In the earlier works, researchers employed the Fourier transform technique to interpret the obtained tactile information for texture classification. However, the Fourier transform is not appropriate for analysing non-stationary signals in which textures are irregular or non-uniform. Short time Fourier transform or Wavelet might be the most appropriate techniques to analyse non-stationary signals. However, these methods deal with a large number of data points, thereby causing difficulties at the classification step. More features require more training samples resulting in the growth of the computational complexity as well as the risk of over-fitting. To overcome these issues
Kaboli et al. proposed a set of fundamental tactile descriptor inspired by Hjorth parameters. Although Hjorth parameters are defined in the time domain, they can be interpreted in the frequency domain as well. The
Activity parameter is the total power of the signal. It is also the surface of the power spectrum in the frequency domain (
Parseval's theorem). The
Mobility parameter is determined as the square root of the ratio of the variance of the first derivative of the signal to that of the signal. This parameter is proportional to a standard deviation of the power spectrum. It is an estimate of the mean frequency.
Complexity gives an estimate of the bandwidth of the signal, which indicates the similarity of the shape of the signal to a pure sine wave. Since the calculation of the Hjorth parameters is based on variance, the computational cost of this method is sufficiently low, which makes them appropriate for the real-time task. ==References==