A Comparative Study of Genetic Algorithm Parameters for the Inverse Problem-based Fault Diagnosis of Liquid Rocket Propulsion Systems

Fault diagnosis of liquid rocket propulsion systems （LRPSs） is a very important issue in space launch activities particularly when manned space missions are accompanied, since the safety and reliability can be significantly enhanced by exploiting an efficient fault diagnosis system. Currently, inverse problem-based diagnosis has attracted a great deal of research attention in fault diagnosis domain. This methodology provides a new strategy to model-based fault diagnosis for monitoring the health of propulsion systems. To solve the inverse problems arising from the fault diagnosis of LRPSs, GAs have been adopted in recent years as the first and effective choice of available numerical optimization tools. However, the GA has many control parameters to be chosen in advance and there still lack sound theoretical tools to analyze the effects of these parameters on diagnostic performance analytically. In this paper a comparative study of the influence of GA parameters on diagnostic results is conducted by performing a series of numerical experiments. The objective of this study is to investigate the contribution of individual algorithm parameter to final diagnostic result and provide reasonable estimates for choosing GA parameters in the inverse problem-based fault diagnosis of LRPSs. Some constructive remarks are made in conclusion and will be helpful for the implementation of GA to the fault diagnosis practice of LRPSs in the future.

Target detection and recognition in SAR imagery based on KFDA

Current research on target detection and recognition from synthetic aperture radar （SAR） images is usually carried out separately. It is difficult to verify the ability of a target recognition algorithm for adapting to changes in the environment. To realize the whole process of SAR automatic target recognition （ATR）, es- pecially for the detection and recognition of vehicles, an algorithm based on kernel fisher discdminant analysis （KFDA） is proposed. First, in order to make a better description of the difference be- tween the background and the target, KFDA is extended to the detection part. Image samples are obtained with a dual-window approach and features of the inner and outer window samples are extracted by using KFDA. The difference between the features of inner and outer window samples is compared with a threshold to determine whether a vehicle exists. Second, for the target area, we propose an improved KFDA-IMED （image Euclidean distance） combined with a support vector machine （SVM） to recognize the vehicles. Experimental results validate the performance of our method. On the detection task, our proposed method obtains not only a high detection rate but also a low false alarm rate without using any prior information. For the recognition task, our method overcomes the SAR image aspect angle sensitivity, reduces the requirements for image preprocessing and improves the recogni- tion rate.

A novel visual attention method for target detection from SAR images

Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) imaging systems have been widely used in civil and military fields due to their all-weather and all-day abilities and various other advantages. However, due to image data exponentially increasing, there is a need for novel automatic target detection and recognition technologies. In recent years, the visual attention mechanism in the visual system has helped humans effectively deal with complex visual signals. In particular, biologically inspired top-down attention models have garnered much attention recently. This paper presents a visual attention model for SAR target detection, comprising a bottom-up stage and top-down process.In the bottom-up step, the Itti model is improved based on the difference between SAR and optical images. The top-down step fully utilizes prior information to further detect targets. Extensive detection experiments carried out on the benchmark Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition(MSTAR) dataset show that, compared with typical visual models and other popular detection methods, our model has increased ability and robustness for SAR target detection, under a range of Signal to Clutter Ratio(SCR) conditions and scenes. In addition, results obtained using only the bottom-up stage are inferior to those of the proposed method, further demonstrating the effectiveness and rationality of a top-down strategy. In summary, our proposed visual attention method can be considered a potential benchmark resource for the SAR research community.