Subspace-based methods suffer from the rank loss of the noise free data covariance matrix in the context of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of coherent sources. The well-known spatial smoothing techniques are then widely employed to create a rank restored data covariance matrix. However, conventional spatial smoothing techniques, such as the spatial smoothing pre-processing (SSP), modified spatial smoothing pre-processing (MSSP), and improved spatial smoothing (ISS), do not make full use of the available information in the data covariance matrix. In this paper, an enhanced spatial smoothing (ESS) technique is proposed to exploit both the covariance matrices of individual subarrays and the cross-covariance matrices of different subarrays. Besides, the proposed method can work directly on the signal subspace (ESS-SS), since the signal subspace contains all the information of the DOAs of incoming signals. After de-correlation, the subspace method ESPRIT is adopted to estimate the DOAs. Compared with conventional approaches, the proposed method is more powerful to de-correlate the correlation between signals, and also more robust to the noise impact. The proposed method is tested on numerical data in coherent scenarios, and compared with conventional approaches. Simulation results show that the proposed method has an enhanced resolving capability and a lower signal-to-noise ratio threshold.

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is a common technique for evaluating the structure and quality of civil engineering materials. The ever-increasing demand for higher GPR time resolution and better interpretation of GPR data has motivated the use of advanced signal processing methods for GPR applications. In this article, we review the major advances in signal processing techniques employed in civil engineering for different tasks, such as estimation of thickness, permittivity, and roughness. Their performance is tested and compared through numerical testing and using experimental data from laboratory measurements.

The development and application of marine current energy are attracting more and more attention around the world. Due to the hardness of its working environment, it is important and difficult to study the fault diagnosis of a marine current generation system. In this paper, an underwater image is chosen as the fault-diagnosing signal, after different sensors are compared. This paper proposes a diagnosis method based on the sparse autoencoder (SA) and softmax regression (SR). The SA is used to extract the features and SR is used to classify them. Images are used to monitor whether the blade is attached by benthos and to determine its corresponding degree of attachment. Compared with other methods, the experiment results show that the proposed method can diagnose the blade attachment with higher accuracy.

Semisupervised learning methods are often adopted to handle datasets with very small number of labeled samples. However, conventional semisupervised ensemble learning approaches have two limitations: 1) most of them cannot obtain satisfactory results on high dimensional datasets with limited labels and 2) they usually do not consider how to use an optimization process to enlarge the training set. In this paper, we propose the progressive semisupervised ensemble learning approach (PSEMISEL) to address the above limitations and handle datasets with very small number of labeled samples. When compared with traditional semisupervised ensemble learning approaches, PSEMISEL is characterized by two properties: 1) it adopts the random subspace technique to investigate the structure of the dataset in the subspaces and 2) a progressive training set generation process and a self evolutionary sample selection process are proposed to enlarge the training set. We also use a set of nonparametric tests to compare different semisupervised ensemble learning methods over multiple datasets. The experimental results on 18 real-world datasets from the University of California, Irvine machine learning repository show that PSEMISEL works well on most of the real-world datasets, and outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches on 10 out of 18 datasets.

Ship detection from high-resolution optical satellite images is still an important task that deserves optimal solutions. This paper introduces a novel high-resolution image network-based approach based on the preselection of a region of interest (RoI). This pre-selected network first identifies and extracts a region of interest from input images. In order to efficiently match ship candidates, the principle of our approach is to distinguish suspected areas from the images based on hue, saturation, value (HSV) differences between ships and the background. The whole approach is the basis of an experiment with a large ship dataset, consisting of Google Earth images and HRSC2016 datasets. The experiment shows that the H-YOLO network, which uses the same weight training from a set of remote sensing images, has a 19.01% higher recognition rate and a 16.19% higher accuracy than applying the you only look once (YOLO) network alone. After image preprocessing, the value of the intersection over union (IoU) is also greatly improved.

With the wide application of lithium batteries, battery fault prediction and health management have become more and more important. This article proposes a method for predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of lithium-ion batteries to avoid a series of safety problems caused by continuing to use the battery after reaching its service life threshold. Since the battery capacity is not easy to obtain online, we propose that some measurable parameters should be used in the battery discharge cycle to estimate battery capacity. Then, the estimated capacity is used to replace the measured value of the particle filter (PF) based on the Kendall rank correlation coefficient (KCCPF) to predict the RUL of the lithium batteries. Simulation results show that the proposed method has high prediction accuracy, stability, and practical value.