Higher-order cumulants for termite’s activity detection in the time domain

Abstract

This paper deals with termite detection using higher-order statistics in the time domain. Sliding higher-order cumulants offer distinctive time instances, as a complement to the sliding variance, which only reveals power excesses in the signal, even for low-amplitude impulses. This sliding kurtosis reveals non-Gaussian characteristics (the peakedness of the probability density function) associated to non-stationary measurements, specially in the near ultrasound frequency band. Contrasted estimators have been used to compute the higher-order statistics. The results are shown via graphical examples and could be extrapolated to all impulse-like insect emissions in a non-destructive frame. Data acquisition stage has been performed using piezoelectric acoustic emission probes.