Over the last decade there has been an increasing interest in solutions for the continuous monitoring of health status with wireless, and in particular, wearable devices that provide remote analysis of physiological data. The use of wireless technologies have introduced new problems such as the transmission of a huge amount of data within the constraint of limited battery life devices. The design of an accurate and energy efficient telemonitoring system can be achieved by reducing the amount of data that should be transmitted, which is still a challenging task on devices with both computational and energy constraints. Furthermore, it is not sufficient merely to collect and transmit data, and algorithms that provide real-time analysis are needed. In this thesis, we address the problems of compression and analysis of physiological data using the emerging frameworks of Compressive Sensing (CS) and sparse ...

The achievement of perfect security is out of the question. Even if we are not yet aware of them, every security aimed technology has weaknesses which attackers can exploit in order to circumvent the system. We should hence direct our efforts to the development of applications whose security level make it infeasible for computationally bound attackers to break the systems. This Thesis is focused on improving the security and privacy provided by biometric systems. With the increased need for reliable and automatic identity verification, biometrics have emerged in the last decades as a pushing alternative to traditional authentication methods. Certainly, biometrics are very attractive and useful for the general public: forget about PINs and passwords, you are your own key. However, the wide deployment of biometric recognition systems at both large-scale applications (e.g., border management at European level or national ...

This research focuses on the development of algorithms to extract diagnostic information from the ECG signal, which can be used to improve automatic detection systems and home monitoring solutions. In the first part of this work, a generically applicable algorithm for model selection in kernel principal component analysis is presented, which was inspired by the derivation of respiratory information from the ECG signal. This method not only solves a problem in biomedical signal processing, but more importantly offers a solution to a long-standing problem in the field of machine learning. Next, a methodology to quantify the level of contamination in a segment of ECG is proposed. This level is used to detect artifacts, and to improve the performance of different classifiers, by removing these artifacts from the training set. Furthermore, an evaluation of three different methodologies to compute the ECG-derived ...

Advances in wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring devices have allowed for new cardiovascular applications to emerge beyond diagnostics, such as stress and fatigue detection, athletic performance assessment, sleep disorder characterization, mood recognition, activity surveillance, biometrics, and fitness tracking, to name a few. Such devices, however, are prone to artifacts, particularly due to movement, thus hampering heart rate and heart rate variability measurement and posing a serious threat to cardiac monitoring applications. To address these issues, this thesis proposes the use of a spectro-temporal signal representation called “modulation spectrum”, which is shown to accurately separate cardiac and noise components from the ECG signals, thus opening doors for noise-robust ECG signal processing tools and applications. First, an innovative ECG quality index based on the modulation spectral signal representation is proposed. The representation quantifies the rate-of-change of ECG spectral components, which are shown to ...

This dissertation is concerned with the application of the theory of rational functions in signal processing. The PhD thesis summarizes the corresponding results of the author’s research. Since the systems of rational functions are defined by the collection of inverse poles with multiplicities, the following parameters should be determined: the number, the positions and the multiplicities of the inverse poles. Therefore, we develop the hyperbolic variant of the so-called Nelder–Mead and the particle swarm optimization algorithm. In addition, the latter one is integrated into a more general multi-dimensional framework. Furthermore, we perform a detailed stability and error analysis of these methods. We propose an electrocardiogram signal generator based on spline interpolation. It turns to be an efficient tool for testing and evaluating signal models, filtering techniques, etc. In this thesis, the synthesized heartbeats are used to test the diagnostic distortion ...

Due to some tragic events such as crime, bank robberies and terrorist attacks, an unparalleled surge in video surveillance cameras has occurred in recent years. In consequence, our daily life is overseen everywhere (e.g. on the street, in stations, in shops and in the workplace). For example, on average, people living in London can be caught on cameras more than 300 times a day. At the same time, automatic processing technology and quality of sensors have advanced significantly, which has even enabled automatic detection, tracking and identification of individuals. With the proliferation of video surveillance systems and the progress in automatic recognition, privacy protection is now becoming a significant concern. Video surveillance is intrusive because it allows the observation of certain information that is considered as private (i.e., identity or some characteristics such as age, race, gender). Nowadays, some processing ...

As biometrics gains popularity and proliferates into the daily life, there is an increased concern over the loss of privacy and potential misuse of biometric data held in central repositories. The major concerns are about i) the use of biometrics to track people, ii) non-revocability of biometrics (eg. if a fingerprint is compromised it can not be canceled or reissued), and iii) disclosure of sensitive information such as race, gender and health problems which may be revealed by biometric traits. The straightforward suggestion of keeping the biometric data in a user owned token (eg. smart cards) does not completely solve the problem, since malicious users can claim that their token is broken to avoid biometric verification altogether. Put together, these concerns brought the need for privacy preserving biometric authentication methods in the recent years. In this dissertation, we survey existing ...

In this thesis, advanced robust estimation methodologies for signal processing are developed and analyzed. The developed methodologies solve problems concerning multi-sensor data, robust model selection as well as robustness for dependent data. The work has been applied to solve practical signal processing problems in different areas of biomedical and array signal processing. In particular, for univariate independent data, a robust criterion is presented to select the model order with an application to corneal-height data modeling. The proposed criterion overcomes some limitations of existing robust criteria. For real-world data, it selects the radial model order of the Zernike polynomial of the corneal topography map in accordance with clinical expectations, even if the measurement conditions for the videokeratoscopy, which is the state-of-the-art method to collect corneal-height data, are poor. For multi-sensor data, robust model order selection selection criteria are proposed and applied ...

Distributed signal or information processing using Internet of Things (IoT), facilitates real-time monitoring of signals, for example, environmental pollutants, health indicators, and electric energy consumption in a smart city. Despite the promising capabilities of IoTs, these distributed deployments often face the challenge of data privacy and communication rate constraints. In traditional machine learning, training data is moved to a data center, which requires massive data movement from distributed IoT devices to a third-party location, thus raising concerns over privacy and inefficient use of communication resources. Moreover, the growing network size, model size, and data volume combined lead to unusual complexity in the design of optimization algorithms beyond the compute capability of a single device. This necessitates novel system architectures to ensure stable and secure operations of such networks. Federated learning (FL) architecture, a novel distributed learning paradigm introduced by McMahan ...

The growing risk of privacy violation and espionage associated with the rapid spread of mobile communications renewed interest in the original concept of sending encrypted voice as audio signal over arbitrary voice channels. The usual methods used for encrypted data transmission over analog telephony turned out to be inadequate for modern vocal links (cellular networks, VoIP) equipped with voice compression, voice activity detection, and adaptive noise suppression algorithms. The limited available bandwidth, nonlinear channel distortion, and signal fadings motivate the investigation of a dedicated, joint approach for speech encoding and encryption adapted to modern noisy voice channels. This thesis aims to develop, analyze, and validate secure and efficient schemes for real-time speech encryption and transmission via modern voice channels. In addition to speech encryption, this study covers the security and operational aspects of the whole voice communication system, as this ...

The first part of the presented work is focused on measuring of QT intervals. QT interval can be an indicator of the cardiovascular health of the patient and detect any potential abnormalities. The QT interval is measured from the onset of the QRS complex to the end of the T wave. However, measurements for the end of the T wave are often highly subjective and the corresponding verification is difficult. Here we propose two methods of QT interval measuring – wavelet based and template matching method. Methods are compared with each other and tested on standard QT database. The second part of the presented work is focused on modelling of arrhythmias using McSharry’s model followed with classification using an artificial neural network. The proposed method uses pre-processing of signals with Linear Approximation Distance Thresholding method and Line Segment Clustering method ...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia encountered in clinical practice, and one of the main causes of ictus and strokes. Despite the advances in the comprehension of its mechanisms, its thorough characterization and the quantification of its effects on the human heart are still an open issue. In particular, the choice of the most appropriate therapy is frequently a hard task. Radiofrequency catheter ablation (CA) is becoming one of the most popular solutions for the treatment of the disease. Yet, very little is known about its impact on heart substrate during AF, thus leading to an inaccurate selection of positive responders to therapy and a low success rate; hence, the need for advanced signal processing tools able to quantify AF impact on heart substrate and assess the effectiveness of the CA therapy in an objective and ...

This thesis has two main parts. The first part deals with security and privacy analysis of biometric hashing. The second part introduces a method for fixed-length feature vector extraction and hash generation from fingerprint minutiae. The upsurge of interest in biometric systems has led to development of biometric template protection methods in order to overcome security and privacy problems. Biometric hashing produces a secure binary template by combining a personal secret key and the biometric of a person, which leads to a two factor authentication method. This dissertation analyzes biometric hashing both from a theoretical point of view and in regards to its practical application. For theoretical evaluation of biohashes, a systematic approach which uses estimated entropy based on degree of freedom of a binomial distribution is outlined. In addition, novel practical security and privacy attacks against face image hashing ...

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is the most prevalent sleep related breathing disorder, nevertheless subjects suffering from it often remain undiagnosed due to the cumbersome diagnosis procedure. Moreover, the prevalence of OSA is increasing and a better phenotyping of patients is needed in order to prioritize treatment. The goal of this thesis was to tackle those challenges in OSA diagnosis. Additionally, two main algorithmic contributions which are generally applicable were proposed within this thesis. The binary interval coded scoring algorithm was extended to multilevel problems and novel monotonicity constraints were introduced. Moreover, improvements to the random-forest based feature selection were proposed including the use of the Cohen’s kappa value, patient independent validation, and further feature pruning steered by the correlation between features. These novel methods were applied together with classification and feature selection methods from the literature to improve the OSA ...

The electrocardiogram or ECG is a relatively easy-to-record signal that contains an enormous amount of potentially useful information. It is currently mostly being used for screening purposes. For example, pre-participation cardiovascular screening of young athletes has been endorsed by both scientific organisations and sporting governing bodies. A typical cardiac examination is taken in a hospital environment and lasts 10 seconds. This is often sufficient to detect major pathologies, yet this small sample size of the heart’s functioning can be deceptive when used to evaluate one’s general condition. A solution for this problem is to monitor the patient outside of the hospital, during a longer period of time. Due to the extension of the analysis period, the detection rate of cardiac events can be highly increased, compared to the cardiac exam in the hospital. However, it also increases the likelihood of ...