Powerful, User-Friendly Method for Automated Signal Detection

Adjustable Bandwidth Concept (ABC) allows for automation of signal detection by reducing the number of human interventions and also provides new ways of looking at the data. ABC is applicable to any data that can be expressed in a time-frequency spectrogram. This efficient technique is especially suitable to detect burst or aperiodic signals. ABC uses a series of linear filters to decompose the input (typically log-scale) spectrogram into multi-views. This algorithm combines both time and frequency domain averaging. Unlike conventional techniques, wide-band signals are not “averaged away” over time; narrow-band signals are not “averaged away” over frequency. Benefits: Powerful. Allows detection of signals that would normally be missed by traditional methods. User friendly and robust. Low complexity, computationally stable by being robust to small system parameter changes, and easy to use by an operator. Easy to implement. Key components of ABC are time-frequency representations and log-amplitude compression; these are well established techniques commonly found in signal processing systems. ABC is an extra computation step that can be easily accomplished in software languages such as Java or C++ or in hardware via FPGA or ASIC and brings significant payback. Application examples: Channel activity assessment – FCC compliance and EMI studies; Feature detection – signal parameter estimation (SNR and bandwidth).