High dimensional time series data are observed in many complex systems. In networked data, some of the time series are influenced by other time series. Identifying these relations encoded in a graph structure or topology among the time series is of paramount interest in certain applications since the identifi ed structure can provide insights about the underlying system and can assist in inference tasks. In practice, the underlying topology is usually sparse, that is, not all the participating time series influence each other. The goal of this dissertation pertains to study the problem of sparse topology identi fication under various settings. Topology identi fication from time series is a challenging task. The first major challenge in topology identi fication is that the assumption of static topology does not hold always in practice since most of the practical systems are evolving ...

Recent academic developments have initiated a paradigm shift in the way spatial sensor data can be acquired. Traditional localized and regularly arranged sensor arrays are replaced by sensor nodes that are randomly distributed over the entire spatial field, and which communicate with each other or with a master node through wireless communication links. Together, these nodes form a so-called ‘wireless sensor network’ (WSN). Each node of a WSN has a local sensor array and a signal processing unit to perform computations on the acquired data. The advantage of WSNs compared to traditional (wired) sensor arrays, is that many more sensors can be used that physically cover the full spatial field, which typically yields more variety (and thus more information) in the signals. It is likely that future data acquisition, control and physical monitoring, will heavily rely on this type of ...

The abundance of large and heterogeneous systems is rendering contemporary data more pervasive, intricate, and with a non-regular structure. With classical techniques facing troubles to deal with the irregular (non-Euclidean) domain where the signals are defined, a popular approach at the heart of graph signal processing (GSP) is to: (i) represent the underlying support via a graph and (ii) exploit the topology of this graph to process the signals at hand. In addition to the irregular structure of the signals, another critical limitation is that the observed data is prone to the presence of perturbations, which, in the context of GSP, may affect not only the observed signals but also the topology of the supporting graph. Ignoring the presence of perturbations, along with the couplings between the errors in the signal and the errors in their support, can drastically hinder ...

To the surprise of most of us, complexity in nature spawns from simplicity. No matter how simple a basic unit is, when many of them work together, the interactions among these units lead to complexity. This complexity is present in the spreading of diseases, where slightly different policies, or conditions,might lead to very different results; or in biological systems where the interactions between elements maintain the delicate balance that keep life running. Fortunately, despite their complexity, current advances in technology have allowed us to have more than just a sneak-peak at these systems. With new views on how to observe such systems and gather data, we aimto understand the complexity within. One of these new views comes from the field of graph signal processing which provides models and tools to understand and process data coming from such complex systems. With ...

Localization, separation and tracking of acoustic sources are ancient challenges that lots of animals and human beings are doing intuitively and sometimes with an impressive accuracy. Artificial methods have been developed for various applications and conditions. The majority of those methods are centralized, meaning that all signals are processed together to produce the estimation results. The concept of distributed sensor networks is becoming more realistic as technology advances in the fields of nano-technology, micro electro-mechanic systems (MEMS) and communication. A distributed sensor network comprises scattered nodes which are autonomous, self-powered modules consisting of sensors, actuators and communication capabilities. A variety of layout and connectivity graphs are usually used. Distributed sensor networks have a broad range of applications, which can be categorized in ecology, military, environment monitoring, medical, security and surveillance. In this dissertation we develop algorithms for distributed sensor networks ...

The performance of today's communication systems is highly dependent on the employed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), and in order to provide more flexibility and precision for the emerging communication technologies, high-performance ADCs are required. In this regard, the time-interleaved operation of an array of ADCs (TI-ADC) can be a reasonable solution. A TI-ADC can increase its throughput by using M channel ADCs or subconverters in parallel and sampling the input signal in a time-interleaved manner. However, the performance of a TI-ADC badly suffers from the mismatches among the channel ADCs. The mismatches among channel ADCs distort the TI-ADC output spectrum by introducing spurious tones besides the actual signal components. This thesis deals with the adaptive background calibration of frequency-response mismatches in a TI-ADC. By modeling each channel ADC as a linear time-invariant system, we develop the continuous-time, discrete-time, and time-varying system ...

Reverberation is the sum of reflected sound waves and is present in any conventional room. Speech communication devices such as mobile phones in hands-free mode, tablets, smart TVs, teleconferencing systems, hearing aids, voice-controlled systems, etc. use one or more microphones to pick up the desired speech signals. When the microphones are not in the proximity of the desired source, strong reverberation and noise can degrade the signal quality at the microphones and can impair the intelligibility and the performance of automatic speech recognizers. Therefore, it is a highly demanded task to process the microphone signals such that reverberation and noise are reduced. The process of reducing or removing reverberation from recorded signals is called dereverberation. As dereverberation is usually a completely blind problem, where the only available information are the microphone signals, and as the acoustic scenario can be non-stationary, ...

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channels are extensively proposed as a means to overcome the random channel impairments of wireless communications. Based upon placing multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver sides of the communication, their virtues are twofold. On the one hand, they allow the transmitter to code across antennas to overcome unknown channel fading. On the other hand, they permit the receiver to sample the signal on the space domain. This operation, followed by the coherent combination of samples, increases the signal-to-noise ratio at the input of the detector and provides large capacity, and reliability, gains. Nevertheless, equipping wireless handsets with multiple antennas is not always possible or worthwhile. Mainly, due to size and cost constraints, respectively. For these cases, the appropriate manner to exploit multi-antenna processing is by means of relaying. This consists of a set of wireless relay ...

In the thesis, various aspects of deconvolution of ultrasonic pulse-echo signals in nondestructive testing are treated. The deconvolution problem is formulated as estimation of a reflection sequence which is the impulse characteristic of the inspected object and the estimation is performed using either maximum a posteriori (MAP) or linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimators. A multivariable model is proposed for a certain multiple transducer setup allowing for frequency diversity, thereby improving the estimation accuracy. Using the MAP estimator three different material types were treated, with varying amount of sparsity in the reflection sequences. The Gaussian distribution is used for modelling materials containing a large number of small scatters. The Bernoulli--Gaussian distribution is used for sparse data obtained from layered structures and a genetic algorithm approach is proposed for optimizing the corresponding MAP criterion. Sequences with intermediate sparsity suitable of ...

The telecommunications sector is characterized by an increasing demand for user-friendliness and interactivity. This explains the growing interest in hands-free communication systems. Signal quality in current hands-free systems is unsatisfactory. To overcome this, advanced signal processing techniques such as the subband and frequency-domain adaptive filter are employed to enhance the signal. These techniques are known to have computationally efficient solutions. Furthermore, thanks to the frequency-dependent processing and adaptivity, highly time-varying systems and signals with a continuously changing spectral content such as speech can be handled. This thesis deals with subband and frequency-domain adaptive filtering techniques for speech enhancement in hands-free communication. The text consists of four parts. In the first part design methods for perfect and nearly perfect reconstruction DFT modulated filter banks are discussed. Part II deals with subband and frequency-domain adaptive filtering. The subband adaptive filter and the ...

Audio signals are characterised and perceived based on how their spectral make-up changes with time. Uncovering the behaviour of latent spectral components is at the heart of many real-world applications involving sound, but is a highly ill-posed task given the infinite number of ways any signal can be decomposed. This motivates the use of prior knowledge and a probabilistic modelling paradigm that can characterise uncertainty. This thesis studies the application of Gaussian processes to audio, which offer a principled non-parametric way to specify probability distributions over functions whilst also encoding prior knowledge. Along the way we consider what prior knowledge we have about sound, the way it behaves, and the way it is perceived, and write down these assumptions in the form of probabilistic models. We show how Bayesian time-frequency analysis can be reformulated as a spectral mixture Gaussian process, ...

The aim of this thesis is to introduce a variety of signal processing methodologies specifically designed to model, interpret, and learn from data structured within topological spaces. These spaces are loosely characterized as a collection of points together with a neighborhood notion among points. The methodologies and tools discussed herein hold particular relevance and utility when applied to signals defined over combinatorial topological spaces, such as cell complexes, or within metric spaces that exhibit non-trivial properties, such as Riemann manifolds with non-flat metrics. One of the primary motivations behind this research is to address and surmount the constraints encountered with traditional graph-based representations when they are employed to depict intricate systems. This thesis emphasizes the necessity to account for sophisticated, multiway, and geometry-sensitive interactions that are not adequately captured by conventional graph models. The contributions of this work include but ...

An important specificity of wireless communication channels are the rapid fluctuations of propagation coefficients. This effect is called fading and is caused by the motion of obstacles, scatterers and reflectors standing along the different paths of electromagnetic wave propagation between the transmitting and the receiving terminal. These changes in the geometry of the wireless channel prompt the attenuation coefficients and the relative phase shifts between the multiple propagation paths to vary. This suggests to model the channel coefficients (the transfer matrix) as random variables. The present thesis studies information rates for reliable transmission of information over fading channels under the realistic assumption that the receiver has only imperfect knowledge of the random fading state. While the over-idealized assumption of perfect channel-state information at the receiver (CSIR) gives rise to many simple expressions and is fairly well understood, the settings with ...

In the field of adaptive filtering the most commonly applied filter structure is the transversal filter, also referred to as the tapped-delay line (TDL). The TDL is composed of a cascade of unit delay elements that are tapped, weighted and then summed. Thus, the output of a TDL is formed by a linear combination of its input signal at various delays. The weights in this linear combination are called the tap weights. The number of delay elements, or equivalently the number of tap weights, determines the duration of the impulse response of the TDL. For this reason, one often speaks of a finite impulse response (FIR) filter. In a general adaptive filtering scheme the adaptive filter aims to minimize a certain measure of error between its output and a desired signal. Usually, a quadratic cost criterion is taken: the so-called ...

Wireless sensor networks has been one of the major research topics in recent years because of its great potential for a wide range of applications. In some application scenarios, sensor nodes intend to report the sensing data to a far-field destination, which cannot be realized by traditional transmission techniques. Due to the energy limitations and the hardware constraints of sensor nodes, distributed transmit beamforming is considered as an attractive candidate for long-range communications in such scenarios as it can reduce energy requirement of each sen-sor node and extend the communication range. However, unlike conventional beamforming, which is performed by a centralized antenna array, distributed beamforming is performed by a virtual antenna array composed of randomly located sensor nodes, each of which has an independent oscillator. Sensor nodes have to coordinate with each other and adjust their transmitting signals to collaboratively ...