Performance Assessment and Prediction for Superheterodyne Receivers Based on Mahalanobis Distance and Time Sequence Analysis

The superheterodyne receiver is a typical device widely used in electronics and information systems. Thus effective performance assessment and prediction for superheterodyne receiver are necessary for its preventative maintenance. A scheme of performance assessment and prediction based on Mahalanobis distance and time sequence analysis is proposed in this paper. First, a state observer based on radial basis function (RBF) neural network is designed to monitor the superheterodyne receiver and generate the estimated output. The residual error can be calculated by the actual and estimated output. Second, time-domain features of the residual error are then extracted; after that, the Mahalanobis distance measurement is utilized to obtain the health confidence value which represents the performance assessment result of the most recent state. Furthermore, an Elman neural network based time sequence analysis approach is adopted to forecast the future performance of the superheterodyne receiver system. The results of simulation experiments demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed performance assessment and prediction method.