IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 61, NO.
1, JANUARY 2014
Automatic Classification of Power Quality
Events Using Balanced Neural Tree
B. Biswal, Member, IEEE, M. Biswal, Member, IEEE,
S. Mishra, Senior Member, IEEE, and R. Jalaja
AbstractThis paper proposes an empirical-mode decomposi-
tion (EMD) and Hilbert transform (HT)-based method for the
classification of power quality (PQ) events. Nonstationary power
signal disturbance waveforms are considered as the superimposi-
tion of various undulating modes, and EMD is used to separate out
these intrinsic modes known as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs).
The HT is applied on all the IMFs to extract instantaneous am-
plitude and frequency components. This timefrequency analysis
results in the clear visual detection, localization, and classification
of the different power signal disturbances. The required feature
vectors are extracted from the timefrequency distribution to
perform the classification. A balanced neural tree is constructed to
classify the power signal patterns. Finally, the proposed method is
compared with an S-transform-based classifier to show the efficacy
of the proposed technique in classifying the PQ disturbances.
Index TermsBalanced neural tree (NT) (BNT), empirical-
mode decomposition (EMD), Hilbert transform (HT),
instantaneous frequency (IF), intrinsic mode function (IMF),
nonstationary power signals.
I. I NTRODUCTION
R ECENTLY, power quality (PQ) and related power supply
issues have become quite a serious problem both for the
end user and the utilities. The PQ issues and related phenomena
can be attributed to the use of solid-state switching devices,
unbalanced and nonlinear loads, industrial grade rectifiers and
inverters, computer and data processing equipment, etc. These
devices introduce distortions in the phase, frequency, and am-
plitude of the power system signal, thereby deteriorating PQ.
Hence, the analysis of PQ related issues is indispensable,
and this has been the focus of the researchers in the past
decade [1][4]. Timefrequency analysis has been success-
fully used in dealing with rapidly varying transient signals,
such as guided-wave signals and damping vibration signals.
The timefrequency transform would provide direct informa-
tion about the frequency components occurring at any given
Manuscript received July 24, 2012; revised December 31, 2012; accepted
February 8, 2013. Date of publication February 22, 2013; date of current
version July 18, 2013.
B. Biswal is with GMR Institute of Technology, Rajam 532127, India
(e-mail: birendra_biswal1@yahoo.co.in).
M. Biswal is with Silicon Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar 751024,
India (e-mail: milan.biswal@gmail.com).
S. Mishra is with Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi 110 016, India
(e-mail: sukumar.mishra@gmail.com).
R. Jalaja is with Gayatri Vidya Parishad College of Engineering for Women,
Visakhapatnam 530048, India (e-mail: jalaja_raj123@yahoo.co.in).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2013.2248335
0278-0046/$31.00 2013 IEEE
521
time. The Fourier transform gives information regarding the
frequency components present but does not contain information
on when they exist and for how long. Although the Fourier
transform is one of the fast techniques, its efficiency is limited
to stationary signals only. Most PQ events are nonstationary and
hence require technique that would not only provide frequency
information but also capture the timing of occurrence of the
disturbance. The short-time Fourier transform gives a good
characterization of the signal. It provides frequency as well as
time information. The nonstationary nature of the signal is well
defined. However, due to the constant window length, some
characteristics of the signal are not detected well. The time
and frequency resolution is limited by the HeisenbergGabor
inequality. Different types of disturbances would require win-
dows of different lengths. Choosing the best window length
could be a problem. The wavelet transform (WT) provides
time and frequency information of the signal by convolving
the dilated and translated wavelet with the signal. By allowing
variations in time and scale plane, a multiresolution analysis is
obtained. The idea is to increase time resolution at higher fre-
quency and frequency resolution at lower frequency. The main
disadvantage of WT is its degraded performance under noisy
situation. The Stockwel transform most commonly known as
the S-transform (ST) is yet another technique which is being
widely used by PQ researchers [5], [6]. The ST is an extension
of WT [7] and is based on localizing the Gaussian window [8].
Here, the modulating sinusoids are fixed with respect to the time
axis while the Gaussian window scales and moves.
Current advances in signal analysis have led to the develop-
ment of a new method for nonstationary signal analysis called
the HilbertHuang transform (HHT). Together, the empirical-
mode decomposition (EMD) and the Hilbert transform (HT)
are labeled as HHT [9]. In this paper, clear visual localization
and detection have been investigated thoroughly for each of the
power signal disturbances using HHT, and finally, the classifi-
cation is carried out using a method called balanced neural tree
(NT) (BNT).
II. EMD
This paper presents a new data analysis method based on the
EMD [10] method, which generates a collection of intrinsic
mode functions (IMFs). The decomposition is based on the
direct extraction of the energy associated with various intrinsic
time scales, the most important parameters of the system. In
general, signals will consist of more than one oscillatory com-
ponent. The idea of the EMD is to repeatedly apply a process