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Introduction: Subjects with mild to moderate hearing loss today often receive hearing aids (HA) with open-fitting (OF). In OF, direct sound reaches the eardrums with minimal damping. Due to the required processing delay in digital HA, the amplified HA sound follows some milliseconds later. This process occurs in both ears symmetrically in bilateral HA provision and is likely to have no or minor detrimental effect on binaural hearing. However, the delayed and amplified sound are only present in one ear in cases of unilateral hearing loss provided with one HA. This processing alters interaural timing differences in the resulting ear signals.
Methods: In the present study, an experiment with normal-hearing subjects to investigate speech intelligibility in noise with direct and delayed sound was performed to mimic unilateral and bilateral HA provision with OF.
Results: The outcomes reveal that these delays affect speech reception thresholds (SRT) in the unilateral OF simulation when presenting speech and noise from different spatial directions. A significant decrease in the median SRT from –18.1 to –14.7 dB SNR is observed when typical HA processing delays are applied. On the other hand, SRT was independent of the delay between direct and delayed sound in the bilateral OF simulation.
Discussion: The significant effect emphasizes the development of rapid processing algorithms for unilateral HA provision.
Analysing and predicting the advance rate of a tunnel boring machine (TBM) in hard rock is integral to tunnelling project planning and execution. It has been applied in the industry for several decades with varying success. Most prediction models are based on or designed for large-diameter TBMs, and much research has been conducted on related tunnelling projects. However, only a few models incorporate information from projects with an outer diameter smaller than 5 m and no penetration prediction model for pipe jacking machines exists to date. In contrast to large TBMs, small-diameter TBMs and their projects have been considered little in research. In general, they are characterised by distinctive features, including insufficient geotechnical information, sometimes rather short drive lengths, special machine designs and partially concurring lining methods like pipe jacking and segment lining. A database which covers most of the parameters mentioned above has been compiled to investigate the performance of small-diameter TBMs in hard rock. In order to provide sufficient geological and technical variance, this database contains 37 projects with 70 geotechnically homogeneous areas. Besides the technical parameters, important geotechnical data like lithological information, unconfined compressive strength, tensile strength and point load index is included and evaluated. The analysis shows that segment lining TBMs have considerably higher penetration rates in similar geological and technical settings mostly due to their design parameters. Different methodologies for predicting TBM penetration, including state-of-the-art models from the literature as well as newly derived regression and machine learning models, are discussed and deployed for backward modelling of the projects contained in the database. New ranges of application for small-diameter tunnelling in several industry-standard penetration models are presented, and new approaches for the penetration prediction of pipe jacking machines in hard rock are proposed.
Precisely synchronized communication is a major precondition for many industrial applications. At the same time, hardware cost and power consumption need to be kept as low as possible in the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. While many wired solutions on the market achieve these requirements, wireless alternatives are an interesting field for research and development. This article presents a novel IEEE802.11n/ac wireless solution, exhibiting several advantages over state-of-the-art competitors. It is based on a market-available wireless System on a Chip with modified low-level communication firmware combined with a low-cost field-programmable gate array. By achieving submicrosecond synchronization accuracy, our solution outperforms the precision of low-cost products by almost four orders of magnitude. Based on inexpensive hardware, the presented wireless module is up to 20 times cheaper than software-defined-radio solutions with comparable timing accuracy. Moreover, it consumes three to five times less power. To back up our claims, we report data that we collected with a high sampling rate (2000 samples per second) during an extended measurement campaign of more than 120 h, which makes our experimental results far more representative than others reported in the literature. Additional support is provided by the size of the testbed we used during the experiments, composed of a hybrid network with nine nodes divided into two independent wireless segments connected by a wired backbone. In conclusion, we believe that our novel Industrial IoT module architecture will have a significant impact on the future technological development of high-precision time-synchronized communication for the cost-sensitive industrial IoT market.
Blockchain interoperability: the state of heterogenous blockchain-to-blockchain communication
(2023)
Blockchain technology has been increasingly adopted over the past few years since the introduction of Bitcoin, with several blockchain architectures and solutions being proposed. Most proposed solutions have been developed in isolation, without a standard protocol or cryptographic structure to work with. This has led to the problem of interoperability, where solutions running on different blockchain platforms are unable to communicate, limiting the scope of use. With blockchains being adopted in a variety of fields such as the Internet of Things, it is expected that the problem of interoperability if not addressed quickly, will stifle technology advancement. This paper presents the current state of interoperability solutions proposed for heterogenous blockchain systems. A look is taken at interoperability solutions, not only for cryptocurrencies, but also for general data-based use cases. Current open issues in heterogenous blockchain interoperability are presented. Additionally, some possible research directions are presented to enhance and to extend the existing blockchain interoperability solutions. It was discovered that though there are a number of proposed solutions in literature, few have seen real-world implementation. The lack of blockchain-specific standards has slowed the progress of interoperability. It was also realized that most of the proposed solutions are developed targeting cryptocurrency-based applications.
This paper presents an overview of EREMI, a two-year project funded under ERASMUS+ KA203, and its results. The project team’s main objective was to develop and validate an advanced interdisciplinary higher education curriculum, which includes lifelong learning components. The curriculum focuses on enhancing resource efficiency in the manufacturing industry and optimising poorly or non-digitised industrial physical infrastructure systems. The paper also discusses the results of the project, highlighting the successful achievement of its goals. EREMI effectively supports the transition to Industry 5.0 by preparing a common European pool of future experts. Through comprehensive research and collaboration, the project team has designed a curriculum that equips students with the necessary skills and knowledge to thrive in the evolving manufacturing landscape. Furthermore, the paper explores the significance of EREMI’s contributions to the field, emphasising the importance of resource efficiency and system optimisation in industrial settings. By addressing the challenges posed by under-digitised infrastructure, the project aims to drive sustainable and innovative practices in manufacturing. All five project partner organisations have been actively engaged in offering relevant educational content and framework for decentralised sustainable economic development in regional and national contexts through capacity building at a local level. A crucial element of the added value is the new channel for obtaining feedback from students. The survey results, which are outlined in the paper, offer valuable insights gathered from students, contributing to the continuous improvement of the project.
The article investigates the development of a manufacturing route for highly porous titanium foams suitable for craniofacial surgery applications, particularly in cranioplasties. The study focuses on the polyurethane replication method for foam production and emphasizes reducing residual gas content, as it significantly affects the mechanical properties and suitability for approval of the foams. Various factors such as starting materials, solvent debinding, heating schedules, and hydrogen atmosphere are analyzed for their impact on residual gas content. It is shown that significant reductions in residual gas content can only be achieved by reworking each step of the process. A combination of initial solvent debinding of the PU template with dimethyl sulphoxide, reduction of suspension additives, use of coarser Gd. 1 powders, and an integrated debinding and sintering process under partial hydrogen atmosphere achieves a significant reduction in residual gas content. This way, the potential for producing titanium foams that comply with relevant standards for craniofacial implants is demonstrated.
Am 1. Juli 2022 trafen sich im Rahmen des Abschlusskolloquiums des Projekts ACA-Modes rund 60 Teilnehmende aus Forschung, Lehre und Industrie zu einer internationalen Konferenz an der Hochschule Offenburg. Hier wurden die Projektergebnisse rund um die erfolgreiche Implementierung modellprädiktiver Regelstrategien vorgestellt, aktuelle Fragestellungen diskutiert und Entwicklungspfade hin zu einem netzdienlichen Betrieb von Energieverbundsystemen skizziert.
Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are increasingly generating attention in the field of hardware-based security for the Internet of Things (IoT). A PUF, as its name implies, is a physical element with a special and unique inherent characteristic and can act as the security anchor for authentication and cryptographic applications. Keeping in mind that the PUF outputs are prone to change in the presence of noise and environmental variations, it is critical to derive reliable keys from the PUF and to use the maximum entropy at the same time. In this work, the PUF output positioning (POP) method is proposed, which is a novel method for grouping the PUF outputs in order to maximize the extracted entropy. To achieve this, an offset data is introduced as helper data, which is used to relax the constraints considered for the grouping of PUF outputs, and deriving more entropy, while reducing the secret key error bits. To implement the method, the key enrollment and key generation algorithms are presented. Based on a theoretical analysis of the achieved entropy, it is proven that POP can maximize the achieved entropy, while respecting the constraints induced to guarantee the reliability of the secret key. Moreover, a detailed security analysis is presented, which shows the resilience of the method against cyber-security attacks. The findings of this work are evaluated by applying the method on a hybrid printed PUF, where it can be practically shown that the proposed method outperforms other existing group-based PUF key generation methods.
Design and Implementation of a Camera-Based Tracking System for MAV Using Deep Learning Algorithms
(2023)
In recent years, the advancement of micro-aerial vehicles has been rapid, leading to their widespread utilization across various domains due to their adaptability and efficiency. This research paper focuses on the development of a camera-based tracking system specifically designed for low-cost drones. The primary objective of this study is to build up a system capable of detecting objects and locating them on a map in real time. Detection and positioning are achieved solely through the utilization of the drone’s camera and sensors. To accomplish this goal, several deep learning algorithms are assessed and adopted because of their suitability with the system. Object detection is based upon a single-shot detector architecture chosen for maximum computation speed, and the tracking is based upon the combination of deep neural-network-based features combined with an efficient sorting strategy. Subsequently, the developed system is evaluated using diverse metrics to determine its performance for detection and tracking. To further validate the approach, the system is employed in the real world to show its possible deployment. For this, two distinct scenarios were chosen to adjust the algorithms and system setup: a search and rescue scenario with user interaction and precise geolocalization of missing objects, and a livestock control scenario, showing the capability of surveying individual members and keeping track of number and area. The results demonstrate that the system is capable of operating in real time, and the evaluation verifies that the implemented system enables precise and reliable determination of detected object positions. The ablation studies prove that object identification through small variations in phenotypes is feasible with our approach.
An in-depth study of U-net for seismic data conditioning: Multiple removal by moveout discrimination
(2024)
Seismic processing often involves suppressing multiples that are an inherent component of collected seismic data. Elaborate multiple prediction and subtraction schemes such as surface-related multiple removal have become standard in industry workflows. In cases of limited spatial sampling, low signal-to-noise ratio, or conservative subtraction of the predicted multiples, the processed data frequently suffer from residual multiples. To tackle these artifacts in the postmigration domain, practitioners often rely on Radon transform-based algorithms. However, such traditional approaches are both time-consuming and parameter dependent, making them relatively complex. In this work, we present a deep learning-based alternative that provides competitive results, while reducing the complexity of its usage, and, hence simplifying its applicability. Our proposed model demonstrates excellent performance when applied to complex field data, despite it being exclusively trained on synthetic data. Furthermore, extensive experiments show that our method can preserve the inherent characteristics of the data, avoiding undesired oversmoothed results, while removing the multiples from seismic offset or angle gathers. Finally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the model, where we pinpoint the effects of the main hyperparameters on real data inference, and we probabilistically assess its performance from a Bayesian perspective. In this study, we put particular emphasis on helping the user reveal the inner workings of the neural network and attempt to unbox the model.
Seismic data processing involves techniques to deal with undesired effects that occur during acquisition and pre-processing. These effects mainly comprise coherent artefacts such as multiples, non-coherent signals such as electrical noise, and loss of signal information at the receivers that leads to incomplete traces. In the past years, there has been a remarkable increase of machine-learning-based solutions that have addressed the aforementioned issues. In particular, deep-learning practitioners have usually relied on heavily fine-tuned, customized discriminative algorithms. Although, these methods can provide solid results, they seem to lack semantic understanding of the provided data. Motivated by this limitation, in this work, we employ a generative solution, as it can explicitly model complex data distributions and hence, yield to a better decision-making process. In particular, we introduce diffusion models for three seismic applications: demultiple, denoising and interpolation. To that end, we run experiments on synthetic and on real data, and we compare the diffusion performance with standardized algorithms. We believe that our pioneer study not only demonstrates the capability of diffusion models, but also opens the door to future research to integrate generative models in seismic workflows.
Neural networks tend to overfit the training distribution and perform poorly on out-ofdistribution data. A conceptually simple solution lies in adversarial training, which introduces worst-case perturbations into the training data and thus improves model generalization to some extent. However, it is only one ingredient towards generally more robust models and requires knowledge about the potential attacks or inference time data corruptions during model training. This paper focuses on the native robustness of models that can learn robust behavior directly from conventional training data without out-of-distribution examples. To this end, we study the frequencies in learned convolution filters. Clean-trained models often prioritize high-frequency information, whereas adversarial training enforces models to shift the focus to low-frequency details during training. By mimicking this behavior through frequency regularization in learned convolution weights, we achieve improved native robustness to adversarial attacks, common corruptions, and other out-of-distribution tests. Additionally, this method leads to more favorable shifts in decision-making towards low-frequency information, such as shapes, which inherently aligns more closely with human vision.
Predictive control has great potential in the home energy management domain. However, such controls need reliable predictions of the system dynamics as well as energy consumption and generation, and the actual implementation in the real system is associated with many challenges. This paper presents the implementation of predictive controls for a heat pump with thermal storage in a real single-family house with a photovoltaic rooftop system. The predictive controls make use of a novel cloud camera-based short-term solar energy prediction and an intraday prediction system that includes additional data sources. In addition, machine learning methods were used to model the dynamics of the heating system and predict loads using extensive measured data. The results of the real and simulated operation will be presented.
The increasingly stringent CO2 emissions standards require innovative solutions in the vehicle development process. One possibility to reduce CO2 emissions is the electrification of powertrains. The resulting increased complexity, as well as the increased competition and time pressure make the use of simulation software and test benches indispensable in the early development phases. This publication therefore presents a methodology for test bench coupling to enable early testing of electrified powertrains. For this purpose, an internal combustion engine test bench and an electric motor test bench are virtually interconnected. By applying and extending the Distributed Co-Simulation Protocol Standard for the presented hybrid electric powertrain use case, real-time-capable communication between the two test benches is achieved. Insights into the test bench setups, and the communication between the test benches and the protocol extension, especially with regard to temperature measurements, enable the extension to be applied to other powertrain or test bench configurations. The shown results from coupled test bench operations emphasize the applicability. The discussed experiences from the test bench coupling experiments complete the insights.
With the function RooTri(), we present a simple and robust calculation method for the approximation of the intersection points of a scalar field given as an unstructured point cloud with a plane oriented arbitrarily in space. The point cloud is approximated to a surface consisting of triangles whose edges are used for computing the intersection points. The function contourc() of Matlab is taken as a reference. Our experiments show that the function contourc() produces outliers that deviate significantly from the defined nominal value, while the quality of the results produced by the function RooTri() increases with finer resolution of the examined grid.
Featherweight Generic Go (FGG) is a minimal core calculus modeling the essential features of the programming language Go. It includes support for overloaded methods, interface types, structural subtyping, and generics. The most straightforward semantic description of the dynamic behavior of FGG programs is to resolve method calls based on runtime type information of the receiver. This article shows a different approach by defining a type-directed translation from FGG− to an untyped lambda-calculus. FGG− includes all features of FGG but type assertions. The translation of an FGG− program provides evidence for the availability of methods as additional dictionary parameters, similar to the dictionary-passing approach known from Haskell type classes. Then, method calls can be resolved by a simple lookup of the method definition in the dictionary. Every program in the image of the translation has the same dynamic semantics as its source FGG− program. The proof of this result is based on a syntactic, step-indexed logical relation. The step index ensures a well-founded definition of the relation in the presence of recursive interface types and recursive methods. Although being non-deterministic, the translation is coherent.
In this paper, the performance of different continuous-time and discrete-time models of the electrical subsystem of induction machines and permanent-magnet synchronous machines as well as methods based on them for decoupling the direct and
quadrature axis components of the stator current are investigated and compared. The focus here is on inverter-fed, pulse width modulated drives when operated with a relatively large product of stator frequency and sampling time, where significant
differences between the models and decoupling methods used come to light. Recommendations for a discrete-time model to be used uniformly in the future are made, as well as statements on whether feedforward or feedback decoupling structures are better suited and whether state controllers improve decoupling measures for very steep speed ramps. Simulation studies and measurement results support the statements made above.
Unterschiedliche Stimulationszeitpunkte bei bimodaler Versorgung mit Hörgerät und Cochleaimplantat
(2023)
Die bimodale Versorgung von Patienten mit Hörgerät (HG) ipsilateral und Cochleaimplantat (CI) kontralateral bei asymmetrischem Hörverlust ist aufgrund vieler inhärenter Variablen die komplizierteste Versorgungsart im Kontext der Versorgung mit CI. Im vorliegenden Übersichtsartikel werden alle systematischen interauralen Unterschiede zwischen elektrischer und akustischer Stimulation dargestellt, die bei dieser Versorgungsart auftreten können. Darüber hinaus werden Methoden zur Quantifizierung des interauralen Latenzoffsets, also des Zeitunterschieds zwischen der akustischen und elektrischen Stimulation des Hörnervs, mittels Registrierung auditorisch evozierter Potenziale – erzeugt durch akustische bzw. elektrische Stimulation – und Messungen an den Sprachprozessoren und Hörgeräten vorgestellt. Die technische Kompensation des interauralen Latenzoffsets und ihre positive Auswirkung auf die Schalllokalisationsfähigkeit bimodal mit CI und HG versorgter Patienten wird ebenfalls beschrieben. Zuletzt werden neueste Erkenntnisse diskutiert, die Gründe dafür aufzeigen, warum die Kompensation des interauralen Latenzoffsets das Sprachverstehen im Störgeräusch bei bimodal versorgten CI-/HG-Trägern nicht verbessert.