Signal processing--Digital techniques

At sea cargo transfer has historically been a logistical challenge for both the military and the offshore industry. Even in moderate seas, three to five foot wave heights, extreme pendulations of cargo and large relative motions between vessels can occur that halts cargo transfer activities. This work develops a six-degree-of-freedom rigid crane dynamics model that is used to investigate the feasibility of crane target tracking which could extend and enhance offshore crane operations. A double girder crane system is developed that easily adapts to different configurations and efficiently supports long reach heavy lift applications. Target tracking is feasible in sea states up to 5 when using the double girder crane. When compared to a present crane system, the target tracking crane requires, on average, only 3.65% more absolute total system power and 13.4% less continuous power, indicating that the proposed system should be realizable.

In this research project the objective is to realize a software - hardware design implementation of a real time digital signal processing (DSP) radiometer - receiver for atmospheric noise temperature detection using the digital cross correlation technique. Atmospheric noise in the band of 20-30 GHz band is down-converted to 10.7
MHz IF and 3 MHz bandwidth in the form of statistical additive white gaussian noise
which is used as the received signal by a digital signal processing broadband microwave
radiometer based on the digital cross correlation technique.
Living in a technological era, which is characterized as the era of data
transmission and reception for RF-wireless communication systems, the theory of RF
digital signal processing detection has applied to radar, ultrasound, and digital
communications. Due to the need of high speed of data detection, much effort has gone into the
design and development of sophisticated equipment to obtain such DSP detectors.
Detection can also apply in seismic and big earthquake measurements by using
geophones, nuclear testing, sonar and acoustic localizations, and even for oil excavations.
Based on a statistical model and proposed design implementation, a basic DSP
atmospheric noise temperature radiometer system is introduced and developed. The
realization of the DSP Radiometer examines the noise characteristics (parameters) and
their corresponding parameter values at the received input at the Antenna. It is essential
to introduce the fundamental and statistical properties of the additive white gaussian
noise, as well as the key-parameters which are used for the development of this real time
design implementation. A design implementation of the proposed DSP atmospheric noise
radiometer is discussed and developed via a statistical analysis. The statistical analysis
utilizes the standard deviation, intermediate frequency, bandwidth, number of samples,
and the temperature of the noise received signal at the antenna. Measurements and real
time simulations in order to evaluate the noise temperature’s detectability in terms of
system’s accuracy and performance of the noise random variable are also presented in
this research work. The advantage of the digital cross correlation technique is examined
and investigated.

The measurement of the Scattering function of time-variant fading channels is of strong interest in the field of underwater acoustic communications, as it indicates the limitations of the channel capacity. It also helps reducing the development time of acoustic communication systems and the need for on-site tests using so-called "fading simulators". The Scattering function is interpreted as the expected power received at a given time-delay and frequency shift for a given signal transmitted through the acoustic channel. It has been estimated using a fourth-moment method developed by Kailath from 18 to 30 kHz, 8-ms broad-band chirps and 20--28 kHz, 28-ms pseudo noise sequences. These signals were transmitted periodically in the shallow coastal waters of South Florida from a static source, and recorded from a 64-channel receiver array located at a distance of 1000 meters. Spatial beamforming has been applied to study the spatial sensitivity of the scattering function.

In this thesis, realization and implementation of one-dimensional (1-D) and two-dimensional (2-D) recursive digital filters using LabVIEW are presented. A number of direct and state-space realizations for 1-D filters are implemented either as in general form or second-order modules. Implementation programs are provided and simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, several realizations for 2-D separable-in-denominator filters are proposed. These realizations have the properties of highly parallel structure and improved throughput delay. The performance as well as the implementation of 2-D filters using LabVIEW is also presented.

Navigation of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) is commonly assisted in confined areas by acoustic positioning systems. The Department of Ocean Engineenng at Florida Atlantic University is developing an altemative system based on submerged modems. This thesis describes an optimal target location estimation technique using a multi-channel spatial receiver array (Millscross) used as a development tool combined with a synchronous modem and transponder network mounted on buoys and UUVs. The Millscross provides a reference to evaluate the performance of the navigation estimator. Spatial array principles are used to develop decoding and beamforming techniques to process modem messages, enabling the end user (the UUV) to estimate in real-time its own position and navigate in space. A simulation was used to compare actual results with theory and determine the processing and decoding algorithms. These algorithms were then applied to real data to estimate the target position (direction of arrival and geodetic coordinates).

Underwater communication is an important component of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) operations. Communicating underwater is limited to very low communication rates without the use of processing techniques that mitigate the influence of the acoustic channel. This thesis develops array processing techniques for frequency hopping and multiple frequency shift keying to achieve long range, reliable high speed communications. The thesis makes the comparison between two techniques for calculating beamforming coefficients: a coherent Least Mean Square (LMS) adaptive filter and a non-coherent LMS. An Equal Gain Combiner (EGC) and a Maximum Likelihood (ML) were used to determine the performance of the coherent and non-coherent LMS. The results show that by using the coherent LMS, the ML or the EGC, communications at rates of 493 bit per second (bps) and 370bps can be achieved with no frame error at 5km in 40 feet of water using 16.3kHz of bandwidth centered at 25kHz.

In this paper we propose using parametric modeling by employing a Multi-Pulse Excited Linear Predictive Coded (MPE-LPC) filter to synthesize the guitar. First we introduce different methods for sound synthesis. A detailed discussion including the derivation of LPC and MPE presented. Then we study the impulse and steady state response of the guitar signal. An implementation of the MPE-LPC method to model the guitar is covered in detail and opportunities to improve the compression ratio are discussed. We then present simulation results with a set of fixed parameters, which are used as a benchmark to observe performance trade-offs by varying the model parameters to improve the compression ratio. Finally, we discuss limitations of the modeling algorithm for use with wide-band transient musical sounds and possible applications of the MPE-LPC model as a method to dynamically calculate samples for use with wavetable synthesis of steady state sounds.

In this dissertation, the digital signal processing techniques required for a 3-D sonar imaging system are examined. The achievable performance of the generated images is investigated by using a combination of theoretical analysis, computer simulation and field experiments. The system consists of a forward looking sonar, with separate projector and receiver. The projector is a line source with an 80 degrees by 1.2 degree beam pattern, which is electronically scanned within a 150 degree sector. The receiver is a multi element line array, where each transducer element has a directivity pattern that covers the full sector of view, that is 150 degrees by 80 degrees. The purpose of this sonar system is to produce three dimensional (3-D) images which display the underwater topography within the sector of view up to a range of 200 meters. The principle of operation of the proposed 3-D imaging system differs from other commonly used systems in that it is not based on the intensity of backscatter. The geometries of the targets are obtained from the delay and direction information that can be extracted from the signal backscatter. The acquired data is further processed using an approach based on sequential Fourier transforms to build the 3-D images. With careful selection of the system parameters, the generated images have sufficient quality to be used for AUV tasks such as obstacle avoidance, navigation and object classification. An approach based on a sophisticated two dimensional (2-D) autoregressive (AR) model is explored to further improve the resolution and generate images with higher quality. The real time processing requirements for image generation are evaluated, with the use of dedicated Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chips. A pipeline processing model is analyzed and developed on a selected system.