IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 18, NO.
2, APRIL 2003
Power Quality Disturbance Data Compression,
Detection, and Classification Using Integrated
Spline Wavelet and S -Transform
P. K. Dash, B. K. Panigrahi, D. K. Sahoo, and G. Panda
Abstract—In this paper, power quality transient data are
compressed and stored for analysis and classification purposes.
From the compressed data set, original data are reconstructed
and then analyzed using a modified wavelet transform known as
-transform. Compression techniques using splines are performed
through signal decomposition, thresholding of wavelet transform
coefficients, and signal reconstruction. Finally, we present com-
pression results using splines and examine the application of
splines compression in power quality monitoring to mitigate
against data-communication and data-storage problems. Since
-transform has better time frequency and localization property,
power quality disturbances are detected and then classified in a
superior way than the recently used wavelet transform.
Index Terms—Data compression, pattern classification, power
quality, spline wavelets, -transforms.
I. INTRODUCTION
P OWER-SUPPLY quality issues and resulting problems
are consequences of the increasing use of solid-state
switching devices, nonlinear and power electronically switched
loads, unbalanced power systems, lighting controls, computer
and data-processing equipment, as well as industrial plant
rectifiers and inverters. These electronic-type loads cause
quasistatic harmonic dynamic voltage distortions, inrush,
pulse-type current phenomena with exciting harmonics, and
high distortion.
Power quality problems can cause system equipment mal-
function; computer data loss and memory malfunction of sen-
sitive loads such as computer, programmable logic controller
(PLC) controls, protection, and relaying equipment; and erratic
operation of electronic controls.
Therefore, it is necessary to monitor these disturbances.
Since transient disturbances occur in the order of microseconds,
a single captured event recorded using this type of monitoring
system produces megabytes of data. As a result, the volume
of the recorded data increases significantly, necessitating the
development of a technique to compress the data volume
[1], [2]. It is the purpose of this paper to introduce spline for
compressing power quality disturbance signals. Splines-based
compression schemes have been used especially in image
processing. In 1946, Schoenberg [3] showed how one could
use splines to interpolate equally spaced samples of a function.
Manuscript received September 29, 2000; revised April 4, 2002
P. K. Dash is with Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Selangor, Malaysia.
B. K. Panigrahi, D. K. Sahoo, and G. Panda are with the National Institute of
Technology, Rourkela, India.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2002.803824
0885-8977/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
595
Spline wavelets [4] stand apart in the general theory of wavelet
transform. Their construction starts with the specification of
the underlying multiresolution function spaces. Thus, spline
wavelets can be characterized explicitly; this is in contrast with
most other constructions where the scaling function is specified
indirectly through a two-scale relation.
The main advantage of an explicit construction is that
one does not need to worry about the delicate issues of the
convergence of the iterated filter bank. After reconstructing
the power quality data using spline wavelets, -transform
(a modified form of wavelet transform) [5] is used to detect
and classify the type of disturbance. The -transform uses
a scalable Gaussian window that dilates and translates. The
-transform is unique in that it provides frequency-dependent
resolution while maintaining a direct relationship with the
Fourier spectrum. Several examples are chosen to use spline
wavelets for data compression and reconstruction and -trans-
form for detection and classification of disturbance type. The
-transform contours resemble the nature of the disturbance
unlike the wavelet transform [6], [7] and, hence, directly pro-
vides a visual classification for low-frequency short-duration
disturbances and high-frequency transients as well. A simple
automated classification procedure is also described in the
paper for different types of power quality problems.
II. BASIC PRINCIPLES OF SPLINE WAVELETS
Among all wavelet families, splines [8] appear to have the
best approximation property in the sense that the magnitude of
the constant is minimum. This means that, in the asymptotic
regime where the error is small, we can apply a coarser sam-
pling step if we use splines as opposed to other basis functions
(or wavelet) with the same order . The potential reduction in
sampling density can be quite significant. For instance, it is ob-
served that splines at half the resolution could provide a better
approximation than Daubechies wavelets.
Splines are piecewise polynomials with pieces that are
smoothly connected together. The joining points of the polyno-
mials are called knots. For a spline of degree , each segment
is a polynomial of degree , which would suggest that we need
coefficients to describe each piece.
Splines are uniquely characterized in terms of a B-spline ex-
pansion as
(1)
596
Fig. 1. Centered B-spline of degree 0 to 3.
B-spline Coefficients. The B-splines of degree 0 to 3 are
shown in Fig. 1.
The following closed-form representation of the cubic
B-spline is obtained as
(2)
. , respectively;
Here, we consider the center-symmetric B-spline of degree ,
for compression and reconstruction of power quality
data.
(3)
A. Optimal Time-Frequency Localization
If denotes the B-spline wavelet of degree , than we
have the following approximate formula (Cosine-modulated
Gaussian)
(4)
with
(5)
The quality of this Gabor approximation improves rapidly with
increasing ; for 3 the approximation error is less than
3%. Implication is that there are spline wavelet bases that can
be optimally localized in time and frequency. In other words,
we can get as close as we wish to the time limit and frequency
localization limit specified by the uncertainty principle.
III. SIGNAL DECOMPOSITION AND RECONSTRUCTION
In splines, multiresolution processing in time domain is con-
verted to time-scale domain which is known as forward trans-
form. This process of transform of time domain to time-scale do-
main is known as forward transform (“Wavelet transform”) and
technically known as signal decomposition because a particular
signal is decomposed into several other signals with a different
level of resolution. The reverse transform from time-scale do-
main to time domain is known as inverse Wavelet transform or
signal reconstruction.
A recorded digitized time signal (which is a sampled
version of the original signal) is decomposed into its detailed
and smoothed signals, using filters and
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 18, NO. 2, APRIL 2003
(a)
(b)
Fig. 2. (a) First-scale signal decomposition into c (n) into c (n) and d (n).
(b) First-scale signal reconstruction from c (n) and d (n) into c (n).
contains a detailed version of
and higher-frequency components (i.e., sharp edges transition)
than a smoothed signal . Mathematically this can be
expressed as
(6)
(7)
This is shown in Fig. 2(a). In each level, the length of the de-
composed signal is reduced to half of the original signal. Similar
higher-order decomposition is performed.
The reconstruction of can be performed by a pyramidal
scheme similar to decomposition Fig. 2(b) shows the recon-
struction of from decomposed signals and .
Mathematically, this can be expressed as
(8)
Higher-scale reconstruction is performed in a similar manner.
IV. DATA COMPRESSION USING SPLINE
Data compression is another area where splines can be used
for their symmetry, short support, and excellent approximation
properties. Splines offers advantages, especially in higher di-
mensions where the overhead with respect to wavelets becomes
negligible. This is a powerful idea for the implementation of it-
erative algorithms using a coarse-to-fine iteration strategy. The
approach is reasonably fast because it makes the best use of its
iterations: good starting conditions with an optimizer that is ex-
tremely efficient near the optimum.
In splines compression method, a threshold value is fixed to
discard some coefficients and to eliminate noise in the process
of decomposition. Accordingly, some coefficients are discarded
which results in reduction of the original file size by three to six
times. Thresholding process is explained below.
V. THRESHOLDING OF DECOMPOSED COEFFICIENTS
Thresholding in wavelets are broadly classified as
1) soft thresholding;
2) hard thresholding.
DASH et al.: POWER QUALITY DISTURBANCE DATA COMPRESSION USING INTEGRATED SPLINE WAVELET 597

Soft thresholding is adopted for denoising and hard thresh-

olding is adopted for data compression. Particularly abnormal
spikes of noises get reduced when soft thresholding is applied
because large coefficients are made zero by this. We also find
that in case of hard thresholding, small coefficients are made
zero (i.e., coefficients below threshold) are set to zero. This
leads to the compression of the number of coefficients. It should
also be noted that denoising itself leads to compression, but to a
(a)
lesser degree. Particularly in the case of the power system signal,
this scheme is effective since we have only a single frequency
extract.
The threshold is based on the absolute maximum value of
the wavelet transform coefficients at the associated scale
which can be expressed as

where is the threshold value, lies in the range 0 1

and is the wavelet transform coefficients at the associated
scales and is given by
for
for (8a)
After thresholding, it is clear that that are smaller than
are discarded and those that are larger are stored. These spline
transform coefficients and their temporal positions in the signal
are stored together. Consider an actual disturbance signal
with its wavelet transform at scale 1 , where has
1600 sample points, has 800 sample points. It is clear
that is half of . Fig. 3(b) shows the plot of and
its first-level decomposition signal . From Fig. 3(b)(iii),
it is clear that contains the disturbance signal compared
with . Taking 0.9, 0.1
0.0459. With this threshold value, the number of nonzero ele-
ments in signal is only three. Both magnitude and posi-
tion are to be stored and, therefore, there are 6 (2 3) sample
points to be stored. Performing “one-scale compression,” the
most smoothed signal is , as shown in Fig. 3(b)(iii). It has
only 800 sample points. Hence, the compressed data now has
806 (3 2 800) sample points, compared to 1600 sample
points of the original signal.

A. Compression Ratio
It is the ratio of original file size to the compressed file size.
For the example just presented, the compression ratio is 5.0633.
By choosing a different threshold value, a different compression
ratio can be obtained
original file size
Compression ratio
compressed file size

B. Energy Retained by the Compressed Signal Fig. 3. (a) Schematic distribution network. (b) One-scale spline construction
technique (i) original signal, (ii) distorted signal at scale 1, (iii) smoothed signal
It is the ratio of vector norm of the compressed signal to the at scale 1, (iv) distorted signal: scale 1 after thresholding, and (v) reconstructed
vector norm of original signal. signal.

Energy retained VI. NORMALIZED MEAN SQUARE ERROR

vector norm of compressed data
vector norm of original data
In order to enhance the compression ratio, we now decompose NMSE
the impulsive transient shown in Fig. 4(a) into three time scales. in the order of to (9)
598
Fig. 4. (a)–(e) Spline decomposition and reconstruction for impulse, (f)
S -transform of reconstructed signal.
where is the original signal, and is the reconstructed
signal. To obtain a high-quality reconstructed signal, normalized
mean square error (NMSE) should be small and of the order of
10 . From the example mentioned in Fig. 3(b), NMSE is found
as 2.5088 10 .
VII. -TRANSFORM
-transform is an extension of the idea of the Gabor trans-
form and wavelet transform, and is based on a moving and scal-
able localizing Gaussian window. -transform falls within the
broad range of multiresolution spectral analysis and it is impor-
tant to note that it is used here specifically for a translatable and
scalable Gaussian window where the standard deviation is an in-
verse function of the frequency. With the introduction of dilation
parameter into the localizing Gaussian function defined as
where is the standard deviation. The Gaussian function is
chosen as the window because it is the minimum uncertainty
window. The multiresolution -transform is defined by
The primary purpose of the dilation (or scaling) parameter
is to increase the “width” of the window function for
lower frequency and vice versa, and is controlled by selecting a
specific functional dependency of with the frequency .
and
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 18, NO. 2, APRIL 2003
where is the time period; the choice of unity for the constant in
eq. (12) makes the Gaussian window in eq. (10) the narrowest in
the time domain. Now the continuous -transform is modified
to
(13)
The signal can be written in discrete form as , where
varies from 0 to 1 and is known as discrete time series
of the signal . Discrete Fourier transform of the time series
can be expressed as
(14)
where 0, 1, 1 and the inverse Discrete Fourier
transform is
(15)
-transform in discrete case is the projection of the vector de-
fined by the time series onto a spanning set of vectors. S
transform of the discrete time series is
(16)
VIII. RESULTS
The proposed techniques are used to analyze the power
quality disturbance transients in a power distribution system
simulated using a power system block set. A sample distri-
bution system is shown in Fig. 3(a). The sampling rate for
the collection of power quality transient data is taken equal
to 10 kHz. Different distorted data are generated by varying
different parameters in the power distribution system. The
following case studies are presented in this paper: the result is
obtained for a disturbed signal in three scales taking different
compression ratios. The threshold selection is based on the
absolute maximum value. Here, a three-scale spline wavelet
decomposition scheme is applied to the distorted signal.
For all three signal thresholds , and 10% of abso-
lute maximum value of spline coefficients at the corresponding
scale. Then from the compressed data, the original signal is re-
(10)
constructed using spline reconstruction filter with a mean square
error of the order of 10 to 10 . Splines have better com-
pression capability but they fail to classify. Hence, we have per-
formed -transform on compressed data for classification pur-
pose.
(11)
A. Data Compression Using Spline Wavelets
Case 1: Fig. 4(a) shows an impulsive transient at 22 ms,
Fig. 4(b)–(d) shows a three-scale decomposition using spline
and Fig. 4(e) shows the reconstructed signal. Here we obtained
a compression ratio of 7.1429. -transform is then applied to
(12) the reconstructed coefficients for detection and classification of
DASH et al.: POWER QUALITY DISTURBANCE DATA COMPRESSION USING INTEGRATED SPLINE WAVELET
Fig. 5. (a)–(e) Spline decomposition and reconstruction for frequency
distortion and (f) S -transform output.
a power quality problem. From -transform contours, the im-
pulsive transient at 22 ms is clearly detected and localized. Fur-
ther, the time-frequency contours show the nature of disturbance
waveform (in this case an impulse) through visual inspection.
The nature of this disturbance can be classified by obtaining a
few simple features such as standard deviation and amplitude
factors (described in Section VIII-B).
Case 2: As a second example, we use a variable frequency
signal as shown in Fig. 5(a), where, at 20 ms, time frequency
changes from 48 to 50 Hz and then it changes to 52 Hz at
60.1 ms. This distorted signal is compressed, and then recon-
structed using spline for power quality analysis purpose. Here
we obtained a compression ratio of 6.8. -transform is applied
on this reconstructed data for classification purposes. The fre-
quency variation is clearly detected and localized from -trans-
form contours.
Case 3: A momentary interruption can be seen as a mo-
mentary loss of voltage on a power system. These disturbances
describe a drop of 90 to 100% of the rated system voltage lasting
for 0.5 cycle to 1 min. Fig. 6(a) shows a signal having interrup-
tion from 20 to 60 ms. Using the same threshold as before, we
find a compression ratio of 6.58. A three-scale decomposition
and reconstruction using spline is shown in Fig. 6(b)–(e). From
-transform plot, the interruption mentioned before in supply
is clearly detected and identified. Further, the -transform con-
tours show a collapse in magnitude similar to the RMS (or peak)
value plot of voltage magnitude during a voltage interruption.
Case 4: To enhance the compression capability of spline
and classification capability of -transform, harmonic distorted
signal with 50% sag from 20 to 60 ms is shown in Fig. 7(a).
599
Fig. 6. (a)–(e) Spline decomposition and reconstruction for voltage
interruption and (f) S -transform output.
Fig. 7(b)–(e) shows a three-scale decomposition and recon-
struction of the distorted signal mentioned before. Using the
same threshold value, we obtained a compression ratio of 6.45.
Fig. 7(f) shows -transform plot for the reconstructed signal.
From Fig. 7(f), it is found that -transform provides clear
information on the appearance of the disturbance and its type.
The reduction in contour magnitude is clearly analogous to the
description of voltage sag (reduction of RMS or peak value)
magnitude plot.
B. Classification of Power Quality Disturbances
From the results presented in Figs. 4–7, it can be seen that the
-transform provides visual classification of the power quality
disturbance waveforms. However, a few simple features can be
derived from the -transform output to provide an automated
power quality recognition system from the compressed wave-
form data. As the computation of -transform involves the use
of FFT routines, the output matrix contains informations re-
garding amplitude-time, and amplitude-frequency variations of
the disturbance signal. These informations can be used to obtain
the following features.
1) standard deviation of the lowest -transform con-
tour (level 1) that is above the normalized fundamental
frequency.
2) standard deviation of the amplitude versus time
curve obtained from the rows of the -matrix that is above
the normalized fundamental frequency.
600
Fig. 7. (a)–(e) Spline outputs for voltage sag and (f) S -transform output.
3)
where denotes the rows of the -matrix output with
disturbanc, and denotes the corresponding output without
disturbance.
For disturbances such as voltage sag, voltage swell, and in-
terruption, it is observed that and are less than 0.1 (in-
cluding the cases with harmonics and noise) whereas for tran-
sients, there are oscillatory, impulsive types, and notches
0.1. However, is greater than 0.05 for all oscillatory transients
and is less than 0.05 for notches and impulsive transients. The
other important feature clearly distinguishes low- or power-
frequency disturbances such as voltage sag, swell, and interrup-
tions from higher-frequency transients. For example, for 50%
voltage sag, 0.5 and for 20%, 0.2. In a similar
way, it is found from tests that for 50% voltage swell, 0.5.
In case of voltage interruption, the factor 0.9. For tran-
sients, the factor is small and is less than 0.1. However, for
single- or multiple-type notches, is small and is less than 0.1.
In the previouse examples, the factor quantifies the magnitude
of voltage sag, swell, or interruption. From these examples, it is
quite clear that a simple rule-based system will be adequate to
provide a power quality waveform classification system. How-
ever, due to some overlapping of features for steady-state and
transient disturbances, intelligent systems, such as fuzzy logic
and neural networks, can be used for providing more accurate
and robust classification. As a test case, out of 100 disturbances
of steady and transient types, more than 97% were classified ac-
curately in the presence of noise levels of less than 3% (SNR
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 18, NO. 2, APRIL 2003
30 dB). However, in the presence of more noise and harmonics,
this accuracy deteriorated to less than 90%. Some typical cases
of compressed waveforms presented in this paper in Figs. 4–7
were classified accurately using the simple rule-based approach.
IX. CONCLUSION
The paper has proposed a new approach for the compression
of large-quantity data obtained for analysis of power quality
violations in distribution networks. The results presented
in the paper clearly reveal that the signal can be perfectly
reconstructed from the compressed data in order to save energy
using splines. Due to the superior time-frequency resolution
property, the -transform contours display significantly im-
proved patterns to detect, localize, and visually classify the
types of disturbances. However, for automated classification
of power quality disturbances, the -transform output matrix
is searched to provide a few simple features which when used
in a rule-based system yields the disturbance class. Hence,
sources of such disturbances can be identified and controlled to
improve electric power quality.
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P. K. Dash is currently Professor in the faculty of Engineering, Multimedia
University, Malaysia. He was previously a Chairman Centre for intelligence
systems, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India. His interests are
in fuzzy logic and ANN applications toward power system and power quality
studies.
B. K. Panigrahi is pursuing the Ph.D. degree in power quality studies.
He is currently a Lecturer in electrical engineering at the University College
of Engineering, Burla, India.
D. K. Sahoo received the M.Engg. degree from R.E.C. Rourkela, India.
Currently, he is a Research Engineer.
G. Panda is a Professor of the Department of Applied Electronics and Instru-
mentation Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India. He
has published a large number of papers in signal and image processing as well
as in power quality studies.