Improved ECG Watermarking Technique Using Curvelet Transform

Hiding data in electrocardiogram signals are a big challenge due to the embedded information that can hamper the accuracy of disease detection. On the other hand, hiding data into ECG signals provides more security for, and authenticity of, the patient’s data. Some recent studies used non-blind watermarking techniques to embed patient information and data of a patient into ECG signals. However, these techniques are not robust against attacks with noise and show a low performance in terms of parameters such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), normalized correlation (NC), mean square error (MSE), percentage residual difference (PRD), bit error rate (BER), structure similarity index measure (SSIM). In this study, an improved blind ECG-watermarking technique is proposed to embed the information of the patient’s data into the ECG signals using curvelet transform. The Euclidean distance between every two curvelet coefficients was computed to cluster the curvelet coefficients and after this, data were embedded into the selected clusters. This was an improvement not only in terms of extracting a hidden message from the watermarked ECG signals, but also robust against image-processing attacks. Performance metrics of SSIM, NC, PSNR and BER were used to measure the superiority of presented work. KL divergence and PRD were also used to reveal data hiding in curvelet coefficients of ECG without disturbing the original signal. The simulation results also demonstrated that the clustering method in the curvelet domain provided the best performance—even when the hidden messages were large size.

A simple method for classifying data in relative growth analysis of crustaceans

Relative growth in crustaceans is a topic of quite high importance that allows, among other things, to estimate their size at the onset of morphometric sexual maturity. In this process, it is usual to start from a transition point and then generate regressions that reflect phases of the sexual development of the individuals (i.e., mature and immature). There are several statistical methods that allow data to be classified into subsets, but according to the specific growth pattern at issue, those methods may or may not be usable. This paper proposes a simple method to classify data into two subsets, viz., when they are overlapping over a wide range of sizes. The actual procedure consists of a linear regression that divides the data. Subsequently, a linear regression is applied to the groups generated by adjusting the parameters through maximum log-likelihood. The observed values will be classified according to the smallest residual difference generated with each regression line. The proposed method was tested by separating the sexes of Goyazana castelnaui, using real data. The efficiency of the method was analysed based on the percentage value between the number of total data and the number of correctly classified data. Additionally, the k-mean cluster was used as a conventional method, the results of which were reclassified by a linear discriminant analysis. The efficiency of the proposed method was >80% while that of the conventional method was >60%. The values misclassified by the proposed method were mixed with those of the opposite sex, so it was expected to fail in those cases. The proposed method is a simple alternative that can serve as a basis for subsequent morphometric analysis, especially for acquiring an initial insight in the structure of a dataset collected for a study of relative growth.

Tropical Cyclone Center Fix Using CYGNSS Winds

A new method is described for determining the center location of a tropical cyclone (TC) using wind speed measurements by the NASA Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS). CYGNSS measurements made during TC overpasses are used to constrain a parametric wind speed model in which storm center location is varied. The “MTrack” storm center location is selected to minimize the residual difference between model and measurement. Results of the MTrack center fix are compared to the National Hurricane Center (NHC) Best Track, the Automated Rotational Center Hurricane Eye Retrieval (ARCHER), and aircraft reconnaissance fixes for category 1–category 3 TCs during the 2017 and 2018 hurricane seasons. MTrack produces storm center locations at intermediate times between NHC fixes with a factor of 5.6 overall reduction in sensitivity to uncertainties in the NHC fixes between which it interpolates. The MTrack uncertainty is found to be larger in the cross-track direction than the along-track direction, although this behavior and the absolute accuracy of position estimates require further investigation.

Evaluation of Model Fit of Inferred Admixture Proportions

Model based methods for genetic clustering of individuals such as those implemented in structure or ADMIXTURE allow to infer individual ancestries and study population structure. The underlying model makes several assumptions about the demographic history that shaped the analysed genetic data. One assumption is that all individuals are a result of K homogeneous ancestral populations that are all well represented in the data, while another assumption is that no drift happened after the admixture event. The histories of many real world populations do not conform to that model, and in that case taking the inferred admixture proportions at face value might be misleading. We propose a method to evaluate the fit of admixture models based on estimating the correlation of the residual difference between the true genotypes and the genotypes predicted by the model. When the model assumptions are not violated, the residuals from a pair of individuals are not correlated. In case of a bad fit, individuals with similar demographic histories have a positive correlation of their residuals. Using simulated and real data, we show how the method is able to detect a bad fit of inferred admixture proportions due to using an insufficient number of clusters K or to demographic histories that deviate significantly from the admixture model assumptions, such as admixture from ghost populations, drift after admixture events and non-discrete ancestral populations. We have implemented the method as an open source software that can be applied to both unphased genotypes and next generation sequencing data.

A Novel Denoising Algorithm of Electromagnetic Ultrasonic Detection Signal Based on Improved EEMD Method

In this paper, we propose a new denoising algorithm for electromagnetic ultrasonic signals based on the improved EEMD method, which can adaptively adjust for added noise and average times in different noisy environments, so that the effect of the residual difference of white noise on the results can be eliminated as far as possible. First, the way to add white noise in the EEMD method is processed, and then the permutation entropy algorithm is used to identify the nature of the components obtained during the decomposition. Then the wavelet transform modulus maximum denoising method is used to deal with the IMF components of the high-frequency part obtained before. Finally, the processed IMF results and residual difference are summed up. The results show that after processing, the noise component in the signal is less and the original information is more reserved, which prevents the signal distortion to a great extent and provides more effective data for subsequent processing. In the experiment, the crack defect data collected by the electromagnetic ultrasonic experiment system were processed by the improved EEMD method. Compared with the traditional EEMD method, it can retain the information of crack location more accurately, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Estimation of Uncertainty in Temperature Observations Made at Meteorological Stations Using a Probabilistic Spatiotemporal Approach

A probabilistic spatiotemporal approach based on a spatial regression test (SRT-PS) is proposed for the quality control of climate data. It provides a quantitative probability that represents the uncertainty in each temperature observation. The assumption of SRT-PS is that there might be large uncertainty in the station record if there is a large residual difference between the record estimated in the spatial regression test and the true station record. The result of SRT-PS is expressed as a confidence probability ranging from 0 to 1, where a value closer to 1 indicates less uncertainty. The potential of SRT-PS to estimate quantitatively the uncertainty in temperature observations was demonstrated using an annual temperature dataset for China for the period 1971–2000 with seeded errors. SRT-PS was also applied to assess a real dataset, and was compared with two traditional quality control approaches: biweight mean and biweight standard deviation and SRT. The study provides a new approach to assess quantitatively the uncertainty in temperature observations at meteorological stations.