Average Power Spectrum Density Research Articles

Effect of stress on spatial working memory and EEG signal dynamics in the follicular and luteal phases of the menstrual cycle in young single girls.

Women undergo behavioral changes during the menstrual cycle. This study aimed to investigate the effect of estradiol (Es) on stress and effect of stress on spatial working memory (WM) and also to investigate electroencephalogram (EEG) signal's dynamics in the early and late follicular (EF and LF) and luteal (LU) phases of unmarried girls' menstrual cycle. Stress was induced by presentation of a short (3min) movie clip. Simultaneous with a memory test and stress induction, EEG, serum Es levels, and galvanic skin response (GSR) were assessed. Serum Es concentrations were decreased in LF, LU, and EF phases. The mean GSR score decreased after stress induction in all three phases, but it increased in the LF and LU phases versus the EF phase. Spatial WM diminished after stress induction in all three phases, but it increased in the LF phase versus the two phases before and after stress induction. Average power spectrum density in all frequency bands increased after stress induction in the frontal and prefrontal channels in the spatial WM test. The results showed that stress led to spatial WM dysfunction; however, Es improved spatial WM performance in the LF phase versus the other two phases.

A novel method for assessment of human midpalatal sutures using CBCT-based geometric morphometrics and complexity scores

IntroductionManagement of dentofacial deficiencies requires knowledge about sutural morphology and complexity. The present study assesses midpalatal sutural morphology based on human cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) using geometric morphometrics (GMM) and complexity scores. The study is the first to apply a sutural complexity score to human CBCT datasets and demonstrates the potential such a score has to improve objectiveness and comparability when analysing the midpalatal suture.Materials and methodsCBCTs of various age and sex groups were analysed retrospectively (n = 48). For the geometric morphometric analysis, landmark acquisition and generalised Procrustes superimposition were combined with principal component analysis to detect variability in sutural shape patterns. For complexity analysis, a windowed short-time Fourier transform with a power spectrum density (PSD) calculation was applied to resampled superimposed semi-landmarks.ResultsAccording to the GMM, younger patients exhibited comparable sutural patterns. With increasing age, the shape variation increased among the samples. The principal components did not sufficiently capture complexity patterns, so an additional methodology was applied to assess characteristics such as sutural interdigitation. According to the complexity analysis, the average PSD complexity score was 1.465 (standard deviation = 0.010). Suture complexity increased with patient age (p < 0.0001), but was not influenced by sex (p = 0.588). The intra-class correlation coefficient exceeded 0.9, indicating intra-rater reliability.ConclusionOur study demonstrated that GMM applied to human CBCTs can reveal shape variations and allow the comparison of sutural morphologies across samples. We demonstrate that complexity scores can be applied to study human sutures captured in CBCTs and complement GMM for a comprehensive sutural analysis.

Tunable Adhesion of Shape Memory Polymer Dry Adhesive Soft Robotic Gripper via Stiffness Control

A shape memory polymer (SMP) has been intensively researched in terms of its exceptional reversible dry adhesive characteristics and related smart adhesive applications over the last decade. However, its unique adhesive properties have rarely been taken into account for other potential applications, such as robotic pick-and-place, which might otherwise improve robotic manipulation and contribute to the related fields. This work explores the use of an SMP to design an adhesive gripper that picks and places a target solid object employing the reversible dry adhesion of an SMP. The numerical and experimental results reveal that an ideal compositional and topological SMP adhesive design can significantly improve its adhesion strength and reversibility, leading to a strong grip force and a minimal release force. Next, a radially averaged power spectrum density (RAPSD) analysis proves that active heating and cooling with a thermoelectric Peltier module (TEC) substantially enhances the conformal adhesive contact of an SMP. Based on these findings, an adhesive gripper is designed, fabricated, and tested. Remarkably, the SMP adhesive gripper interacts not only with flat and smooth dry surfaces, but also moderately rough and even wet surfaces for pick-and-place, showing high adhesion strength (&gt;2 standard atmospheres) which is comparable to or exceeds those of other single-surface contact grippers, such as vacuum, electromagnetic, electroadhesion, and gecko grippers. Lastly, the versatility and utility of the SMP adhesive gripper are highlighted through diverse pick-and-place demonstrations. Associated studies on physical mechanisms, SMP adhesive mechanics, and thermal conditions are also presented.

Non-Contact Heart Rate Measurement From Facial Video Data Using a 2D-VMD Scheme

Non-contact human body vital parameter measurements are getting more attention and have been extensively studied in a short span of time. One of such techniques is the heart rate (HR) estimation based on video recording of human face known as remote photoplethysmogram (rPPG). Usually, the recorded video gets contaminated due to illumination variation of ambient light, motion artifacts, and other environmental factors. Thus, extracting a reliable rPPG signal is a challenging task. In this paper, a novel spatial-temporal filtering method is proposed that utilizes 2D variational mode decomposition (2D-VMD) along with azimuthally averaged power spectrum density (AAPSD) and multimode kurtosis to extract a reliable rPPG signal. The robustness of the proposed algorithm is tested and validated using our own database and the publicly available standard dataset. The obtained experimental results are compared with the reference PPG signal measurements. Also, the proposed method is compared with the well-established independent component analysis (ICA)-based method. The performance results show that the non-contact HR estimated by the proposed method dramatically reduces the error and it proves our method to be superior than the existing method.

3D micromorphology evaluation of kefir microbial films loaded with extract of Amazon rainforest fruit Cupuaçu

We performed qualitative and quantitative analysis of surfaces of kefir biofilms loaded with Amazon rainforest fruit extract. Scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy were used to evaluate the micromorphology of the biofilms. The films surface displayed a lower density of microorganisms (∼ 0.061 microorganisms/μm2) for the lowest concentration of fruit extract, however, a greater density (∼0.220 microorganisms/μm2) was observed for the higher concentration. Height stereometric parameters revealed that the biofilms with the highest concentration presented the highest roughness. However, almost all the stereometric parameters related to texture showed no significant difference. Furthermore, the Hurst coefficients of the average power spectrum density were similar for all biofilms. Fractal parameters confirmed that higher concentrations of fruit extract induced a superior topographic irregularity. However, fractal lacunarity does not show any significant difference confirming the similarity of the microtextures. Moreover, fractal succolarity and surface entropy exhibited values that suggested ideal percolation and strong topographic uniformity, respectively, indicating that these films can uniformly adhere to other surfaces. Our results confirm that the stereometric and fractal parameters can be relevant for the surface characterization of microbial films, which can be of great importance to the biomedical field.

Averaged power spectrum density, fractal and multifractal spectra of Au nano-particles deposited onto annealed TiO2 thin films

This work describes the morphology of titanium oxide (TiO2) thin films deposited by gold nanoparticles and produced at room temperature over Si(100) wafers. A direct-current (DC) reactive magnetron sputtering process was applied for the sample preparation. Then, their three-dimensional (3-D) surface characterization was carried out by using atomic force microscopy (AFM). Stereometric analysis was carrying out on the basis of AFM-data, and the surface topography was described according to ISO 25,178–2:2012 standard. As can be seen, the surface of sample #3 has the most regular topography (Df = 2.70 ± 0.01) with the most regular surface (Sq = 0.97 nm). The most irregular topography (Df = 2.83 ± 0.01) was found in sample #2, while the most irregular surface (Sq = 3.38 nm) was found in sample #1.

Frequency‐domain wideband compressive spectrum sensing

The authors study the power spectrum density (PSD) estimation of wideband wide-sense stationary (WSS) signals with sub-Nyquist sampling rate. Owing to the large bandwidth, Nyquist rate sampling of such signals needs very high rate analogue-to-digital converters. It is important to note that PSD estimation does not necessarily require reconstruction of the original signal. Indeed, the power spectrum can be directly obtained from sub-Nyquist samples. In this study, a new method for reconstructing the power spectrum in the frequency domain for WSS signals is presented. The main idea is to divide the whole spectrum into N equal-length segments and calculate the average PSD in each segment using a frequency-domain representation of sub-Nyquist samples. In addition, the capability of the proposed method, as a detector of spectrum holes, is studied using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Then, the analysis of false alarm probability is provided. Simulation results for the additive white Gaussian noise channel and the slowly fading frequency selective channel show that the proposed method considerably outperforms available techniques.

Tone-dependent error diffusion based on an updated blue-noise model

The conventional blue-noise model that specifies the desired noise characteristics of an ideal halftone has been updated recently, and simulation results showed that the updated model can serve as a better guideline for developing halftone algorithms. At the moment, only a feature-preserving multiscale error diffusion-based algorithm was developed based on the updated noise model. As the algorithm does not support real-time applications, a tone-dependent error diffusion (TDED) algorithm is developed based on the updated noise model. To support the proposed TDED algorithm, we optimize a diffusion filter and a quantizer threshold for each possible input gray level based on the updated noise model, such that the algorithm can adapt its diffusion filter and quantizer according to the input intensity value of a pixel to produce a halftone. Simulation results showed that the proposed TDED algorithm can successfully produce halftones bearing the desired noise characteristics as specified by the updated noise model. As a consequence, it provides better performance than conventional error diffusion-based algorithms in terms of various measures including radially averaged power spectrum density and anisotropy. When processing real images, it can eliminate directional artifacts, regular structure patterns, and unintended sharpening effects in its halftoning outputs.

Dot-Diffused Halftoning With Improved Homogeneity.

Compared with the error diffusion, dot diffusion provides an additional pixel-level parallelism for digital halftoning. However, even though its periodic and blocking artifacts had been eased by the previous works, it was still far from satisfactory in terms of the blue noise spectrum perspective. In this paper, we strengthen the relation among the pixel locations of the same processing order by an iterative halftoning method, and the results demonstrate a significant improvement. Moreover, a new approach of deriving the averaged power spectrum density is proposed to avoid the regular sampling of the well-known Bartlett's procedure which inaccurately presents the halftone periodicity of certain halftoning techniques with parallelism. As a result, the proposed dot diffusion is substantially superior to the state-of-the-art parallel halftoning methods in terms of visual quality and artifact-free property, and competitive runtime to the theoretical fastest ordered dithering is offered simultaneously.

A Novel Method for Reliability Estimation of Optoelectronic Coupled Devices Based on Low-frequency Noise Measurements

In this paper the theoretical analysis of Low-frequency (LF) noise sources in Optoelectronic Coupled Devices (OCDs) is given and the relation between typical defects and LF noise (1/f noise, generationrecombination (g-r) nosie and burst noise) is described. According to LF noise sources of OCDs and device reliability estimation methods, a novel measurement system based on virtual instrument for OCDs is introduced and nV-level measurement precision can be achieved with the typical LF noise measurement system, which can be used to screen potential devices with excess noise and assess device relibility classifications. In this experiment, the top and bottom limitative thresholds were used to estimate the components parameters of the Power Spectrum Density (PSD) for estimating the reliability of OCDs by the average noise PSD for the 200 OCDs and the classification criterions of electronic components. The experimental results demonstrated that high reliability requirements can be satisfied.

Precise and unbiased estimation of astigmatism and defocus in transmission electron microscopy

Defocus and twofold astigmatism are the key parameters governing the contrast transfer function (CTF) in transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of weak phase objects. We present a new algorithm to estimate these aberrations and the associated uncertainties. Tests show very good agreement between simulated and estimated defocus and astigmatism. We evaluate the reproducibility of the algorithm on experimental data by repeating measurements of an amorphous sample under identical imaging conditions and by analyzing the linearity of the stigmator response. By using a new Thon ring averaging method, the modulation depth of the rings in a 1D averaged power spectrum density (PSD) can be enhanced compared to elliptical averaging. This facilitates a better contrast transfer assessment in the presence of spherical aberration. Our algorithm for defocus and astigmatism estimation inverts the contrast of the Thon rings and suppresses the background in the PSD using an adaptive filtering strategy. Template matching with kernels of various ellipticities is applied to the filtered PSD after transformation into polar coordinates. Maxima in the resulting 3D parameter space provide multiple estimates of the long axis orientation, frequencies and apparent ellipticities of the rings. The frequencies of the detected rings, together with outlier rejection and assignment of an order to the CTF zeros, are used to estimate the defocus and its uncertainty. From estimations of defocus and ellipticity, we derive astigmatism and its uncertainty. A two-pass approach refines the astigmatism and defocus estimate by taking into account the influence of the known spherical aberration on the shape and frequencies of the rings. The implementation of the presented algorithm is freely available for non-commercial use.

Frequency analysis of wavefront curvature sensing: optimum propagation distance and multi-z wavefront curvature sensing

In this paper we determine the optimum propagation distance between measurement planes and the plane of the lens in a wavefront curvature sensor with the diffraction optics approach. From the diffraction viewpoint, the measured wavefront aberration can be decomposed into Fourier harmonics at various frequencies. The curvature signal produced by a single harmonic is analyzed with the wave propagation transfer function approach, which is the frequency analysis of wavefront curvature sensing. The intensity of the curvature signal is a sine function of the product of the propagation distance and the squared frequency. To maximize the curvature signal, the optimum propagation distance is proposed as one quarter of the Talbot length at the critical frequency (average power point at which the power spectrum density is the average power spectrum density). Following the determination of the propagation distance, the intensity of the curvature signal varies sinusoidally with the squared frequencies, vanishing at some higher frequency bands just like a comb filter. To cover these insensitive bands, wavefront curvature sensing with dual propagation distances or with multi-propagation distances is proposed.

Measuring derived acoustic power of an ultrasound surgical device in the linear and nonlinear operating modes

Objective and motivation The method for measuring derived acoustic power of an ultrasound point source in the form of a sonotrode tip has been considered in the free acoustic field, according to the IEC 61847 standard. The main objective of this work is measuring averaged pressure magnitude spatial distribution of an sonotrode tip in the free acoustic field conditions at different electrical excitation levels and calculation of the derived acoustic power at excitation frequency ( f 0 ≈ 25 kHz). Finding the derived acoustic power of an ultrasonic surgical device in the strong cavitation regime of working, even in the considered laboratory conditions (anechoic pool), will enable better understanding of the biological effects on the tissue produced during operation with the considered device. Experimental method The pressure magnitude spatial distribution is measured using B&K 8103 hydrophone connected with a B&K 2626 conditioning amplifier, digital storage oscilloscope LeCroy Waverunner 474, where pressure waveforms in the field points are recorded. Using MATLAB with DSP processing toolbox, averaged power spectrum density of recorded pressure signals in different field positions is calculated. The measured pressure magnitude spatial distributions are fitted with the appropriate theoretical models. Theoretical approaches In the linear operating mode, using the acoustic reciprocity principle, the sonotrode tip is theoretically described as radially oscillating sphere (ROS) and transversely oscillating sphere (TOS) in the vicinity of pressure release boundary. The measured pressure magnitude spatial distribution is fitted with theoretical curves, describing the pressure field of the considered theoretical models. The velocity and displacement magnitudes with derived acoustic power of equivalent theoretical sources are found, and the electroacoustic efficiency factor is calculated. When the transmitter is excited at higher electrical power levels, the displacement magnitude of sonotrode tip is increased, and nonlinear behaviour in loading medium appears, with strong cavitation activity produced hydrodynamically. The presence of harmonics, subharmonics and ultraharmonics as a consequence of stable cavitation is evident in the averaged power spectral density. The cavitation noise with continuous frequency components is present as a consequence of transient cavitation. The averaged pressure magnitude at the frequency components of interest (discrete and continous) in the field points is found by calculating average power spectral density of the recorded pressure waveform signal using the welch method. The frequency band of interest where average power spectral density is calculated is in the range from 15 Hz up to 120 kHz due to measurement system restrictions. The novelty in the approach is the application of the acoustic reciprocity principle on the nonlinear system (sonotrode tip and bubble cloud) to find neccessary acoustic power of the equivalent acoustic source to produce the measured pressure magnitude in the field points at the frequency components of interest. Results In the nonlinear operating mode, the ROS model for the considered sonotrode tip is chosen due to the better agreement between measurement results and theoretical considerations. At higher excitation levels, it is shown that the averaged pressure magnitude spatial distribution of discrete frequency components, produced due to stable cavitation, can be fitted in the far field with the inverse distance law. The reduced electroacoustic efficiency factor, calculated at excitation frequency component as ratio of derived acoustic power with applied electrical power, is reduced from 40% in the linear to 3% in the strong nonlinear operating mode. The derived acoustic power at other frequency components (subharmonic, harmonic and ultraharmonic) is negligible in comparison with the derived acoustic power at excitation frequency. Discussion and conclusions The sonotrode tip and loading medium are shown in the strong cavitation regime as the coupled nonlinear dynamical system radiating acoustic power at frequency components appearing in the spectrum. The bubble cloud in the strong nonlinear operating mode decreases the derived acoustic power significantly at the excitation frequency.

Gabor Filter Optimization Design for Iris Texture Analysis

This paper deals with an optimization design method for the Gabor filters based on the analysis of an iris texture model. By means of analyzing the properties of an iris texture image, the energy distribution regularity of the iris texture image measured by the average power spectrum density is exploited, and the theoretical ranges of the efficient valued frequency and orientation parameters can also be deduced. The analysis shows that the energy distribution of the iris texture is generally centralized around lower frequencies in the spatial frequency domain. Accordingly, an iterative algorithm is designed to optimize the Gabor parameter field. The experimental results indicate the validity of the theory and efficiency of the algorithm.