of waveforms with nonlinear phase function by optimizing the waveform parameters to minimize interference between the two systems and interference among communications users. Using multi-objective optimization, a trade-off in system performance is demonstrated when selecting waveforms that minimize both system interference and tracking MSE.
ContributorsKota, John S (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
The quality of real-world visual content is typically impaired by many factors including image noise and blur. Detecting and analyzing these impairments are important steps for multiple computer vision tasks. This work focuses on perceptual-based locally adaptive noise and blur detection and their application to image restoration.

In the context of

The quality of real-world visual content is typically impaired by many factors including image noise and blur. Detecting and analyzing these impairments are important steps for multiple computer vision tasks. This work focuses on perceptual-based locally adaptive noise and blur detection and their application to image restoration.

In the context of noise detection, this work proposes perceptual-based full-reference and no-reference objective image quality metrics by integrating perceptually weighted local noise into a probability summation model. Results are reported on both the LIVE and TID2008 databases. The proposed metrics achieve consistently a good performance across noise types and across databases as compared to many of the best very recent quality metrics. The proposed metrics are able to predict with high accuracy the relative amount of perceived noise in images of different content.

In the context of blur detection, existing approaches are either computationally costly or cannot perform reliably when dealing with the spatially-varying nature of the defocus blur. In addition, many existing approaches do not take human perception into account. This work proposes a blur detection algorithm that is capable of detecting and quantifying the level of spatially-varying blur by integrating directional edge spread calculation, probability of blur detection and local probability summation. The proposed method generates a blur map indicating the relative amount of perceived local blurriness. In order to detect the flat
ear flat regions that do not contribute to perceivable blur, a perceptual model based on the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) is further integrated in the proposed blur detection algorithm to generate perceptually significant blur maps. We compare our proposed method with six other state-of-the-art blur detection methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs the best both visually and quantitatively.

This work further investigates the application of the proposed blur detection methods to image deblurring. Two selective perceptual-based image deblurring frameworks are proposed, to improve the image deblurring results and to reduce the restoration artifacts. In addition, an edge-enhanced super resolution algorithm is proposed, and is shown to achieve better reconstructed results for the edge regions.
ContributorsZhu, Tong (Author) / Karam, Lina (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Myint, Soe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Biological and biomedical measurements, when adequately analyzed and processed, can be used to impart quantitative diagnosis during primary health care consultation to improve patient adherence to recommended treatments. For example, analyzing neural recordings from neurostimulators implanted in patients with neurological disorders can be used by a physician to adjust detrimental

Biological and biomedical measurements, when adequately analyzed and processed, can be used to impart quantitative diagnosis during primary health care consultation to improve patient adherence to recommended treatments. For example, analyzing neural recordings from neurostimulators implanted in patients with neurological disorders can be used by a physician to adjust detrimental stimulation parameters to improve treatment. As another example, biosequences, such as sequences from peptide microarrays obtained from a biological sample, can potentially provide pre-symptomatic diagnosis for infectious diseases when processed to associate antibodies to specific pathogens or infectious agents. This work proposes advanced statistical signal processing and machine learning methodologies to assess neurostimulation from neural recordings and to extract diagnostic information from biosequences.

For locating specific cognitive and behavioral information in different regions of the brain, neural recordings are processed using sequential Bayesian filtering methods to detect and estimate both the number of neural sources and their corresponding parameters. Time-frequency based feature selection algorithms are combined with adaptive machine learning approaches to suppress physiological and non-physiological artifacts present in neural recordings. Adaptive processing and unsupervised clustering methods applied to neural recordings are also used to suppress neurostimulation artifacts and classify between various behavior tasks to assess the level of neurostimulation in patients.

For pathogen detection and identification, random peptide sequences and their properties are first uniquely mapped to highly-localized signals and their corresponding parameters in the time-frequency plane. Time-frequency signal processing methods are then applied to estimate antigenic determinants or epitope candidates for detecting and identifying potential pathogens.
ContributorsMaurer, Alexander Joseph (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
This dissertation introduces stochastic ordering of instantaneous channel powers of fading channels as a general method to compare the performance of a communication system over two different channels, even when a closed-form expression for the metric may not be available. Such a comparison is with respect to a variety of

This dissertation introduces stochastic ordering of instantaneous channel powers of fading channels as a general method to compare the performance of a communication system over two different channels, even when a closed-form expression for the metric may not be available. Such a comparison is with respect to a variety of performance metrics such as error rates, outage probability and ergodic capacity, which share common mathematical properties such as monotonicity, convexity or complete monotonicity. Complete monotonicity of a metric, such as the symbol error rate, in conjunction with the stochastic Laplace transform order between two fading channels implies the ordering of the two channels with respect to the metric. While it has been established previously that certain modulation schemes have convex symbol error rates, there is no study of the complete monotonicity of the same, which helps in establishing stronger channel ordering results. Toward this goal, the current research proves for the first time, that all 1-dimensional and 2-dimensional modulations have completely monotone symbol error rates. Furthermore, it is shown that the frequently used parametric fading distributions for modeling line of sight exhibit a monotonicity in the line of sight parameter with respect to the Laplace transform order. While the Laplace transform order can also be used to order fading distributions based on the ergodic capacity, there exist several distributions which are not Laplace transform ordered, although they have ordered ergodic capacities. To address this gap, a new stochastic order called the ergodic capacity order has been proposed herein, which can be used to compare channels based on the ergodic capacity. Using stochastic orders, average performance of systems involving multiple random variables are compared over two different channels. These systems include diversity combining schemes, relay networks, and signal detection over fading channels with non-Gaussian additive noise. This research also addresses the problem of unifying fading distributions. This unification is based on infinite divisibility, which subsumes almost all known fading distributions, and provides simplified expressions for performance metrics, in addition to enabling stochastic ordering.
ContributorsRajan, Adithya (Author) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Tracking a time-varying number of targets is a challenging

dynamic state estimation problem whose complexity is intensified

under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or high clutter conditions.

This is important, for example, when tracking

multiple, closely spaced targets moving in the same direction such as a

convoy of low observable vehicles moving

Tracking a time-varying number of targets is a challenging

dynamic state estimation problem whose complexity is intensified

under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or high clutter conditions.

This is important, for example, when tracking

multiple, closely spaced targets moving in the same direction such as a

convoy of low observable vehicles moving through a forest or multiple

targets moving in a crisscross pattern. The SNR in

these applications is usually low as the reflected signals from

the targets are weak or the noise level is very high.

An effective approach for detecting and tracking a single target

under low SNR conditions is the track-before-detect filter (TBDF)

that uses unthresholded measurements. However, the TBDF has only been used to

track a small fixed number of targets at low SNR.

This work proposes a new multiple target TBDF approach to track a

dynamically varying number of targets under the recursive Bayesian framework.

For a given maximum number of

targets, the state estimates are obtained by estimating the joint

multiple target posterior probability density function under all possible

target

existence combinations. The estimation of the corresponding target existence

combination probabilities and the target existence probabilities are also

derived. A feasible sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) based implementation

algorithm is proposed. The approximation accuracy of the SMC

method with a reduced number of particles is improved by an efficient

proposal density function that partitions the multiple target space into a

single target space.

The proposed multiple target TBDF method is extended to track targets in sea

clutter using highly time-varying radar measurements. A generalized

likelihood function for closely spaced multiple targets in compound Gaussian

sea clutter is derived together with the maximum likelihood estimate of

the model parameters using an iterative fixed point algorithm.

The TBDF performance is improved by proposing a computationally feasible

method to estimate the space-time covariance matrix of rapidly-varying sea

clutter. The method applies the Kronecker product approximation to the

covariance matrix and uses particle filtering to solve the resulting dynamic

state space model formulation.
ContributorsEbenezer, Samuel P (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Thousands of high-resolution images are generated each day. Detecting and analyzing variations in these images are key steps in image understanding. This work focuses on spatial and multitemporal

visual change detection and its applications in multi-temporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images.

The Canny edge detector is one of the most widely-used edge

Thousands of high-resolution images are generated each day. Detecting and analyzing variations in these images are key steps in image understanding. This work focuses on spatial and multitemporal

visual change detection and its applications in multi-temporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images.

The Canny edge detector is one of the most widely-used edge detection algorithms due to its superior performance in terms of SNR and edge localization and only one response to a single edge. In this work, we propose a mechanism to implement the Canny algorithm at the block level without any loss in edge detection performance as compared to the original frame-level Canny algorithm. The resulting block-based algorithm has significantly reduced memory requirements and can achieve a significantly reduced latency. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can be easily integrated with other block-based image processing systems. In addition, quantitative evaluations and subjective tests show that the edge detection performance of the proposed algorithm is better than the original frame-based algorithm, especially when noise is present in the images.

In the context of multi-temporal SAR images for earth monitoring applications, one critical issue is the detection of changes occurring after a natural or anthropic disaster. In this work, we propose a novel similarity measure for automatic change detection using a pair of SAR images

acquired at different times and apply it in both the spatial and wavelet domains. This measure is based on the evolution of the local statistics of the image between two dates. The local statistics are modeled as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), which is more suitable and flexible to approximate the local distribution of the SAR image with distinct land-cover typologies. Tests on real datasets show that the proposed detectors outperform existing methods in terms of the quality of the similarity maps, which are assessed using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, and in terms of the total error rates of the final change detection maps. Furthermore, we proposed a new

similarity measure for automatic change detection based on a divisive normalization transform in order to reduce the computation complexity. Tests show that our proposed DNT-based change detector

exhibits competitive detection performance while achieving lower computational complexity as compared to previously suggested methods.
ContributorsXu, Qian (Author) / Karam, Lina J (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014