Is QAM the best way to do this? - matlab

Sorry about this noob question, because I never work with matlab and signal processing before.
Here is what I want to do: I have a fixed length of byte array X, now I want to encode it to a sound file, I also want this process to be reversible, which means the sound can be converted back to X with no error. I searched online, and found the following code:
M = 16;
x = randint(5000,1,M);
y=modulate(modem.qammod(M),x);
My question is that, is QAM the best way to do this? and how to use it? A little bit code example will be really appreciated, Thank you!
update#1: I tried to output y by sound(y), but matlab does not allow me to do so, it says I can only output floating numbers. How can I solve this? Thank you!

If you need to transmit over the air, you have quiet a lot of work in front of you I think. The most difficult problem to solve in a telecommunications system is often synchronization, meaning that your receiver will have to know where the QAM symbols are placed in time. This is not easy. If you choose to go ahead I agree with mtrw that you should try dsp.stackexchange.com.
Try for example to imaging a simple modulation scheme where each bit is converted to a short piece of sine with the frequency depending on whether the bit is one or zero. How would you go about decoding this on the receiver end? You need to detect the onset of the first bit and have some self maintaining clock running for synchronization on the receiver to find bits in case they do not change, aka a PLL (Phase Locked Loop). This could possibly be made easier by using manchester coding, but you would still have to do quite a lot to get it running.
As you see, there are no easy solutions when you leave the save Matlab harbor :-)
Best regards

Related

Numerical Integral of large numbers in Fortran 90

so I have the following Integral that i need to do numerically:
Int[Exp(0.5*(aCosx + bSinx + cCos2x + dSin2x))] x=0..2Pi
The problem is that the output at any given value of x can be extremely large, e^2000, so larger than I can deal with in double precision.
I havn't had much luck googling for the following, how do you deal with large numbers in fortran, not high precision, i dont care if i know it to beyond double precision, and at the end i'll just be taking the log, but i just need to be able to handle the large numbers untill i can take the log..
Are there integration packes that have the ability to handle arbitrarily large numbers? Mathematica clearly can.. so there must be something like this out there.
Cheers
This is probably an extended comment rather than an answer but here goes anyway ...
As you've already observed Fortran isn't equipped, out of the box, with the facility for handling such large numbers as e^2000. I think you have 3 options.
Use mathematics to reduce your problem to one which does (or a number of related ones which do) fall within the numerical range that your Fortran compiler can compute.
Use Mathematica or one of the other computer algebra systems (eg Maple, SAGE, Maxima). All (I think) of these can be integrated into a Fortran program (with varying degrees of difficulty and integration).
Use a library for high-precision (often called either arbitray-precision or multiple-precision too) arithmetic. Your favourite search engine will turn up a number of these for you, some written in Fortran (and therefore easy to integrate), some written in C/C++ or other languages (and therefore slightly harder to integrate). You might start your search at Lawrence Berkeley or the GNU bignum library.
(Yes I know that I wrote that you have 3 options, but your question suggests that you aren't ready to consider this yet) You could write your own high-/arbitrary-/multiple-precision functions. Fortran provides everything you need to construct such a library, there is a lot of work already done in the field to learn from, and it might be something of interest to you.
In practice it generally makes sense to apply as much mathematics as possible to a problem before resorting to a computer, that process can not only assist in solving the problem but guide your selection or construction of a program to solve what's left of the problem.
I agree with High Peformance Mark that the best option here numerically is to use analytics to scale or simplify the result first.
I will mention that if you do want to brute force it, gfortran (as of 4.6, with the libquadmath library) has support for quadruple precision reals, which you can use by selecting the appropriate kind. As long as your answers (and the intermediate results!) don't get too much bigger than what you're describing, that may work, but it will generally be much slower than double precision.
This requires looking deeper at the problem you are trying to solve and the behavior of the underlying mathematics. To add to the good advice already provided by Mark and Jonathan, consider expanding the exponential and trig functions into Taylor series and truncating to the desired level of precision.
Also, take a step back and ask why you are trying to accomplish by calculating this value. As an example, I recently had to debug why I was getting outlandish results from a property correlation which was calculating vapor pressure of a fluid to see if condensation was occurring. I spent a long time trying to understand what was wrong with the temperature being fed into the correlation until I realized the case causing the error was a simulation of vapor detonation. The problem was not in the numerics but in the logic of checking for condensation during a literal explosion; physically, a condensation check made no sense. The real problem was the code was asking an unnecessary question; it already had the answer.
I highly recommend Forman Acton's Numerical Methods That (Usually) Work and Real Computing Made Real. Both focus on problems like this and suggest techniques to tame ill-mannered computations.

Calculate distance Using UIAccelerometer in xcode

I am implementing an app which measures the how much distance it has moved .For example if my device felldown from my table to ground ,then I would like to calculate the distance.So Kindly help me to do this. Let me know if my question is not clear.
Thanks in advance.
Your question is very clear : you want to compute the second level integral of the acceleration, which theorically is possible, by supposing the speed null at some time, but I really doubt you could get something precise enough to make any sense (as in many integral computations).
This isn't done today because the error is too big. Done in hardware (for permanent integration of the acceleration) it could be a little more precise but probably not enough to really compute a distance in any acceptable sense of the word "accuracy".
If you want to try it by yourself, here's a document describing more in detail the approach : http://perso-etis.ensea.fr/~pierandr/cours/M1_SIC/AN3397.pdf

max likelihood fminsearch

I used Matlab-fminsearch for a negativ max likelihood model for a binomial distributed function. I don't get any error notice, but the parameter which I want to estimate, take always the start value. Apparently, there is a mistake. I know that I ask a totally general question. But is it possible that anybody had the same mistake and know how to deal with it?
Thanks a lot,
#woodchips, thank you a lot. Step by step, I've tried to do what you advised me. First of all, I actually maximized (-log(likelihood)) and this is not the problem. I think I found out the problem but I still have some questions, if I don't bother you. I have a model(param) to maximize in paramstart=p1. This model is built for (-log(likelihood(F))) and my F is a vectorized function like F(t,Z,X,T,param,m2,m3,k,l). I have a data like (tdata,kdata,ldata),X,T are grids and Z is a function on this grid and (m1,m2,m3) are given parameters.When I want to see the value of F(tdata,Z,X,T,m1,m2,m3,kdata,ldata), I get a good output. But I think fminsearch accept that F(tdata,Z,X,T,p,m2,m3,kdata,ldata) like a constant and thatswhy I always have as estimated parameter the start value. I will be happy, if you have any advise to tweak that.
You have some options you can try to tweak. I'd start with algorithm.
When the function value practically doesn't change around your startpoint it's also problematic. Maybe switching to log-likelyhood helps.
I always use fminunc or fmincon. They allow also providing the Hessian (typically better than "estimated") or 'typical values' so the algorithm doesn't spend time in unfeasible regions.
It is virtually always true that you should NEVER maximize a likelihood function, but ALWAYS maximize the log of that function. Floating point issues will almost always corrupt the problem otherwise. That your optimization starts and stops at the same point is a good indicator this is the problem.
You may well need to dig a little deeper than the above, but even so, this next test is the test I recommend that all users of optimization tools do for every one of their problems, BEFORE they throw a function into an optimizer. Evaluate your objective for several points in the vicinity. Does it yield significantly different values? If not, then look to see why not. Are you creating a non-smooth objective to optimize, or a zero objective? I.e., zero to within the supplied tolerances?
If it does yield different values but still not converge, then make sure you know how to call the optimizer correctly. Yeah, right, like nobody has ever made this mistake before. This is actually a very common cause of failure of optimizers.
If it does yield good values that vary, and you ARE calling the optimizer correctly, then think if there are regions into which the optimizer is trying to diverge that yield garbage results. Is the objective generating complex or imaginary results?

Audio File Matching Program

I'm trying to write a program in iPhone than can take two audio files (e.g. WAV) as inputs, compare them, and spit out a number that tells you how similar the audio files are.
If someone has done something like this, know how to go about doing it, or just have some ideas, please let me know. Anything will be greatly appreciated.
Specific questions: What language is suitable? How hard is it to do (how many
hours, roughly)? Where can I find a good source of audio library/tools?
Thanks!
I'd say it's pretty hard, not so much the implementation, but coming up with a reasonable definition of 'similar'.
That said, you're probably looking at techniques like autocorrelation and FFT, both of which are CPU-intensive tasks, so I'd say a fully-compiled language (C, C++, don't know about Objective-C) would be most suitable at least for the actual calculations. Also, you're facing a somewhat underpowered platform for such tasks (if only because uncompressed audio files are pretty large), so you're in for quite some optimization.
This book: http://www.dspguide.com/ is quite concise reading for all things DSP-related.
Sounds similar to what 'Shazam' does - awesome iPhone app by the way, check it out if you haven't already (it's free too).
A while ago there was an article on how Shazam works, read it here. It takes an acoustic fingerprint and compares it to other songs' fingerprints, returning the closest match.
I would say there is a lot of math, probably some matrices and maybe Fourier transforms involved in fingerprinting and then trying to compare the audio.
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Probably would take a good while to program. If your math skills are up to it though, sounds like a good challenge :-)
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EDIT: turns out there was some source code on the site I linked. It's in Java but would be well worth a look through before you start writing your own. Source code here
I am working on something similar in Java on a speech recognition app.
I would recommend using MFCC (requires calculating FFT) for feature extraction and Neural Networks or some other sort of machine learning technique for training and recognition. You train the NN with the features extracted from the reference wav file, more precisely from consecutive equal lenght slices/windows of that audio file. Then you use the NN to detect if another file, also split into slices, has the same features.
This is the basic idea upon which you can elaborate to further your own specifications, or exactly what you want your app to do.
In terms of libraries in Objective C I think you can find a few for the signal processing part (FFT and such) as for the machine learning part I have no idea about what you could find.
As for programming time it's hard to estimate because it depends on a lot of details. I would say somewhere about a week, but that's just a fair estimation.
ps: MFCC stands for Mel-Frequency Coeficients: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel-frequency_cepstrum

Using MATLAB's plotting features as an interactive part of a Fortran program

Although many of you will have a decent idea of what I'm aiming at, just from reading the title -- allow me a simple introduction still.
I have a Fortran program - it consists of a program, some internal subroutines, 7 modules with its own procedures, and ... uhmm, that's it.
Without going into much detail, for I don't think it's necessary at this point, what would be the easiest way to use MATLAB's plotting features (mainly plot(x,y) with some customizations) as an interactive part of my program ? For now I'm using some of my own custom plotting routines (based on HPGL and Calcomp's routines), but just as part of an exercise on my part, I'd like to see where this could go and how would it work (is it even possible what I'm suggesting?). Also, how much effort would it take on my part ?
I know this subject has been rather extensively described in many "tutorials" on the net, but for some reason I have trouble finding the really simple yet illustrative introductory ones. So if anyone can post an example or two, simple ones, I'd be really grateful. Or just take me by the hand and guide me through one working example.
platform: IVF 11.something :) on Win XP SP2, Matlab 2008b
The easiest way would be to have your Fortran program write to file, and have your Matlab program read those files for the information you want to plot. I do most of my number-crunching on Linux, so I'm not entirely sure how Windows handles one process writing a file and another reading it at the same time.
That's a bit of a kludge though, so you might want to think about using Matlab to call the Fortran program (or parts of it) and get data directly for plotting. In this case you'll want to investigate Creating Fortran MEX Files in the Matlab documentation. This is relatively straightforward to do and would serve your needs if you were happy to use Matlab to drive the process and Fortran to act as a compute service. I'd look in the examples distributed with Matlab for simple Fortran MEX files.
Finally, you could call Matlab from your Fortran program, search the documentation for Calling the Matlab Engine. It's a little more difficult for me to see how this might fit your needs, and it's not something I'm terribly familiar with.
If you post again with more detail I may be able to provide more specific tips, but you should probably start rolling your sleeves up and diving in to MEX files.
Continuing the discussion of DISLIN as a solution, with an answer that won't fit into a comment...
#M. S. B. - hello. I apologize for writing in your answer, but these comments are much too short, and answering a question in the form of an answer with an answer is ... anyway ...
There is the Quick Plot feature of DISLIN -- routine QPLOT needs only three arguments to plot a curve: X array, Y array and number N. See Chapter 16 of the manual. Plus only several additional calls to select output device and label the axes. I haven't used this, so I don't know how good the auto-scaling is.
Yes, I know of Quickplot, and it's related routines, but it is too fixed for my needs (cannot change anything), and yes, it's autoscaling is somewhat quircky. Also, too big margins inside the graf.
Or if you want to use the power of GRAF to setup your graph box, there is subroutine GAXPAR to automatically generate recommended values. -2 as the first argument to LABDIG automatically determines the number of digits in tick-mark labels.
Have you tried the routines?
Sorry, I cannot find the GAXPAR routine you're reffering to in dislin's index. Are you sure it is called exactly like that ?
Reply by M.S.B.: Yes, I am sure about the spelling of GAXPAR. It is the last routine in Chapter 4 of the DISLIN 9.5 PDF manual. Perhaps it is a new routine? Also there is another path to automatic scaling: SETSCL -- see Chapter 6.
So far, what I've been doing (apart from some "duck tape" solutions) is
use dislin; implicit none
real, dimension(5) :: &
x = [.5, 2., 3., 4., 5.], &
y = [10., 22., 34., 43., 15.]
real :: xa, xe, xor, xstp, &
ya, ye, yor, ystp
call setpag('da4p'); call metafl('xwin');
call disini(); call winkey('return');
call setscl(x,size(x),'x');
call setscl(y,size(y),'y')
call axslen(1680,2376) !(8/10)*2100 and 2970, respectively
call setgrf('name','name','line','line')
call incmrk(1); call hsymbl(3);
call graf(xa, xe, xor, xstp, ya, ye, yor, ystp); call curve(x,y,size(x))
call disfin()
end
which will put the extreme values right on the axis. Do you know perhaps how could I go to have one "major tick margin" on the outside, as to put some area between the curve and the axis (while still keeping setscl's effects) ?
Even if you don't like the built-in auto-scaling, if you are already using DISLIN, rolling your own auto-scaling will be easier than calling Fortran from MATLAB. You can use the Fortran intrinsic functions minval and maxval to find the smallest and largest values in the data, than write a subroutine to round outwards to "nice" round values. Similarly, a subroutine to decide on the tick-mark spacing.
This is actually not so easy to accomplish (and ideas to prove me wrong will be gladly appreciated). Or should I say, it is easy if you know the rough range in which your values will lie. But if you don't, and you don't know
whether your values will lie in the range of 13-34 or in the 1330-3440, then ...
... if I'm on the wrong track completely here, please, explain if you ment something different. My english is somewhat lacking, so I can only hope the above is understandable.
Inside a subroutine to determine round graph start/end values, you could scale the actual min/max values to always be between 1 and 10, then have a table to pick nice round values, then unscale back to the correct range.
--
Dump Matlab because its proprietary, expensive, bloated/slow and codes are not easy to parallelize.
What you should do is use something on the lines of DISLIN, PLplot, GINO, gnuplotfortran etc.