Motor deficiencies constitute a significant problem affecting millions of people worldwide. Such people suffer from a debility in daily functioning, which may lead to decreased and incoherence in daily routines and deteriorate their quality of life (QoL). Thus, there is an essential need for assistive systems to help those people achieve their daily actions and enhance their overall QoL. This study proposes a novel brain–computer interface (BCI) system for assisting people with limb motor disabilities in performing their daily life activities by using their brain signals to control assistive devices. The extraction of useful features is vital for an efficient BCI system. Therefore, the proposed system consists of a hybrid feature set that feeds into three machine-learning (ML) classifiers to classify motor Imagery (MI) tasks. This hybrid feature selection (FS) system is practical, real-time, and an efficient BCI with low computation cost. We investigate different combinations of channels to select the combination that has the highest impact on performance. The results indicate that the highest achieved accuracies using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier are 93.46% and 86.0% for the BCI competition III–IVa dataset and the autocalibration and recurrent adaptation dataset, respectively. These datasets are used to test the performance of the proposed BCI. Also, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed BCI by comparing its performance with recent studies. We show that the proposed system is accurate and efficient. Future work can apply the proposed system to individuals with limb motor disabilities to assist them and test their capability to improve their QoL. Moreover, the forthcoming work can examine the system’s performance in controlling assistive devices such as wheelchairs or artificial limbs.
21 April 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems
This research introduces a new twodimensional direction of arrival (DOA) elevation and azimuth angles estimation technique for global positioning system (GPS) jamming signals in challenging environments based on the fast orthogonal search (FOS) method. FOS-DOA estimation is accommodated to process array structure optimized for interference rejection. Performance of FOS-DOA is compared to the predominant multiple signal classification (MUSIC) DOA estimation method. Results showed significant improvement in jamming detection of the multiple sources of interference with slight variations in their amplitude at jamming to signal ratio (JSR) 15dB and 45dB. The improvement introduced by the proposed DOA estimation technique is mainly in the accuracy of detecting the number of jammers and their direction of arrival.
The received global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signal has a very low power due to traveling a very long distance and to the nature of the signal’s propagation medium. Thus, GNSS signals are easily susceptible to signal interference. Signal interference can cause severe degradation or interruption in GNSS position, navigation, and timing (PNT) services which could be very critical, especially in safety-critical applications. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the presence of jamming signals on a high-end GNSS receiver and investigate the benefits of using a multi-constellation system under such circumstances. Several jamming signals are considered in this research, including narrowband and wideband signals that are located on GPS L1 or GLONASS L1 frequency bands. Quasi-real dynamic trajectories are generated using the Spirent™ GSS6700 GNSS signal simulator combined with an interference signal generator through a Spirent™ GSS8366 unit. The performance evaluation was carried out using several evaluation metrics, including signal power degradation, navigation solution availability, dilution of precision (DOP), and positioning accuracy. The multi-constellation system presented better performance over the global positioning system (GPS)-only constellation in most cases. Moreover, jamming the GPS band caused more critical effects than jamming the GLONASS band.
Many new consumer applications are based on the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, such as voice command interfaces, speech-to-text applications, and data entry processes. Although ASR systems have remarkably improved in recent decades, the speech recognition system performance still significantly degrades in the presence of noisy environments. Developing a robust ASR system that can work in real-world noise and other acoustic distorting conditions is an attractive research topic. Many advanced algorithms have been developed in the literature to deal with this problem; most of these algorithms are based on modeling the behavior of the human auditory system with perceived noisy speech. In this research, the power-normalized cepstral coefficient (PNCC) system is modified to increase robustness against the different types of environmental noises, where a new technique based on gammatone channel filtering combined with channel bias minimization is used to suppress the noise effects. The TIDIGITS database is utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed system in comparison to the state-of-the-art techniques in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and seven different types of environmental noises. In this research, one word is recognized from a set containing 11 possibilities only. The experimental results showed that the proposed method provides significant improvements in the recognition accuracy at low signal to noise ratios (SNR). In the case of subway noise at SNR = 5 dB, the proposed method outperforms the mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) and relative spectral (RASTA)–perceptual linear predictive (PLP) methods by 55% and 47%, respectively. Moreover, the recognition rate of the proposed method is higher than the gammatone frequency cepstral coefficient (GFCC) and PNCC methods in the case of car noise. It is enhanced by 40% in comparison to the GFCC method at SNR 0dB, while it is improved by 20% in comparison to the PNCC method at SNR −5dB.
The Delay Locked Loop (DLL) tracking algorithm is one of the most widely used in GPS receivers. It uses different correlators such as the Early-Late Slope (ELS) correlator and High-Resolution Correlator (HRC) to mitigate code phase multipath. These techniques are effective for weak multipath environments but they may not be suitable for challenging multipath environments. The Multipath Estimating Delay Lock Loop (MEDLL) shows better performance than the classical methods. However, MEDLL still has limited capabilities in severe multipath environments. This paper introduces a robust multipath mitigation technique based on fast orthogonal search to obtain better delay estimation for GPS receivers. This research utilised a SPIRENT Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) simulator to compare the performance of the proposed method with other multipath mitigation techniques. Experimental results demonstrated that the performance of the proposed algorithm was better than the classical and advanced techniques under the multipath scenarios tested.
The smartphone market is rapidly spreading, coupled with several services and applications. Some of these services require the knowledge of the exact location of their handsets. The Global Positioning System (GPS) suffers from accuracy deterioration and outages in indoor environments. The Wi-Fi Fingerprinting approach has been widely used in indoor positioning systems. In this paper, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is utilized to improve the performance and to reduce the computation complexity of the Wi-Fi indoor localization systems based on a machine learning approach. The experimental setup and performance of the proposed method were tested in real indoor environments at a large-scale environment of 960 m2 to analyze the performance of different machine learning approaches. The results show that the performance of the proposed method outperforms conventional indoor localization techniques based on machine learning techniques.