The objective of the study is to predict the cold cracking resistance of high strength low alloy 950A welded joints using an artificial neural network (ANN) model. A bead on plate welding is carried out using the gas metal arc welding process. The identified process parameters for the ANN are preheating temperature, oxide particle content, and heat input. The impact strength of the weld metal is considered as the output parameter. A feed-forward back propagation model with ten neurons in the hidden layer is developed to predict the impact strength of the weld metal. The neural network model is created, trained, and tested with a set of experimental data. The proposed model correctly predicted the impact strength of the given input parameters. The predicted value of the impact strength is in agreement with the experimental data. The error percentage between the predicted and observed values is <5% and the root mean square error value is 2.2%. Sensitivity analysis is performed to identify the significance of input parameters. It is evident that the preheating temperature contributes 50.04%, oxide particles content contributes 37.15%, and heat input contributes 12.81% to impact strength.

In this study, a novel image edge detection technique based on the combination of total variation (TV) and anisotropic diffusion (PM) models is presented. In the proposed technique, the authors first use the gradient magnitude to eliminate the noise, then utilise the adaptive weight function to detect the edges of the image. The adaptive weight function has a high ability to adapt and change according to the areas information (edges or flats areas). More specifically, TV filter is applied on the areas which suffer from double and false edges, whereas, anisotropic diffusion filter is applied on the areas which suffer from weak and discontinuous edges. Applying TV filter on the double edges areas will allow one to remove most of the false edges, and thus to obtain much sharper edges. While, applying anisotropic diffusion filter on the discontinuous edges areas will lead to obtaining robust and continuous edges. Consequently, less false edges besides high localisation accuracy were obtained. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the new approach in terms of removing the false edges and improving the localisation accuracy of the edges. As objective quantitative performance measures, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and Pratt's figure of merit (FOM) were used.

To reduce the large errors for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in the multipath condition, a DOA estimation method for multipath targets based on time reversal (TR) multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar is proposed. First, the proposed algorithm combines the focusing characteristic of TR technology with the waveform diversity and symmetry characteristic of MIMO radar, obtaining the virtual sub-arrays of echo signal. Then, the authors multiplex the rows and columns and apply forward–backward spatial smoothing algorithm to remove the coherence of the virtual sub-arrays, effectively improving the DOA estimation accuracy for multipath targets. Simulation results verify the validity of the proposed method.