Soft Sensor Development Based on Quality-Relevant Slow Feature Analysis and Bayesian Regression with Application to Propylene Polymerization

Data-driven soft sensors are widely used to predict quality indices in propylene polymerization processes to improve the availability of measurements and efficiency. To deal with the nonlinearity and dynamics in propylene polymerization processes, a novel soft sensor based on quality-relevant slow feature analysis and Bayesian regression is proposed in this paper. The proposed method can handle the dynamics of the process better by extracting quality-relevant slow features, which present both the slowly varying characteristic and the correlations with quality indices. Meanwhile, a Bayesian inference model is developed to predict the quality indices, which takes advantages of a probability framework with iterative maximum likelihood techniques for parameter estimation and a sparse constraint for avoiding overfitting. Finally, a case study is conducted with data sampled from a practical industrial propylene polymerization process to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Multispectral Image Change Detection Based on Single-Band Slow Feature Analysis

Due to differences in external imaging conditions, multispectral images taken at different periods are subject to radiation differences, which severely affect the detection accuracy. To solve this problem, a modified algorithm based on slow feature analysis is proposed for multispectral image change detection. First, single-band slow feature analysis is performed to process bitemporal multispectral images band by band. In this way, the differences between unchanged pixels in each pair of single-band images can be sufficiently suppressed to obtain multiple feature-difference images containing real change information. Then, the feature-difference images of each band are fused into a grayscale distance image using the Euclidean distance. After Gaussian filtering of the grayscale distance image, false detection points can be further reduced. Finally, the k-means clustering method is performed on the filtered grayscale distance image to obtain the binary change map. Experiments reveal that our proposed algorithm is less affected by radiation differences and has obvious advantages in time complexity and detection accuracy.