On-site non-destructive measurement of termite activity using the spectral kurtosis and the discrete wavelet transform

In this paper we present the operation results of a portable computer-based measurement equipment, conceived to perform non-destructive testing of suspected termite infestations. Its signal processing nucleus is the spectral kurtosis (SK), whose pattern allows the targeting of alarms and activity signals. Data have been also de-noised using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) in order to study its potential complementarity to SK. The DWT keeps the successive approximations of the termite emissions, supposed more non-Gaussian (less noisy) and with less entropy than the detail coefficients. For a given mother wavelet, the maximum acceptable level in the wavelet decomposition tree, which preserves the insects’ emissions features, depends on the comparative evolution of the approximations vs. details’ entropies, and the value of the global SK associated to the approximation of the separated signals. The paper explains the detection criterion by showing different types of real-life recordings (alarms, activity, and background).