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- Creator:
- Mehciz, Burton
- Description:
- The affordability, small size, and minimal power requirements of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers makes them common in portable applications. The challenge with MEMS accelerometers is that they are subject to stochastic and deterministic errors. This work provides an examination of the benefits and limitations of average measurement-based homogeneous MEMS accelerometer fusion techniques. A gradient descent technique and two linear least squares approximation methods are also developed for accelerometer calibration. A new calibration method, called the moments technique, achieves low computational requirement and demonstrates similar accuracy to the gradient descent calibration method when accelerometer measurement biases are small. Predictive models of compound accelerometer measurement improvement are also developed. They exhibit good agreement with experimentally established trends and support the idea that simple compound accelerometer systems can be used to improve the quality of acceleration measurements in certain applications. However, this study also reveals an increasing trend in the relative error between the predicted and observed compound measurement improvement when more accelerometers are combined.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sacramento
- Department:
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering

- Creator:
- Alharbi, Kamal Abdullah
- Description:
- The limited resolution of a microscope is due to the diffraction limit, aperture and the optical lens. Superresolution (SR) methods improve resolution beyond the diffraction limit. Structured illumination (SI) is an SR method that helps acquire and fuse several non-redundant low-resolution (LR) images of the same object to produce a high-resolution (HR) image. In this thesis, an alternative method is developed and evaluated for fusing LR images obtained using SI to produce HR images. The method advocates the use of the L1 norm with total variation regularization to address the problem with existing image reconstruction using Wiener-like deconvolution. The method is applicable for reconstruction of grayscale images. The work also justifies some practical assumptions that greatly reduce the computational complexity and memory requirements of the proposed methods. The work introduces Peak Signal to Standard Error of the Estimate Ratio (PSSEER) as a quantitative method of measuring image quality. Subjective and objective methods are consistent in showing that L1/TV optimization resolves more details than Wiener-like deconvolution reconstruction. The proposed method performs better in the absence of noise and in the presence of either Gaussian or Poisson noise.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sacramento
- Department:
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering

- Creator:
- Sanchez, Saul
- Description:
- Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a serious health problem that can lead to permanent disability or death. A TBI may cause two major types of intra-cranial hemorrhage: subdural hematoma (SDH) and epidural hematoma (EDH). Subdural hematomas are the most common. Acute SDH/EDHs are associated with a high mortality rate, thus requiring immediate surgical treatment. Complications due to an SDH/EDH include seizures, temporary or permanent numbness, dizziness, headaches, coma, and death. The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) is the most commonly used method of diagnosis to determine if a person needs to be hospitalized to test for the presence of an SDH/EDH. Current technologies, computer tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to detect an SDH/EDH require the patient to be hospitalized. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory currently is developing a portable device that uses micro-power impulse radar (MIR) to help in the rapid detection of SDH/EDHs. The device, which is currently undergoing clinical trials, has successfully detected a large EDH. This thesis describes a phantom study performed to determine the possibility of detecting an intracranial hematoma as small as 1 cc using the device. If a small hematoma is diagnosed, the device would allow for constant monitoring for further volume growth. A bench top experiment used porcine brain tissue, blood, and the upper portion of a human skull to simulate a human head. A latex pouch containing blood was used to simulate an intracranial hematoma. The data obtained showed that the hematoma detector was able to detect an SDH as small as 1 cc. The hematoma volume was incremented in volume to observe the effects it had on the return signal. It was observed that as the hematoma volume was increased, the detected return signal amplitude was altered in a non-linear manner.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sacramento
- Department:
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering

- Creator:
- Rahimi-Ardabily, Ali
- Description:
- This thesis discusses the different strategies used to perform peak load shaving through the means of distributed generation and energy storage systems from the Utility’s perspective. Peak load shaving, sometimes referred to as load leveling or peak shifting, consists of the schemes used to eliminate the peaks and valleys in the load profile. This practice offers vast benefits to utilities in cost generation, line loss reduction, and volt support which is further discussed. Prior work for peak load shaving has been mainly focused on approaches such as linear and dynamic programming, and heuristic approaches such as particle-swarm optimization. The proposed algorithm here is based on a simple approach which compares the load profile with its average in a certain period and shares the charge/discharge among the energy storage devices based on defined weighting factors. In particular, the thesis focuses on the usage of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) and distributed generations to accomplish this task. Results show that the proposed algorithm offers a simple, fast and effective way for peak-load shaving without heavy computational burdens often needed in other methods. As a result, it can be easily implemented in the Utility main substation for controlling the charge/discharge of storage devices throughout the distribution system.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sacramento
- Department:
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering

5. A fuzzy approach for cell counting in poorly-illuminated images applied to a cell-phone microscope
- Creator:
- Rahimzadeh Soumesaraei, Mehdi
- Description:
- A blood cell count is a common diagnostic tool in medicine, and one way to obtain such a count is from an image of a blood smear. Researchers at the Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST) at the University of California, Davis have developed an attachment to convert a cell phone to a microscope. The images provided by this cell-phone microscope suffer from several artifacts, such as radial distortion and non-uniform illumination. It is desired to develop a software application for a smart phone to perform image processing and pattern recognition that can return an approximate blood count. In this work, prototype software has been developed on a personal computer (PC) that performs the whole procedure of image processing and pattern recognition to provide an approximate red blood cell count. To do the red blood cell count, images that are taken of a blood sample by a smart phone are transferred to a PC for processing. Radial distortion correction and cropping the defocused area of the image are done as pre-processing steps in preparation for robust cell recognition. Adaptive multi-level segmentation is performed as the second step to transform the image to a fuzzy scene, followed by the red cell recognition step. A fuzzy approach is taken for red cell recognition. The fuzzy approach presented in this work utilized fuzzy sets and not fuzzy logic. Adaptive image fuzzification and fuzzy criterion functions proposed in this thesis have higher performance than conventional counting methods. The proposed approach is robust against fuzziness of the image due to the poor quality of a cell phone image, taken under non-laboratory conditions. The recognition process in this application is a blind search method that is independent of manual calibration and learning. Most of this work has been dedicated to enhancing the algorithm of cell recognition even in poorly-illuminated images. This work focuses on red blood cell counting. However, the concept can be extended to other blood smear counting, such as white blood cells and platelets. This algorithm is tested on seven blood smear images, and the average values for precision and recall are 95.6 percent and 95.4 percent, respectively.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sacramento
- Department:
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering

- Creator:
- Hossain, Syed Junaid
- Description:
- The objective of this thesis is to design, simulate and fabricate a dielectric resonator band-pass filter to operate at a center frequency of 1.905 GHz with a narrow bandwidth of 8.0 MHz and 60 dB rejection ± 1 MHz from the pass-band edge. In this thesis, I will be designing this band-pass filter with the aid of innovative cross coupling techniques between non-adjacent resonators to produce finite transmission zeros at the desired rejection frequencies. This filter will be utilized in the wireless industry where co-location interference between neighboring cell sites is causing an issue. The aim is to achieve the 60 dB rejection whilst maintaining the 1.5 dB insertion loss and 15 dB return loss over the pass-band frequencies. Various simulation programs and machines will be used to design, develop and fabricate the band-pass filter. The emphasis will be to maintain the insertion loss, return loss and rejection over the temperature range 0 to 70°C by use of a high Q dielectric resonator and temperature compensated cross couplings.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sacramento
- Department:
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Creator:
- Estepanian, Sevak
- Description:
- Jaundice is a commonly occurring incident at birth and the first few days to weeks of the life a neonate. It does not pose a serious health risk and requires minimal medical intervention. However, hyperbilirubinemia can result in long term neurodevelopmental health issues. The most reliable method of monitoring serum bilirubin is to draw a blood sample by a heel puncture. However, this method is painful and increases the risk of infection in hospital settings. Several noninvasive transcutaneous methods are developed. However, skin tone variations or the use of phototherapy exhibited undesired interference with the results. In addition, in the third world countries, medical care is not readily available after the discharge of a neonate from the hospital. Therefore, this thesis work aimed to investigate the functionality of an inexpensive noninvasive method for detection of hyperbilirubinemia. The pulsatile tissue simulator developed in this project to perform preliminary studies on the functionality of the novel method of identifying hyperbilirubinemia noninvasively showed promising results. The simulator was able to represent normal and elevated levels of bilirubin.
- Resource Type:
- Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sacramento
- Department:
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering