Sharif Digital Repository

The Electrocardiogram (ECG) is widely used for diagnosis of heart diseases. Therefore, the quality of information extracted from the ECG has a vital role. In real recordings, ECG is corrupted by artifacts such as prolonged repolarization, respiration, changes of electrode position, muscle contraction, and power line interface. In this paper, a denoising technique for ECG signals based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is proposed. We use Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) to overcome the limitations of EMD. Moreover, to overcome the limitations of thresholding methods we use the combination of mutual information and two EMD based interval thresholding approaches. Our new method... 

In this letter, we propose a method for real-time high density impulse noise suppression from images. In our method, we first apply an impulse detector to identify the corrupted pixels and then employ an innovative weighted-average filter to restore them. The filter takes the nearest neighboring interpolated image as the initial image and computes the weights according to the relative positions of the corrupted and uncorrupted pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the best existing methods in both PSNR measure and visual quality and is quite suitable for real-time applications  

Denoising is an important preprocessing stage in some ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) applications. For this purpose, Blind Source Separation (BSS) methods, such as Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Decorrelated and Colored Component Analysis (DCCA), are commonly used. Although ICA and DCCA-based methods are powerful tools to extract sources of interest, the procedure of eliminating the effect of sources of non-interest is usually manual. It should be noted that some methods for automatic selection of artifact sources after BSS methods exist, although they imply a training supervised step. On the other hand, in cases where there are some a prioriinformation about the subspace of... 

Image segmentation with clustering approach is widely used in biomedical application. Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering is able to preserve the information between tissues in image, but not taking spatial information into account, makes segmentation results of the standard FCM sensitive to noise. To overcome the above shortcoming, a modified FCM algorithm for MRI brain image segmentation is presented in this paper. The algorithm is realized by incorporating the spatial neighborhood information into the standard FCM algorithm and modifying the membership weighting of each cluster by smoothing it by Total Variation (TV) denoising. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with accuracy index in... 

The main objective of this work is to propose a scheme to extract intrinsic mode functions of online data with an acceptable speed as well as accuracy. For this purpose, an individual block framework method is firstly employed to extract the intrinsic mode functions. In this method, buffers are selected such that they overlap with their neighbors to prevent the end effect errors with no need for the averaging process. And in order to avoid the mode mixing problem, a bandwidth empirical mode decomposition scheme is developed to effectively improve the results. Through this scheme, an auxiliary function made of both high- and low-frequency components corresponding to noise and dominant... 

This letter considers the use of total variation (TV) minimization in the recovery of a given gradient sparse vector from Gaussian linear measurements. It has been shown in recent studies that there exists a sharp phase transition behavior in TV minimization for the number of measurements necessary to recover the signal in asymptotic regimes. The phase-transition curve specifies the boundary of success and failure of TV minimization for large number of measurements. It is a challenging task to obtain a theoretical bound that reflects this curve. In this letter, we present a novel upper bound that suitably approximates this curve and is asymptotically sharp. Numerical results show that our... 

Reconstructing a signal corrupted by impulsive noise is of high importance in several applications, including impulsive noise removal from images, audios and videos, and separating texts from images. Investigating this problem, in this paper we propose a new method to reconstruct a noise-corrupted signal where both signal and noise are sparse but in different domains. We apply our algorithm for impulsive noise (Salt- and-Pepper Noise (SPN) and Random-Valued Impulsive Noise (RVIN) removal from images and compare our results with other notable algorithms in the literature. Simulation indicates show that our algorithm is not only simple and fast, but also it outperforms the other... 

In this paper, we propose two methods for signal denoising where both signal and noise are sparse but in different domains. First, an optimization problem is proposed which is non-convex and NP-hard due to the existence of ℓ 0 norm in its cost function. Then, we propose two approaches to approximate and solve it. We also provide the proof of convergence for the proposed methods. The problem addressed in this paper arises in some applications for example in image denoising where the noise is sparse, signal reconstruction in the case of random sampling where the random mask is unknown, and error detection and error correction in the case of missing samples. The experimental results indicate... 

In this paper an efficient Altering procedure based on the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) has been proposed. The method is based on a modified nonlinear dynamic model, previously introduced for the generation of synthetic ECG signals. We have suggested simple dynamics as the governing equations for the model parameters. Since we have not any observation for these new state variables, they are considered as hidden states. Quantitative evaluation of the proposed algorithm on the MIT-BIH signals shows that an average SNR improvement of 12 dB is achieved for a signal of -5 dB. The results show improved output SNRs compared to the EKF outputs in the absence of these new dynamics. © 2007 IEEE  

The Savitzky-Golay (SG) filtering is a widely used denoising method employed in different applications. The SG filter has two design parameters: the window length and the filter order. As the window length increases, the estimation variance is reduced, but at the same time, the bias error is increased. In this article, we obtain the optimal window length of an SG filter with an arbitrary order, based on minimizing the mean square error (mse), a well-known performance measure considering both the estimation bias and variance. To achieve the optimal window length, we propose an algorithm the performance of which is much better than the existing methods. In this article, we follow the viewpoint... 

This paper presents a modified sensor-based online method for mobile robot navigation generating paths in dynamic environments. The core of the navigation algorithm is based on the velocity obstacle avoidance method and the guidance-based tracking algorithm. A fuzzy decision maker is designed to combine the two mentioned algorithms intelligently. Hence the robot will be able to decide intelligently in various situations when facing the moving obstacles and moving target. A noble noise cancellation algorithm using Neural Network is designed to navigate the robot in an uncertain dynamic environment safely. The results show that the robot can track a moving target while maneuvering safely in... 

In this work, we present a new method of noise removal which is applied on images corrupted by impulse noise. This new algorithm has a good trade-off between quantitative and qualitative properties of the recovered image and the computation time. In this new method, the corrupted pixels are replaced by using a median filter or, they are estimated by their neighbors' values. Our proposed method shows better results especially in very high density noisy images than Standard Median Filter (SMF), Adaptive Median Filter (AMF) and some other well-known filters for removing impulse noise. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed algorithm in measures of PSNR and SSIM, specifically... 

Electrocardiogram is one of the most prominent cardiac signals being capable to be utilized for medical uses such as arrhythmia detection. Over the years, the feasibility of using this signal for human identification issue has been investigated, and some methods have been proposed. In this Paper a novel approach is proposed for electrocardiogram (ECG) based human identification using Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The innovation signal of EKF has been considered as feature which is used to classify different subjects. In this paper a general issue, human identification, is summarized to a classification problem in which the proposed features of each subject is calculated, and the... 

Adaptive Noise Cancellation (ANC) is an effective dual-channel technique for background noise reduction. Due to the presence of uncorrelated noise components at the two inputs in vehicular environments, ANC does not provide sufficient background noise reduction. To alleviate this problem, a complementary linear filter is added to ANC structure. Filter coefficients are determined to make the enhanced signal an MMSE estimation of speech signal. Therefore, the ANC structure is modified to a dual-channel Wiener structure. We prove that this structure is identical to the LMS type ANC which is followed by a Wiener post-filter. A new method is proposed for the noise spectrum estimation in the... 

Sparse representation is a powerful tool for image processing, including noise removal. It is an effective method for Gaussian noise removal by taking advantage of a fixed and learned dictionary. In this study, the variable distribution of Rician noise is reduced in magnetic resonance (MR) images by sparse representation based on reconstruction error sets. Standard deviation of Gaussian noise is used to find these errors locally. The proposed method represents two formulas for local error calculation using standard deviation of noise. The acquired results from the real and simulated images are comparable, and in some cases, better than the best Rician noise removal method due to the... 

In this paper, we address the problem of recovering degraded images using multivariate Gaussian mixture model (GMM) as a prior. The GMM framework in our method for image restoration is based on the assumption that the accumulation of similar patches in a neighborhood are derived from a multivariate Gaussian probability distribution with a specific covariance and mean. Previous methods of image restoration with GMM have not considered spatial (geometric) distance between patches in clustering. Our conducted experiments show that in the case of constraining Gaussian estimates into a finite-sized windows, the patch clusters are more likely to be derived from the estimated multivariate Gaussian... 

Due to the presence of excessive noise in the recorded partial discharge (PD) current signals, de-noising of these signals is a crucial task for performing any investigation on the subject. Meanwhile, to accelerate this de-noising process a single PD pulse can be extracted from the train of those recorded pulses, followed by its de-noising. In this paper a single PD pulse is extracted from the train of recorded PD pulses, using noisy recorded data cumulative energy. A de-noising technique based on adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems is proposed. To verify the validity of the proposed method, four different sources of PD signals are physically simulated. The proposed method is applied on... 

Noise contamination is inevitable in biomedical recordings. In some cases biomedical recordings are highly contaminated with artifacts which make the effective recovering process hard to achieve. Many different methods have been proposed for artifact removal from biomedical signals but introducing an effective method which can present valuable data for medical analysis, is still an ongoing process. In this paper a new method for interictal EEG denoising is presented. Single-channel ICA denoising method based on EMD decomposition is used to improve the multi-channel ICA denoising results. This method is tested on simulated epileptic recordings which are contaminated with real muscle artifact... 

Removing muscle activity from ictal ElectroEncephaloGram (EEG) data is an essential preprocessing step in diagnosis and study of epileptic disorders. Indeed, at the very beginning of seizures, ictal EEG has a low amplitude and its morphology in the time domain is quite similar to muscular activity. Contrary to the time domain, ictal signals have specific characteristics in the time-frequency domain. In this paper, we use the time-frequency signature of ictal discharges as a priori information on the sources of interest. To extract the time-frequency signature of ictal sources, we use the Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) method. Then, we propose two time-frequency based semi-blind source...