This paper addresses the problem of background modeling for foreground object detection in complex environments. A Bayesian framework that incorporates spectral, spatial, and temporal features to characterize the background appearance is proposed. Under this framework, the background is represented by the most significant and frequent features, i.e., the principal features , at each pixel. A Bayes decision rule is derived for background and foreground classification based on the statistics of principal features. Principal feature representation for both the static and dynamic background pixels is investigated. A novel learning method is proposed to adapt to both gradual and sudden "once-off" background changes. The convergence of the learning process is analyzed and a formula to select a proper learning rate is derived. Under the proposed framework, a novel algorithm for detecting foreground objects from complex environments is then established. It consists of change detection, change classification, foreground segmentation, and background maintenance. Experiments were conducted on image sequences containing targets of interest in a variety of environments, e.g., offices, public buildings, subway stations, campuses, parking lots, airports, and sidewalks. Good results of foreground detection were obtained. Quantitative evaluation and comparison with the existing method show that the proposed method provides much improved results.

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This paper presents an expert system that is able to classify different types of power system events to the underlying causes (i.e., events) and offer useful information in terms of power quality. The expert system uses the voltage waveforms and distinguishes the different types of voltage dips (fault-induced, transformer saturation, induction motor starting) as well as interruptions (nonfault, fault-induced). A method for event-based classification is used, where a segmentation algorithm is first applied to divide waveforms into several possible events. The expert system is tested using real measurements and the results show that the system enables fast and accurate analysis of data from power quality monitors.

The support vector machine (SVM) is a powerful method for statistical classification of data used in a number of different applications. However, the usefulness of the method in a commercial available system is very much dependent on whether the SVM classifier can be pretrained from a factory since it is not realistic that the SVM classifier must be trained by the customers themselves before it can be used. This paper proposes a novel SVM classification system for voltage disturbances. The performance of the proposed SVM classifier is investigated when the voltage disturbance data used for training and testing originated from different sources. The data used in the experiments were obtained from both real disturbances recorded in two different power networks and from synthetic data. The experimental results shown high accuracy in classification with training data from one power network and unseen testing data from another. High accuracy was also achieved when the SVM classifier was trained on data from a real power network and test data originated from synthetic data. A lower accuracy resulted when the SVM classifier was trained on synthetic data and test data originated from the power network.