The tradeoff between computational complexity and speed, in addition to growing demands for real-time BMI (brain-machine interface) systems, expose the necessity of applying methods with least possible complexity. Willison amplitude (WAMP) and slope sign change (SSC) are two promising time-domain features only if the right threshold value is defined for them. To overcome the drawback of going through trial and error for the determination of a suitable threshold value, modified WAMP and modified SSC are proposed in this paper. Besides, a comprehensive assessment of statistical time-domain features in which their effectiveness is evaluated with a support vector machine (SVM) is presented. To ensure the accuracy of the results obtained by the SVM, the performance of each feature is reassessed with supervised fuzzy C-means. The general assessment shows that every subject had at least one of his performances near or greater than 80%. The obtained results prove that for BMI applications, in which a few errors can be tolerated, these combinations of feature-classifier are suitable. Moreover, features that could perform satisfactorily were selected for feature combination. Combinations of the selected features are evaluated with the SVM, and they could significantly improve the results, in some cases, up to full accuracy.
The use of vascular intersection aberration as one of the signs when monitoring and diagnosing diabetic retinopathy from retina fundus images (FIs) has been widely reported in the literature. In this paper, a new hybrid approach called the combined cross-point number (CCN) method able to detect the vascular bifurcation and intersection points in FIs is proposed. The CCN method makes use of two vascular intersection detection techniques, namely the modified cross-point number (MCN) method and the simple cross-point number (SCN) method. Our proposed approach was tested on images obtained from two different and publicly available fundus image databases. The results show a very high precision, accuracy, sensitivity and low false rate in detecting both bifurcation and crossover points compared with both the MCN and the SCN methods.
A real valued neural network (RVNN) based energy detector (ED) is proposed and analyzed for cognitive radio (CR) application. This was developed using a known two-layered RVNN model to estimate the model coefficients of an autoregressive (AR) system. By using appropriate modules and a well-designed detector, the power spectral density (PSD) of the AR system transfer function was estimated and subsequent receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves of the detector generated and analyzed. A high detection performance with low false alarm rate was observed for varying signal to noise ratio (SNR), sample number, and model order conditions. The proposed RVNN based ED was then compared to the simple periodogram (SP), Welch periodogram (WP), multitaper (MT), Yule-Walker (YW), Burg (BG), and covariance (CV) based ED techniques. The proposed detector showed better performance than the SP, WP, and MT while providing better false alarm performance than the YW, BG, and CV. Data provided here support the effectiveness of the proposed RVNN based ED for CR application.