Faculty Bibliography

The vibration signal of faulty rotating machinery tends to be a mixture of repetitive transients, discrete frequency components and noise. How to accurately extract the repetitive transients is a critical issue for machinery fault diagnosis. Inspired by reweighted L1 (ReL1) minimization for sparsity enhancement, a reweighted generalized minimax-concave (ReGMC) sparse regularization method is proposed to extract the repetitive transients. We utilize the generalized minimax-concave (GMC) penalty to regularize the weighted sparse representation model to overcome the underestimation deficiency of L1 norm penalty. Moreover, a new reweight strategy which is different from the reweight strategy in ReL1 for sparsity enhancement is proposed according to the statistical characteristic, i.e., squared envelope spectrum kurtosis. Then ReGMC is proposed by solving a series of weighted GMC minimization problems. ReGMC is utilized to process a simulated signal and the vibration signals of a hot-milling transmission gearbox and a run-to-failure bearing with incipient fault. The ReGMC analysis results and the comparison studies show that ReGMC can effectively extract the repetitive transients while suppressing the discrete frequency components and noise, and behaves better than GMC, improved lasso, and spectral kurtosis.

The authors regret that they omitted to acknowledge that this work was supported in part by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to Achim, under grant RF-2019-282\9. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.

We introduce a real-time capable algorithm which estimates the long-term signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the speech in multi-talker babble noise. In real-time applications, long-term SNR is calculated over a sufficiently long moving frame of the noisy speech ending at the current time. The algorithm performs the real-time long-term SNR estimation by averaging "speech-likeness" values of multiple consecutive short-frames of the noisy speech which collectively form a long-frame with an adaptive length. The algorithm is calibrated to be insensitive to short-term fluctuations and transient changes in speech or noise level. However, it quickly responds to non-transient changes in long-term SNR by adjusting the duration of the long-frame on which the long-term SNR is measured. This ability is obtained by employing an event detector and adaptive frame duration. The event detector identifies non-transient changes of the long-term SNR and optimizes the duration of the long-frame accordingly. The algorithm was trained and tested for randomly generated speech samples corrupted with multi-talker babble. In addition to its ability to provide an adaptive long-term SNR estimation in a dynamic noisy situation, the evaluation results show that the algorithm outperforms the existing overall SNR estimation methods in multi-talker babble over a wide range of number of talkers and SNRs. The relatively low computational cost and the ability to update the estimated long-term SNR several times per second make this algorithm capable of operating in real-time speech processing applications.