Parallel computing for efficient time-frequency feature extraction of power quality disturbances

Fast signal processing implementation techniques for detection and classification of power quality (PQ) disturbances are the need of the hour. Hence in this work, a parallel computing approach has been proposed to speed up the feature extraction of PQ signals to facilitate rapid building of classifier models. Considering that the Fourier, the one-dimensional discrete wavelet, the time-time and the Stockwell transforms have been used extensively to extract pertinent time-frequency features from non-stationary and multi-frequency PQ signals, acceleration approaches using data and task parallelism have been employed for parallel implementation of the above time-frequency transforms. In the first approach, data parallelism was applied to the Stockwell transform and the time-time transform-based feature extraction methods separately to alleviate capability problems. Also, data parallelism was applied to Fourier and wavelet-based feature extraction methods independently to alleviate capacity problems. Secondly, a combination of task and data parallelism was applied to speed up S-transform based three-phase sag feature extraction. Experiments were conducted using shared-memory and distributed memory architectures to try out the effectiveness of the proposed parallel approaches. The performances of these parallel implementations were analysed in terms of computational speed and efficiency in comparison with the sequential approach.