In signal processing, spectral analysis is widely used but, whereas computing the power spectral density (PSD) by Fourier approaches is relatively easy, its analysis and reading are much more demanding espe- cially for spectrally rich signals. This paper presents an original method which automatically picks out and estimates the relevant spectral structures of an unknown random stationary process, embedded in an unknown non-white Gaussian noise. First, a statistical hypothesis test is applied to each local max- imum value of the estimated PSD to detect the potential spectral peaks of interest. Second, an original feature space is proposed for classifying and characterizing the detected structures. Then, one key idea of the proposed strategy is to use not only one spectral estimator but to combine the results of different ones, taking benefits of their good properties. Therefore the detection and classification steps are ap- plied to different spectral estimations. A last fusion step outputs a complete attribute vector, including a confidence index, for each detected structure. Another key idea of this data-driven approach is that all parameters are automatically set up without a priori knowledge. This approach is fully adapted to the preventive maintenance of complex systems, as illustrated in the paper.

In the framework of satellite-to-ground laser downlinks, an analytical model describing the variations of the instantaneous coupled flux into a single-mode fiber after correction of the incoming wavefront by partial adaptive optics (AO) is presented. Expressions for the probability density function and the cumulative distribution function as well as for the average fading duration and fading duration distribution of the corrected coupled flux are given. These results are of prime interest for the computation of metrics related to coded transmissions over correlated channels, and they are confronted by end-to-end wave-optics simulations in the case of a geosynchronous satellite (GEO)-to-ground and a low earth orbit satellite (LEO)-to-ground scenario. Eventually, the impact of different AO performances on the aforementioned fading duration distribution is analytically investigated for both scenarios.

The Oscillatory Failure Case (OFC) is the name given to a class of failures in the actuator servo loop that cause undesired oscillation of the control surface. The term undesired refers to the fact that these oscillations, even if they are extremely rare, could be coupled with a structural mode and thus must be taken into account for load computation. The structural design is influenced by the OFC amplitude and detection time and so, if we are able to detect quickly smaller and smaller OFC amplitudes we can reduce the overall structural weight with all the related benefits. The current Airbus servo loop principle is shown in Figure 1. The faulty behaviour of an electronic component or a mechanical failure inside the actuator control loop could lead to an OFC. In this study we simulated the OFC effects through the injection of a periodic signal at two specific points of the control loop: the …

Detecting skin lentigo in reflectance confocal microscopy images is an important and challenging problem. This imaging modality has not yet been widely investigated for this problem and there are a few automatic processing techniques. They are mostly based on machine learning approaches and rely on numerous classical image features that lead to high computational costs given the very large resolution of these images. This paper presents a detection method with very low computational complexity that is able to identify the skin depth at which the lentigo can be detected. The proposed method performs multiresolution decomposition of the image obtained at each skin depth. The distribution of image pixels at a given depth can be approximated accurately by a generalized Gaussian distribution whose parameters depend on the decomposition scale, resulting in a very-low-dimension parameter space. SVM classifiers are then investigated to classify the scale parameter of this distribution allowing real-time detection of lentigo. The method is applied to 45 healthy and lentigo patients from a clinical study, where sensitivity of 81.4% and specificity of 83.3% are achieved. Our results show that lentigo is identifiable at depths between 50μm and 60μm, corresponding to the average location of the the dermoepidermal junction. This result is in agreement with the clinical practices that characterize the lentigo by assessing the disorganization of the dermoepidermal junction.

This paper deals with the characterization and the classification of reflectance confocal microscopy images of human skin. The aim is to identify and characterize the skin lentigo, a phenomenon that originates at the dermo-epidermic junction. High resolution images are acquired at different depths of the skin. In this paper, an analysis of confocal images is performed for each depth and the histogram of pixel intensities in the image is determined. It is modeled by a generalized gamma distribution parameterized by a translation, scale and shape parameters ( , and ). These parameters are estimated using the natural gradient descent algorithm and used to achieve the classification between healthy and lentigo patients of clinical images. The obtained results show that the scale and shape parameters (beta and rho) are good features to identify and characterize the presence of lentigo in skin tissues.

This paper presents a fast approach for penalized least squares (LS) regression problems using a 2D Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF) prior. More precisely, the computationoftheproximityoperatoroftheLScriterionregularizedby different GMRF potentials is formulated as solving a Sylvesterlike matrix equation. By exploiting the structural properties of GMRFs, this matrix equation is solved column-wise in an analytical way. The proposed algorithm can be embedded into a wide range of proximal algorithms to solve LS regression problems including a convex penalty. Experiments carried out in the case of a constrained LS regression problem arising in a multichannel image processing application, provide evidence that an alternating direction method of multipliers performs quite efficiently in this context.

Satellite networks are easy-to-deploy solutions to connect rural un-served and underserved areas. But satellite latency has a significant negative impact on performance. Hybrid networks, combining high-throughput long-delay links (e.g. GEO satellites) and short-delay low-throughput links (e.g. poor ADSL), can improve user experience by the use of intelligent routing. Emerging solutions, such as MultiPath TCP (MPTCP), already optimize the throughput in these hybrid networks. However, this kind of solutions does not take into account QoE requirements by the lack of relevant flows information, leading to sub-optimal path selection. This paper proposes an architecture able to retrieve the content size through interconnection with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Then, we conduct an analytical study of a probabilistic and a size threshold based routing schemes with the Mean Value Analysis (MVA) method. This shows the great benefit brought by size information in terms of QoE. To solve the limitations due to the threshold configuration, we propose a third algorithm that takes into account the path delay and capacity. Finally, we develop a testbed in order to validate our model and to compare this third scheme to the previous ones. We obtain results equivalent to the size threshold scheme, without its disadvantages.

We are facing a steady increase in Internet usages and bandwidth requirements. However, many terrestrial infras-tructures remain unchanged due to exorbitant modernization costs, particularly in rural areas. In front of the aging of their infrastructures, concerned users are turning towards satellite internet access. Indeed, these solutions offer a high-throughput internet access at a moderate cost of deployment. Unfortunately, the long delay introduced by GEO satellite degrades significantly the user Quality of Experience (QoE) in many cases. In this paper, we consider a hybrid access, composed of a low data rate terrestrial path and a satellite path, within a Content Delivery Network (CDN) context. Thanks to the CDN, requested content size is known allowing to use this information in routing schemes to maximize the users' QoE. Then, we compare flow and packet based routing in this heterogeneous and size-aware context. We finally conclude on the limited interest in packet-based routing compared to flow-based routing, privileged by its simplicity and good performance from a QoE point of view.