Antonio Cicone

Antonio Cicone, Haomin Zhou

Real life signals are in general non--stationary and non--linear. The development of methods able to extract their hidden features in a fast and reliable way is of high importance in many research fields. In this work we tackle the problem of further analyzing the convergence of the Iterative Filtering method both in a continuous and a discrete setting in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of its behavior. Based on these results we provide new ideas for efficient implementations of Iterative Filtering algorithm which are based on Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and the reduction of the original iterative algorithm to a direct method.

Antonio Cicone

The Iterative Filtering method is a technique developed recently for the decomposition and analysis of non-stationary and non-linear signals. In this work we propose two alternative formulations of the original algorithm which allows to transform the Iterative Filtering method into a direct technique, making the algorithm closer to an online algorithm. We present a few numerical examples to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

Antonio Cicone, Pietro Dell'Acqua

Nonstationary and nonlinear signals are ubiquitous in real life. Their decomposition and analysis is an important topic of research in signal processing. Recently a new technique, called Iterative Filtering, has been developed with the goal of decomposing such signals into simple oscillatory components. Several papers have been published regarding the analysis of this technique from a mathematical point of view. All these work start with the assumption that each compactly supported signal is extended outside the boundaries periodically. In this work we tackle the problem of studying the influence of different boundary conditions on the decompositions produce by the Iterative Filtering method.

Jayanth Mouli, David Anderson, Antonio Cicone

Many real-life signals, such as gravitational wave measurements, biomedical signals, or geophysical data, are strongly non-stationary but can be decomposed into mono-component signals that contain only one active frequency over time. This is made possible thanks to decomposition methods developed in recent years that can handle non-stationary signals. The problem now is how to compute, in an accurate and stable way, the instantaneous frequency, phase, and amplitude of such mono-component signals. Numerous approaches have been developed so far, but they can be unstable in the presence of noise and struggle to capture quick and intrawave changes in frequency. In this work, we present an alternative approach, called the JADE method, which is based on the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm and which we combine with the FIF algorithm to handle and study multicomponent non-stationary signals. We test the robustness of JADE to noise and run comparisons with classical methods used for instantaneous frequency, phase, and amplitude estimation.

Feng Zhou, Antonio Cicone, Haomin Zhou

The decomposition of non-stationary signals is an important and challenging task in the field of signal time-frequency analysis. In the recent two decades, many signal decomposition methods led by the empirical mode decomposition, which was pioneered by Huang et al. in 1998, have been proposed by different research groups. However, they still have some limitations. For example, they are generally prone to boundary and mode mixing effects and are not very robust to noise. Inspired by the successful applications of deep learning in fields like image processing and natural language processing, and given the lack in the literature of works in which deep learning techniques are used directly to decompose non-stationary signals into simple oscillatory components, we use the convolutional neural network, residual structure and nonlinear activation function to compute in an innovative way the local average of the signal, and study a new non-stationary signal decomposition method under the framework of deep learning. We discuss the training process of the proposed model and study the convergence analysis of the learning algorithm. In the experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed model from two points of view: the calculation of the local average and the signal decomposition. Furthermore, we study the mode mixing, noise interference, and orthogonality properties of the decomposed components produced by the proposed method. All results show that the proposed model allows for better handling boundary effect, mode mixing effect, robustness, and the orthogonality of the decomposed components than existing methods.

Raphael M. Jungers, Nicola Guglielmi, Antonio Cicone

We describe new methods for deciding the stability of switching systems. The methods build on two ideas previously appeared in the literature: the polytope norm iterative construction, and the lifting procedure. Moreover, the combination of these two ideas allows us to introduce a pruning algorithm which can importantly reduce the computational burden. We prove several appealing theoretical properties of our methods like a finiteness computational result which extends a known result for unlifted sets of matrices, and provide numerical examples of their good behaviour.

Feng Zhou, Antonio Cicone, Haomin Zhou

Time-frequency analysis is an important and challenging task in many applications. Fourier and wavelet analysis are two classic methods that have achieved remarkable success in many fields. However, they also exhibit limitations when applied to nonlinear and non-stationary signals. To address this challenge, a series of nonlinear and adaptive methods, pioneered by the empirical mode decomposition method, have been proposed. The goal of these methods is to decompose a non-stationary signal into quasi-stationary components that enhance the clarity of features during time-frequency analysis. Recently, inspired by deep learning, we proposed a novel method called iterative residual convolutional neural network (IRCNN). IRCNN not only achieves more stable decomposition than existing methods but also handles batch processing of large-scale signals with low computational cost. Moreover, deep learning provides a unique perspective for non-stationary signal decomposition. In this study, we aim to further improve IRCNN with the help of several nimble techniques from deep learning and optimization to ameliorate the method and overcome some of the limitations of this technique.

Giuseppe Scarlato, Antonio Cicone, Marco Donatelli

In the analysis of real-world data, extracting meaningful features from signals is a crucial task. This is particularly challenging when signals contain non-stationary frequency components. The Iterative Filtering (IF) method has proven to be an effective tool for decomposing such signals. However, such a technique cannot handle directly data that have been sampled non-uniformly. On the other hand, graph signal processing has gained increasing attention due to its versatility and wide range of applications, and it can handle data sampled both uniformly and non-uniformly. In this work, we propose two algorithms that extend the IF method to signals defined on graphs. In addition, we provide a unified convergence analysis for the different IF variants. Finally, numerical experiments on a variety of graphs, including real-world data, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods. In particular, we test our algorithms on seismic data and the total electron content of the ionosphere. Those data are by their nature non-uniformly sampled, and, therefore, they cannot be directly analyzed by the standard IF method.

Antonio Cicone, Jingfang Liu, Haomin Zhou

Chemicals released in the air can be extremely dangerous for human beings and the environment. Hyperspectral images can be used to identify chemical plumes, however the task can be extremely challenging. Assuming we know a priori that some chemical plume, with a known frequency spectrum, has been photographed using a hyperspectral sensor, we can use standard techniques like the so called matched filter or adaptive cosine estimator, plus a properly chosen threshold value, to identify the position of the chemical plume. However, due to noise and sensors fault, the accurate identification of chemical pixels is not easy even in this apparently simple situation. In this paper we present a post-processing tool that, in a completely adaptive and data driven fashion, allows to improve the performance of any classification methods in identifying the boundaries of a plume. This is done using the Multidimensional Iterative Filtering (MIF) algorithm (arXiv:1411.6051, arXiv:1507.07173), which is a non-stationary signal decomposition method like the pioneering Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method. Moreover, based on the MIF technique, we propose also a pre-processing method that allows to decorrelate and mean-center a hyperspectral dataset. The Cosine Similarity measure, which often fails in practice, appears to become a successful and outperforming classifier when equipped with such pre-processing method. We show some examples of the proposed methods when applied to real life problems.