Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Research Publications

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    Energy Efficient Time Synchronization in WSN for Critical Infrastructure Monitoring
    Rao, AS ; Gubbi, J ; Tuan, N ; Nguyen, J ; Palaniswami, M ; Wyld, DC ; Wozniak, M ; Chaki, N ; Meghanathan, N ; Nagamalai, D (SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN, 2011-01-01)
    Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is becoming popular in analyzing the life of critical infrastructure such as bridges on a continuous basis. For most of the applications, data aggregation requires high sampling rate. A need for accurate time synchronization in the order of 0.6 − 9 μs every few minutes is necessary for data collection and analysis. Two-stage energy-efficient time synchronization is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the network is divided into clusters and a head node is elected using Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy based algorithm. Later, multiple packets of different lengths are used to estimate the delay between the elected head and the entire network hierarchically at different levels. Algorithmic scheme limits error to 3-hop worst case synchronization error. Unlike earlier energy-efficient time synchronization schemes, the achieved results increase the lifetime of the network.
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    A robust algorithm for foreground extraction in crowded scenes
    Rao, AS ; Gubbi, J ; Marusic, S ; Palaniswami, M (IEEE, 2012-12-01)
    The widespread availability of surveillance cameras and digital technology has improved video based security measures in public places. Surveillance systems have been assisting officials both in civil and military applications. It is helping to identify unlawful activities by means of uninterrupted transmission of surveillance videos. By this, the system is adding extraneous onus on to the already existing workload of security officers. Instead, if the surveillance system is intelligent and efficient enough to identify the events of interest and alert the officers, it alleviates the burden of continuous monitoring. In other words, our existing surveillance systems are lacking to identify the objects that are dissimilar in shape, size, and color especially in identifying human beings (nonrigid motions). Global illumination changes, frequent occurrences of shadows, insufficient lighting conditions, unique properties of slow and fast moving objects, unforeseen appearance of objects and its behavior, availability of system memory, etc., may be ascribed to the limitations of existing systems. In this paper, we present a filtering technique to extract foreground information, which uses RGB component and chrominance channels to neutralize the effects of nonuniform illumination, remove shadows, and detect both slow-moving and distant objects.
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    A Pilot Study of Urban Noise Monitoring Architecture Using Wireless Sensor Networks
    Gubbi, J ; Marusic, S ; Rao, AS ; Law, YW ; Palaniswami, M (IEEE, 2013-01-01)
    Internet of Things (IoT) is denned as interconnection of sensing and actuating devices providing the ability to share information across platforms through a unified framework, developing a common operating picture for enabling innovative applications. As the world urban population is set to cross unprecedented levels, adequate provision of services and infrastructure poses huge challenges. The emerging IoT that offers ubiquitous sensing and actuation can be utilized effectively for managing urban environments. In this paper, a new architecture for noise monitoring in urban environments is proposed. The architecture is scalable and applicable to other sensors required for city management. In addition to the architecture, a new noise monitoring hardware platform is reported and visualization of the data is presented. An emerging citizen centric participatory sensing is discussed in the context of noise monitoring.
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    A Pilot Study on the use of Accelerometer Sensors for Monitoring Post Acute Stroke Patients
    Gubbi, J ; Kumar, D ; Rao, AS ; Yan, B ; Palaniswami, M (IEEE, 2013)
    The high incidence of stroke has raised a major concern among health professionals in recent years. Concerted efforts from medical and engineering communities are being exercised to tackle the problem at its early stage. In this direction, a pilot study to analyze and detect the affected arm of the stroke patient based on hand movements is presented. The premise is that the correlation of magnitude of the activities of the two arms vary significantly for stroke patients from controls. Further, the cross-correlation of right and left arms for three axes are differentiable for patients and controls. A total of 22 subjects (15 patients and 7 controls) were included in this study. An overall accuracy of 95.45% was obtained with sensitivity of 1 and specificity of 0.86 using correlation based method.
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    Crowd Density Estimation Based on Optical Flow and Hierarchical Clustering
    Rao, AS ; Gubbi, J ; Marusic, S ; Stanley, P ; Palaniswami, M (IEEE, 2013-01-01)
    Crowd density estimation has gained much attention from researchers recently due to availability of low cost cameras and communication bandwidth. In video surveillance applications, counting people and creating a temporal profile is of high interest. Surveillance systems face difficulties in detecting motion from the scene due to varying environmental conditions and occlusion. Instead of detecting and tracking individual person, density estimation is an approximate method to count people. The approximation is often more accurate than individual tracking in occluded scenarios. In this work, a new technique to estimate crowd density is proposed. A block-based dense optical flow with spatial and temporal filtering is used to obtain velocities in order to infer the locations of objects in crowded scenarios. Furthermore, a hierarchical clustering is employed to cluster the objects based on Euclidean distance metric. The Cophenetic correlation coefficient for the clusters highlighted the fact that our preprocessing and localizing of object movements form hierarchical clusters that are structured well with reasonable accuracy without temporal post-processing.
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    Determination of Object Directions Using Optical Flow for Crowd Monitoring
    Rao, AS ; Gubbi, J ; Marusic, S ; Maher, A ; Palaniswami, M ; Bebis, G ; Boyle, R ; Parvin, B ; Koracin, D ; Li, B ; Porikli, F ; Zordan, V ; Klosowski, J ; Coquillart, S ; Luo, X ; Chen, M ; Gotz, D (SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN, 2013-01-01)
    Determination of object direction in a multi-camera tracking system is critical. The absence of object direction from other cameras pose challenges if the object is along the optical axis. The problem of determining object direction worsens further if the cameras in the existing infrastructure are improperly placed and are uncontrollable. To determine the direction of an object in such situations, three methods based on optical flow (OF) are presented. The first method uses centroids of optical flow vector magnitudes and Kalman filter for tracking and is suitable for less crowded scenarios. The second method uses geometric moments to evaluate the flow vector distribution and to ascertain the direction in case of crowded scenarios by partitioning the scene and then applying moments to individual partitions independently. The third method is appropriate for small-sized objects near vanishing points where global object motion is less. During surveillance, whether multi-object, single-object or crowded scenarios, the aforementioned methods are applicable accordingly. The results show that the object directions can be accurately inferred from three methods for different scenarios.
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    Effect of ECG-derived respiration (EDR) on modeling ventricular repolarization dynamics in different physiological and psychological conditions
    Imam, MH ; Karmakar, CK ; Khandoker, AH ; Palaniswami, M (SPRINGER HEIDELBERG, 2014-10)
    Ventricular repolarization dynamics is an important predictor of the outcome in cardiovascular diseases. Mathematical modeling of the heart rate variability (RR interval variability) and ventricular repolarization variability (QT interval variability) is one of the popular methods to understand the dynamics of ventricular repolarization. Although ECG derived respiration (EDR) was previously suggested as a surrogate of respiration, but the effect of respiratory movement on ventricular repolarization dynamics was not studied. In this study, the importance of considering the effect of respiration and the validity of using EDR as a surrogate of respiration for linear parametric modeling of ventricular repolarization variability is studied in two cases with different physiological and psychological conditions. In the first case study, we used 20 young and 20 old healthy subjects' ECG and respiration data from Fantasia database at Physionet to analyze a bivariate QT-RR and a trivariate [Formula: see text] model structure to study the aging effect on cardiac repolarization variability. In the second study, we used 16 healthy subjects' data from drivedb (stress detection for automobile drivers) database at Physionet to do the same analysis for different psychological condition (i.e., in stressed and no stress condition). The results of our study showed that model having respiratory information (QT-RR-RESP and QT-RR-EDR) gave significantly better fit value (p < 0.05) than that of found from the QT-RR model. EDR showed statistically similar (p > 0.05) performance as that of respiration as an exogenous model input in describing repolarization variability irrespective of age and different mental conditions. Another finding of our study is that both respiration and EDR-based models can significantly (p < 0.05) differentiate the ventricular repolarization dynamics between healthy subjects of different age groups and with different psychological conditions, whereas models without respiration or EDR cannot distinguish between the groups. These results established the importance of using respiration and the validity of using EDR as a surrogate of respiration in the absence of respiration signal recording in linear parametric modeling of ventricular repolarization variability in healthy subjects.
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    Risk stratification of cardiac autonomic neuropathy based on multi-lag Tone-Entropy
    Karmakar, CK ; Khandoker, AH ; Jelinek, HF ; Palaniswami, M (SPRINGER HEIDELBERG, 2013-05)
    Cardiac autonomic neuropathy (CAN) is an irreversible condition affecting the autonomic nervous system, which leads to abnormal functioning of the visceral organs and affects critical body functions such as blood pressure, heart rate and kidney filtration. This study presents multi-lag Tone-Entropy (T-E) analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) at multiple lags as a screening tool for CAN. A total of 41 ECG recordings were acquired from diabetic subjects with definite CAN (CAN+) and without CAN (CAN-) and analyzed. Tone and entropy values of each patient were calculated for different beat sequence lengths (len: 50-900) and lags (m: 1-8). The CAN- group was found to have a lower mean tone value compared to that of CAN+ group for all m and len, whereas the mean entropy value was higher in CAN- than that in CAN+ group. Leave-one-out (LOO) cross-validation tests using a quadratic discriminant (QD) classifier were applied to investigate the performance of multi-lag T-E features. We obtained 100 % accuracy for tone and entropy with len = 250 and m = {2, 3} settings, which is better than the performance of T-E technique based on lag m = 1. The results demonstrate the usefulness of multi-lag T-E analysis over single lag analysis in CAN diagnosis for risk stratification and highlight the change in autonomic nervous system modulation of the heart rate associated with cardiac autonomic neuropathy.
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    Sensitivity of temporal heart rate variability in Poincare plot to changes in parasympathetic nervous system activity
    Karmakar, CK ; Khandoker, AH ; Voss, A ; Palaniswami, M (BMC, 2011-03-03)
    BACKGROUND: A novel descriptor (Complex Correlation Measure (CCM)) for measuring the variability in the temporal structure of Poincaré plot has been developed to characterize or distinguish between Poincaré plots with similar shapes. METHODS: This study was designed to assess the changes in temporal structure of the Poincaré plot using CCM during atropine infusion, 70° head-up tilt and scopolamine administration in healthy human subjects. CCM quantifies the point-to-point variation of the signal rather than gross description of the Poincaré plot. The physiological relevance of CCM was demonstrated by comparing the changes in CCM values with autonomic perturbation during all phases of the experiment. The sensitivities of short term variability (SD1), long term variability (SD2) and variability in temporal structure (CCM) were analyzed by changing the temporal structure by shuffling the sequences of points of the Poincaré plot. Surrogate analysis was used to show CCM as a measure of changes in temporal structure rather than random noise and sensitivity of CCM with changes in parasympathetic activity. RESULTS: CCM was found to be most sensitive to changes in temporal structure of the Poincaré plot as compared to SD1 and SD2. The values of all descriptors decreased with decrease in parasympathetic activity during atropine infusion and 70° head-up tilt phase. In contrast, values of all descriptors increased with increase in parasympathetic activity during scopolamine administration. CONCLUSIONS: The concordant reduction and enhancement in CCM values with parasympathetic activity indicates that the temporal variability of Poincaré plot is modulated by the parasympathetic activity which correlates with changes in CCM values. CCM is more sensitive than SD1 and SD2 to changes of parasympathetic activity.
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    Complex Correlation Measure: a novel descriptor for Poincare plot
    Karmakar, CK ; Khandoker, AH ; Gubbi, J ; Palaniswami, M (BMC, 2009-08-13)
    BACKGROUND: Poincaré plot is one of the important techniques used for visually representing the heart rate variability. It is valuable due to its ability to display nonlinear aspects of the data sequence. However, the problem lies in capturing temporal information of the plot quantitatively. The standard descriptors used in quantifying the Poincaré plot (SD1, SD2) measure the gross variability of the time series data. Determination of advanced methods for capturing temporal properties pose a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel descriptor "Complex Correlation Measure (CCM)" to quantify the temporal aspect of the Poincaré plot. In contrast to SD1 and SD2, the CCM incorporates point-to-point variation of the signal. METHODS: First, we have derived expressions for CCM. Then the sensitivity of descriptors has been shown by measuring all descriptors before and after surrogation of the signal. For each case study, lag-1 Poincaré plots were constructed for three groups of subjects (Arrhythmia, Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) and those with Normal Sinus Rhythm (NSR)), and the new measure CCM was computed along with SD1 and SD2. ANOVA analysis distribution was used to define the level of significance of mean and variance of SD1, SD2 and CCM for different groups of subjects. RESULTS: CCM is defined based on the autocorrelation at different lags of the time series, hence giving an in depth measurement of the correlation structure of the Poincaré plot. A surrogate analysis was performed, and the sensitivity of the proposed descriptor was found to be higher as compared to the standard descriptors. Two case studies were conducted for recognizing arrhythmia and congestive heart failure (CHF) subjects from those with NSR, using the Physionet database and demonstrated the usefulness of the proposed descriptors in biomedical applications. CCM was found to be a more significant (p = 6.28E-18) parameter than SD1 and SD2 in discriminating arrhythmia from NSR subjects. In case of assessing CHF subjects also against NSR, CCM was again found to be the most significant (p = 9.07E-14). CONCLUSION: Hence, CCM can be used as an additional Poincaré plot descriptor to detect pathology.