ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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.
We first consider sensor fusion, a typical multimodal fusion problem critical to building a pervasive computing platform. A systematic fusion technique is described to support both multiple sensors and descriptors for activity recognition. Targeted to learn the optimal combination of kernels, Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) algorithms have been successfully applied to numerous fusion problems in computer vision etc. Utilizing the MKL formulation, next we describe an auto-context algorithm for learning image context via the fusion with low-level descriptors. Furthermore, a principled fusion algorithm using deep learning to optimize kernel machines is developed. By bridging deep architectures with kernel optimization, this approach leverages the benefits of both paradigms and is applied to a wide variety of fusion problems.
In many real-world applications, the modalities exhibit highly specific data structures, such as time sequences and graphs, and consequently, special design of the learning architecture is needed. In order to improve the temporal modeling for multivariate sequences, we developed two architectures centered around attention models. A novel clinical time series analysis model is proposed for several critical problems in healthcare. Another model coupled with triplet ranking loss as metric learning framework is described to better solve speaker diarization. Compared to state-of-the-art recurrent networks, these attention-based multivariate analysis tools achieve improved performance while having a lower computational complexity. Finally, in order to perform community detection on multilayer graphs, a fusion algorithm is described to derive node embedding from word embedding techniques and also exploit the complementary relational information contained in each layer of the graph.
The thesis starts with a careful review of existing signal processing techniques and state of the art methods possible for vital signs monitoring using UWB impulse systems. Then an in-depth analysis of various approaches is presented.
Robust heart-rate monitoring methods are proposed based on a novel result: spectrally the fundamental heartbeat frequency is respiration-interference-limited while its higher-order harmonics are noise-limited. The higher-order statistics related to heartbeat can be a robust indication when the fundamental heartbeat is masked by the strong lower-order harmonics of respiration or when phase calibration is not accurate if phase-based method is used. Analytical spectral analysis is performed to validate that the higher-order harmonics of heartbeat is almost respiration-interference free. Extensive experiments have been conducted to justify an adaptive heart-rate monitoring algorithm. The scenarios of interest are, 1) single subject, 2) multiple subjects at different ranges, 3) multiple subjects at same range, and 4) through wall monitoring.
A remote sensing radar system implemented using the proposed adaptive heart-rate estimation algorithm is compared to the competing remote sensing technology, a remote imaging photoplethysmography system, showing promising results.
State of the art methods for vital signs monitoring are fundamentally related to process the phase variation due to vital signs motions. Their performance are determined by a phase calibration procedure. Existing methods fail to consider the time-varying nature of phase noise. There is no prior knowledge about which of the corrupted complex signals, in-phase component (I) and quadrature component (Q), need to be corrected. A precise phase calibration routine is proposed based on the respiration pattern. The I/Q samples from every breath are more likely to experience similar motion noise and therefore they should be corrected independently. High slow-time sampling rate is used to ensure phase calibration accuracy. Occasionally, a 180-degree phase shift error occurs after the initial calibration step and should be corrected as well. All phase trajectories in the I/Q plot are only allowed in certain angular spaces. This precise phase calibration routine is validated through computer simulations incorporating a time-varying phase noise model, controlled mechanic system, and human subject experiment.
Revealing the underlying structure and dynamics of complex networked systems from observed data without of any specific prior information is of fundamental importance to science, engineering, and society. We articulate a Markov network based model, the sparse dynamical Boltzmann machine (SDBM), as a universal network structural estimator and dynamics approximator based on techniques including compressive sensing and K-means algorithm. It recovers the network structure of the original system and predicts its short-term or even long-term dynamical behavior for a large variety of representative dynamical processes on model and real-world complex networks.
One of the most challenging problems in complex dynamical systems is to control complex networks.
Upon finding that the energy required to approach a target state with reasonable precision
is often unbearably large, and the energy of controlling a set of networks with similar structural properties follows a fat-tail distribution, we identify fundamental structural ``short boards'' that play a dominant role in the enormous energy and offer a theoretical interpretation for the fat-tail distribution and simple strategies to significantly reduce the energy.
Extreme events and cascading failure, a type of collective behavior in complex networked systems, often have catastrophic consequences. Utilizing transportation and evolutionary game dynamics as prototypical
settings, we investigate the emergence of extreme events in simplex complex networks, mobile ad-hoc networks and multi-layer interdependent networks. A striking resonance-like phenomenon and the emergence of global-scale cascading breakdown are discovered. We derive analytic theories to understand the mechanism of
control at a quantitative level and articulate cost-effective control schemes to significantly suppress extreme events and the cascading process.
Conventional approaches focusing on array element failures are mainly based on interpolation or sequential learning algorithm. Both of them rely heavily on some prior knowledge such as the information of the failures or a training dataset without missing data. In addition, since most of the existing approaches are developed for DOA estimation, their recovery target is usually the co-variance matrix but not the signal matrix.
In this thesis, a new signal recovery method based on matrix completion (MC) theory is introduced. It aims to directly refill the absent entries in the signal matrix without any prior knowledge. We proposed a novel overlapping reshaping method to satisfy the applying conditions of MC algorithms. Compared to other existing MC based approaches, our proposed method can provide us higher probability of successful recovery. The thesis describes the principle of the algorithms and analyzes the performance of this method. A few application examples with simulation results are also provided.
This research investigates the algorithms employing emerging computational advances in system operation policies that can improve the flexibility of the electricity industry. The focus of this study is on flexible operation policies for renewable generation, particularly wind generation. Specifically, distributional forecasts of windfarm generation are used to dispatch a “discounted” amount of the wind generation, leaving a reserve margin that can be used for reserve if needed. This study presents systematic mathematic formulations that allow the operator incorporate this flexibility into the operation optimization model to increase the benefits in the energy and reserve scheduling procedure. Incorporating this formulation into the dispatch optimization problem provides the operator with the ability of using forecasted probability distributions as well as the off-line generated policies to choose proper approaches for operating the system in real-time. Methods to generate such policies are discussed and a forecast-based approach for developing wind margin policies is presented. The impacts of incorporating such policies in the electricity market models are also investigated.
The first part consists of three chapters, with a focus on secondary-user authentication. Chapter One gives an overview of the challenges and existing solutions in spectrum-misuse detection. Chapter Two presents SpecGuard, the first crowdsourced spectrum-misuse detection framework for DSA systems. In SpecGuard, three novel schemes are proposed for embedding and detecting a spectrum permit at the physical layer. Chapter Three proposes SafeDSA, a novel PHY-based scheme utilizing temporal features for authenticating secondary users. In SafeDSA, the secondary user embeds his spectrum authorization into the cyclic prefix of each physical-layer symbol, which can be detected and authenticated by a verifier.
The second part also consists of three chapters, with a focus on crowdsourced spectrum sensing (CSS) with privacy consideration. CSS allows a spectrum sensing provider (SSP) to outsource the spectrum sensing to distributed mobile users. Without strong incentives and location-privacy protection in place, however, mobile users are reluctant to act as crowdsourcing workers for spectrum-sensing tasks. Chapter Four gives an overview of the challenges and existing solutions. Chapter Five presents PriCSS, where the SSP selects participants based on the exponential mechanism such that the participants' sensing cost, associated with their locations, are privacy-preserved. Chapter Six further proposes DPSense, a framework that allows the honest-but-curious SSP to select mobile users for executing spatiotemporal spectrum-sensing tasks without violating the location privacy of mobile users. By collecting perturbed location traces with differential privacy guarantee from participants, the SSP assigns spectrum-sensing tasks to participants with the consideration of both spatial and temporal factors.
Through theoretical analysis and simulations, the efficacy and effectiveness of the proposed schemes are validated.
Recovery of CS video frames is far more complex than still images, which are known to be (approximately) sparse in a linear basis such as the discrete cosine transform. By combining sparsity of individual frames with an optical flow-based model of inter-frame dependence, the perceptual quality and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of reconstructed frames is improved. The efficacy of this approach is demonstrated for the cases of \textit{a priori} known image motion and unknown but constant image-wide motion.
Although video sequences can be reconstructed from CS measurements, the process is computationally costly. In autonomous systems, this reconstruction step is unnecessary if higher-level conclusions can be drawn directly from the CS data. A tracking algorithm is described and evaluated which can hold target vehicles at very high levels of compression where reconstruction of video frames fails. The algorithm performs tracking by detection using a particle filter with likelihood given by a maximum average correlation height (MACH) target template model.
Motivated by possible improvements over the MACH filter-based likelihood estimation of the tracking algorithm, the application of deep learning models to detection and classification of compressively sensed images is explored. In tests, a Deep Boltzmann Machine trained on CS measurements outperforms a naive reconstruct-first approach.
Taken together, progress in these three areas of CS inference has the potential to lower system cost and improve performance, opening up new applications of CS video cameras.