Optimum wavelet selection for nonparametric analysis toward structural health monitoring for processing big data from sensor network: A comparative study

A critical problem encountered in structural health monitoring of civil engineering structures, and other structures such as mechanical or aircraft structures, is how to convincingly analyze the nonstationary data that is coming online, how to reduce the high-dimensional features, and how to extract informative features associated with damage to infer structural conditions. Wavelet transform among other techniques has proven to be an effective technique for processing and analyzing nonstationary data due to its unique characteristics. However, the biggest challenge frequently encountered in assuring the effectiveness of wavelet transform in analyzing massive nonstationary data from civil engineering structures, and in structural health diagnosis, is how to select the right wavelet. The question of which wavelet function is appropriate for processing and analyzing the nonstationary data in civil engineering structures has not been clearly addressed, and no clear guidelines or rules have been reported in the literature to show how the right wavelet is chosen. Therefore, this study aims to address an important question in this regard by proposing a new framework for choosing a proper wavelet that can be customized for massive nonstationary data analysis, disturbances separation, and extraction of informative features associated with damage. The proposed method takes into account data type, data and wavelet characteristics, similarity, sharing information, and data recovery accuracy. The novelty of this study lies in integrating multi-criteria which are associated directly with features that correlated well with change in structures due to damage, including common criteria such as energy, entropy, linear correlation index, and variance. Also, it introduces and considers new proposed measures, such as wavelet-based nonlinear correlation such as cosh spectral distance and mutual information, wavelet-based energy fluctuation, measures-based recovery accuracy, such as sensitive feature extraction, noise reduction, and others to evaluate various base wavelets’ function capabilities for appropriate decomposition and reconstruction of structural dynamic responses. The proposed method is verified by experimental and simulated data. The results revealed that the proposed method has a satisfactory performance for base wavelet selection and the small order of Daubechies and Symlet provide the best results, especially order 3. The idea behind our proposed framework can be applied to other structural applications.

Mother wavelet selection using signal energy for cracks detection in the rotation shafts

The mother wavelet greatly influences the wavelet analysis of a non-stationary and nonlinear recorded signal. Choosing mother wavelet must be done to determine cracks in rotating shafts so as to take into account the nature and type of information signals to be extracted from the signal. The difficulty in optimum selection of the mother wavelet is determined by their complex properties that determine different selection criteria. In the paper, several families of functions (Haar, Daubechies, Symlets, Coiflet, BiorSplines) were used for analysis and the proposed selection criterion is the energy dissipated on the frequency bands. Signal recordings were made on a stand to determine the presence of cracks in rotating shafts and their classification. For discrete decomposition of recorded signals (DWT) and the calculation of energy dissipated on the frequency bands the Matlab wavelet instrument was used.

Towards to Optimal Wavelet Denoising Scheme—A Novel Spatial and Volumetric Mapping of Wavelet-Based Biomedical Data Smoothing

Wavelet transformation is one of the most frequent procedures for data denoising, smoothing, decomposition, features extraction, and further related tasks. In order to perform such tasks, we need to select appropriate wavelet settings, including particular wavelet, decomposition level and other parameters, which form the wavelet transformation outputs. Selection of such parameters is a challenging area due to absence of versatile recommendation tools for suitable wavelet settings. In this paper, we propose a versatile recommendation system for prediction of suitable wavelet selection for data smoothing. The proposed system is aimed to generate spatial response matrix for selected wavelets and the decomposition levels. Such response enables the mapping of selected evaluation parameters, determining the efficacy of wavelet settings. The proposed system also enables tracking the dynamical noise influence in the context of Wavelet efficacy by using volumetric response. We provide testing on computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) image data and EMG signals mostly of musculoskeletal system to objectivise system usability for clinical data processing. The experimental testing is done by using evaluation parameters such is MSE (Mean Squared Error), ED (Euclidean distance) and Corr (Correlation index). We also provide the statistical analysis of the results based on Mann-Whitney test, which points out on statistically significant differences for individual Wavelets for the data corrupted with Salt and Pepper and Gaussian noise.

Application of a Novel Wavelet Shrinkage Scheme to Partial Discharge Signal Denoising of Large Generators

Partial Discharge (PD) measurements of large generators are extremely affected and hampered by noise, making the denoising of PD signal an inevitable issue. Wavelet shrinkage is the most commonly employed method for PD signal denoising. The appropriate mother wavelet and decomposition level are critically important for the denoising performance. In consideration of the PD signal characteristics of large generators, a novel wavelet shrinkage scheme for PD signal denoising is presented. In the scheme, a scale dependent wavelet selection method is proposed; the core idea is that the optimum wavelet at each scale is selected as the one maximizing the energy ratio of coefficients beside and inside the range formed by the threshold, which correspond to the signal to be reserved and noise to be removed, respectively. In addition, taking into account the influence of mother wavelet at each scale on the decomposition level, an approach for decomposition level determination is put forward based on the energy composition after decomposition at each scale. The application results on the simulated signals with different SNR obtained by combining the various pulses and measured signal on-site show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Besides, the denoising results are compared with that of the existing wavelet selection methods and the proposed wavelet selection method shows an obvious advantage.