Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

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Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ymssp

Multi-harmonic phase demodulation method for instantaneous

angular speed estimation using harmonic weighting
Cédric Peeters a ,∗, Jérôme Antoni b , Quentin Leclère b , Timothy Verstraeten a ,
Jan Helsen a
a
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Pleinlaan 2, Elsene, Belgium
b
Univ Lyon, INSA Lyon, LVA, EA677, 69621 Villeurbanne, France

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Communicated by D. Wang Phase demodulation is arguably the most used technique for the estimation of the instanta-
neous angular speed from vibration signals measured on rotating machinery. Although phase
Keywords:
demodulation offers a straightforward approach to determine accurately the rotation speed of
Phase demodulation
Multiple harmonics
a particular shaft in a rotating machine, it does have strict limitations that can hinder the
Vibration analysis estimation accuracy and its overall reliability. In general, phase demodulation relies on the
Condition monitoring presence of a single harmonic with a high signal-to-noise ratio for the full duration of the
Rotational speed measured vibration signal. Such a precondition hinders its applicability for a generic speed
estimation approach for rotating machinery. There are copious real-world scenarios where this
requirement is not met, especially given the increasing complexity and dynamic operating range
of rotating machines nowadays. In such complex rotating systems, the deterministic signals are
not necessarily all harmonically related to a fundamental harmonic. The presence of crossing
harmonic orders from non-synchronous rotating components or of lightly damped structural
resonances can significantly skew the instantaneous phase demodulation. This paper proposes
a novel approach towards phase demodulation by both incorporating multiple harmonics in
the demodulation process and also giving the individual harmonic phases time-dependent
weighting. This combination of incorporating multiple harmonics and weighting them allows for
fully exploiting the information contained within the vibration signal while also promising to be
more robust to changing operating regimes. The proposed multi-harmonic demodulation method
is investigated thoroughly by assessing its performance on simulated data, on two benchmark
experimental data sets, and on a large wind turbine vibration data set consisting of thousands
of vibration measurements.

1. Introduction

Rotational speed estimation of a machine based on information contained within a vibration signal has been the subject of a
substantial amount of research in the past two decades. Knowledge of the instantaneous angular speed (IAS) of a shaft has become
a necessity for the majority of vibration signal processing techniques due to the non-stationary regimes many rotating machines
operate in [1–4]. To avoid impairing these signal processing methods, a reliable IAS estimation procedure needs to be implemented
for most condition monitoring (CM) systems. Hitherto most of these CM systems generally would use angle encoders or tachometers

∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: cedric.peeters@vub.be (C. Peeters), jerome.antoni@insa-lyon.fr (J. Antoni), quentin.leclere@insa-lyon.fr (Q. Leclère),
Timothy.Verstraeten@vub.be (T. Verstraeten), jan.helsen@vub.be (J. Helsen).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymssp.2021.108533
Received 5 May 2021; Received in revised form 9 September 2021; Accepted 11 October 2021
Available online 2 November 2021
0888-3270/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

on one of the machine shafts to get an accurate speed measurement [5–8]. However, this paper concentrates on the extraction of
the IAS from the vibration signal directly. Using vibrations for the IAS estimations foregoes the need for installing an additional
measurement sensor and thus saves the machine owner time and money, whilst also needing to do less intrusive measurements.
Though using vibration signals directly for IAS estimation forms a cost-saving opportunity, it does not come without any
complications. Common issues that can arise when dealing with complex vibration signatures include low signal-to-noise ratios,
harmonic interference, fading harmonics, and strongly colored noise. These issues pose a difficult problem to overcome for any
reliable signal processing methodology. This is one of the reasons why there has been such extensive research on the topic, as
evidenced by the existence of the CMMNO conference (International Conference on Condition Monitoring of Machinery in Non-
Stationary Operations) and of a special issue in MSSP on Instantaneous Angular Speed processing and angular applications [9].
Nowadays, thanks to the research interest in this topic, there exist many methodologies to tackle the problems of vibration-based
IAS estimation. The lion’s share of all vibration-based speed estimation techniques can be grouped into two main categories. The
first category of methods is based on using a time-frequency representation (TFR) of the vibration signal for tracking the speed,
while the second category is based on using the instantaneous phase demodulation of harmonics as its main estimation tool. Some
methodologies make use of both principles to improve their estimation accuracy, reliability or general applicability. An in-depth
review and performance analysis of several different state-of-the-art IAS estimation methods belonging to both categories can be
found in [10]. In contrast, this paper mainly investigates a new method that pertains to the second category of the instantaneous
phase demodulation-based techniques.
The first mention of using phase demodulation on acceleration signals for vibration-based rotation speed tracking can be found
around 2004 by Bonnardot et al. [11,12]. They used a high harmonic of the gear meshing frequency to obtain an accurate speed
estimate but their technique was limited to small speed variations. This approach was additionally automated in 2007 by Combet
et al. [13]. In 2009 Coats et al. [14] presented a type of multi-harmonic demodulation approach by iteratively choosing successively
higher harmonics to increase the estimation accuracy and to alleviate to some extent the speed fluctuation limitation. This technique
was also utilized for investigating discrete-random separation methods by Randall et al. in 2011 [15]. Urbanek et al. [16] further
investigated this approach by using two different demodulation-based methods for the analysis of wind turbine vibrations. While
the first method was the one proposed in [14], the second method involved using the zero-crossings of the real part of a band-pass
filtered harmonic analytic signal as a virtual encoder. After realizing that using a TFR of the vibration signal enables determining
a rough estimation of the IAS even in case of large rotational speed fluctuations, Urbanek et al. proposed a two-step approach for
obtaining an IAS estimate [17]. The first step involves maximum tracking in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) to obtain a
coarse IAS that can then be used to angular resample the signal and reduce significantly the amount of speed fluctuation. The second
step used the standard phase demodulation approach after band-pass filtering around a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) harmonic.
This two-step procedure inspired the idea for the approach proposed in this paper as will be detailed in Section 2. Later research
works on vibration analysis of rotating machinery that involve IAS estimation often reuse the standard phase demodulation approach
as initially proposed by Bonnardot et al. [11] and combine it with other techniques. Examples of this can be found in [18–24].
Since single-harmonic phase demodulation of a signal assumes the signal is mono-component, a band-pass filter is typically
used prior to demodulation. However, alternative signal subspace techniques can be employed as well as long as they return a
mono-component signal. Boudraa et al. [25] extracted Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) from a vibration signal using Empirical Mode
Decomposition (EMD). Afterwards the discrete-time Teager-Kaiser Energy Operator (TKEO) is applied to the IMFs that are assumed to
be mono-component for the instantaneous frequency estimation. This idea of using the TKEO for IAS estimation eventually resurfaced
in 2016. Randall et al. [26] formulated a new interpretation of the TKEO for the purpose of rotational speed estimation that is based
on amplitude demodulation and uses the squared envelope of the mono-component signal. A continuation of this work can be found
in [27] where the authors discuss the meaningful uses and unsound misuses of energy operators such as TKEO in vibration analysis.
Despite the existence of multiple subspace methods to enable mono-component phase demodulation, no methods have so far
expanded the phase demodulation itself so that it is less reliant on the signal being mono-component. This paper proposes such an
extension to the standard approach by incorporating multiple harmonics into the phase demodulation formulation and by weighting
those harmonic phases in time so that a few bad apples do not impair the proposed method’s performance. In practice, this means
that when a harmonic with a low SNR or interfering content is employed for the phase demodulation, the weighting should prevent
it from marring the resulting IAS estimate.
The main contribution of this paper is thus the development of a more accurate and more reliable phase demodulation method
by employing multiple harmonics simultaneously. These advantages of the proposed method compared to other methods available
in the literature are the result of exploiting more information embedded within the vibration signal. The primary downside of the
method currently is that it still requires a prior rough speed estimate that is approximately in the vicinity of the actual rotational
speed.
Based on the findings of this work, the proposed approach is capable of estimating the IAS very accurately in comparison to
other existing methods while also being flexible with regard to its input parameters and the data properties (i.e. harmonic structure,
SNR, resonances). Both the simulation and experimental analysis highlight the strengths with regard to accuracy and reliability of
the proposed method. Section 2 discusses the theory behind the proposed method while Sections 3 and 4 analyse the performance
on respectively simulated and experimental data.

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

2. Methodology

Speed estimation through phase demodulation has proven itself to be a reliable way to obtain accurate instantaneous angular
speed estimations [12,13,16,17,25]. It only requires a single well-excited and speed-related harmonic order with preferably no
crossing orders and it is also very easy to implement. The method proposed here is based on the idea of extending phase
demodulation of just a single harmonic to multiple harmonics. The name of the technique is therefore coined as the Multi-Harmonic
Demodulation (MHD) method. The technique does require an a-priori rough estimate of the speed and is partly inspired by Ref. [17].
The main concept of the technique relies on processing the harmonics with a combination of complex demodulation, band-pass
filtering, and phase averaging [28]. In this paper an additional maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of harmonic weights is added
in order to increase the robustness against time-varying or low SNRs of harmonics.

2.1. Derivation of MHD formula

To find an expression of the instantaneous angular speed that takes into account multiple harmonics, an analytic signal consisting
of one harmonic 𝑘 and no noise is considered:
𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) = 𝐴𝑘 (𝑛)𝑒𝑗(𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛)+𝜙𝑘 ) (1)
with 𝑛 being the sample number, 𝑘 the harmonic number, 𝐾 the total number of harmonics, 𝛼𝑘 the 𝑘th harmonic order, 𝐴𝑘 the
amplitude of harmonic 𝑘, 𝜙𝑘 the constant phase of harmonic 𝑘, and 𝜃 the instantaneous angle of rotation with its derivative 𝜃(𝑛) ̇
being the instantaneous angular speed. The derivative 𝑥̇ 𝑘 (𝑛) (the notation means a sample of the time derivative) is related to the
narrow-band signal 𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) as follows:

𝑥̇ 𝑘 (𝑛) = 𝐴̇ 𝑘 (𝑛)𝑒𝑗(𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛)+𝜙𝑘 ) + 𝐴𝑘 (𝑛)(𝑒𝑗(𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛)+𝜙𝑘 ) 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛))

̇ (2)
Rewriting the relationship between 𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) and 𝑥̇ 𝑘 (𝑛) as follows, starting from Eq. (2) gives:

𝑥̇ 𝑘 (𝑛) = 𝐴̇ 𝑘 (𝑛)𝑒𝑗(𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛)+𝜙𝑘 ) + 𝐴𝑘 (𝑛)(𝑒𝑗(𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛)+𝜙𝑘 ) 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛))

̇ (3)
̇
𝐴 (𝑛)
=( 𝑘 ̇
+ 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛))𝑥 𝑘 (𝑛) (4)
𝐴𝑘 (𝑛)
This linear relationship between 𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) and 𝑥̇ 𝑘 (𝑛) can be written as follows:

𝑥̇ 𝑘 (𝑛) = 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) (5)

where 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛) is equal to:
𝐴̇ 𝑘 (𝑛)
𝛽𝑘 (𝑛) = ̇
+ 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛) (6)
𝐴𝑘 (𝑛)
The following is then true:
̇
ℑ{𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)} = 𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛) (7)
̇
with ℑ{𝑥} indicating the imaginary part of 𝑥. Thus, 𝜃(𝑛) can be written as:
𝑥̇ 𝑘 (𝑛)
̇
𝜃(𝑛) = ℑ{ } (8)
𝛼𝑘 (𝑛)𝑥𝑘 (𝑛)
This is a well-known identity and has been used in the past to circumvent phase unwrapping [29]. Typically, the measured signal
is not a mono-component signal, so the harmonic 𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) is usually obtained through band-pass filtering.
Introducing process noise (e.g. due to imperfect sampling and numerical differentiation) 𝜈𝑘 (𝑛) to Eq. (5), the formulation
resembles a state space model where the state and measurement equations are respectively given by:

𝑦𝑘 (𝑛) = 𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) + 𝜖𝑘 (𝑛) (9)

𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) = 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) + 𝜈𝑘 (𝑛) (10)
where 𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) is the source signal and 𝜖𝑘 (𝑛) is the measurement noise. In reality, 𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) and 𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) are both ‘‘experimental’’ variables,
like the input and output of a system. Thus, 𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) is no longer given by the mathematical derivative of Eq. (1). The relationships
between the variables of this model are shown in diagram 1. The process 𝜈𝑘 (𝑛) is in fact also dependent on the measurement noise
𝜖𝑘 (𝑛) as the former includes the latter’s derivative.
While process noise is an idealization of the problem; ‘‘measurement’’ noise (e.g. due to background noise from other vibration
sources) will also be present in practice, even if narrow-band filtering around the harmonics will reduce it. The effect is to bias
downward the estimators. However, as is stated later on more clearly, this bias is assumed to be more desirable as compared to
having an unbounded variance.
̇
Considering only process noise, the least-square error estimator of 𝜃(𝑛) using all the filtered narrow-band harmonic signals to
minimize the square of 𝜈𝑘 (𝑛), is given by:
∑
𝐾
̂̇ = argmin ||𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛)𝑦
̇ 2
(11)
𝜃(𝑛) 𝑘 (𝑛)||
̇
𝜃(𝑛) 𝑘

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

Fig. 1. Diagram showing the relationship between the variables used in Eqs. (9) and (10).

Since the derivative is taken with respect to the function 𝜃̇ and not its evaluation at 𝑛, the time dependencies are removed to simplify
the equations. Calculating the derivative and setting it to zero, gives then the following:

𝛿 (∑
𝐾
𝛿 𝜃̂̇ )
= ̇ 𝑘 ||2 = 0
||𝑧𝑘 − 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃𝑦 (12)
𝛿 𝜃̇ 𝛿 𝜃̇ 𝑘
∑
𝐾 [ ][ ]∗ )
𝛿 ( ̇ 𝑘 𝑧𝑘 − 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃𝑦
̇ 𝑘
𝑧𝑘 − 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃𝑦 =0 (13)
𝛿 𝜃̇
𝑘
∑
𝐾
𝛿 [ ∗ ]
̇ ∗ 𝑧𝑘 − 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃𝑦
𝑧𝑘 𝑧̇ 𝑘 + 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃𝑦 ̇ 𝑘 𝑧̇ ∗ + 𝛼 2 𝜃̇ 2 |𝑦𝑘 |2 = 0 (14)
𝑘 𝑘 𝑘
𝑘𝛿 𝜃̇
∑
𝐾 [ ] ∑𝐾
𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝑦∗𝑘 𝑧𝑘 − 𝑦𝑘 𝑧̇ ∗𝑘 + 2𝛼𝑘2 |𝑦𝑘 |2 𝜃̇ = 0 (15)
𝑘 𝑘
∑𝐾 [ ]
∗ ∗
𝑘 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝑦𝑘 𝑧̇ 𝑘 − 𝑦𝑘 𝑧𝑘
𝜃̂̇ = ∑𝐾 2 (16)
𝑘 2𝛼𝑘 |𝑦𝑘 |
2

∑𝐾 [ ∗ ∗
]
𝑘 𝑗 𝑦𝑘 𝑧̇ 𝑘 − 𝑦𝑘 𝑧𝑘
𝜃̂̇ = ∑𝐾 (17)
𝑘 2𝛼𝑘 |𝑦𝑘 |
2

and rewriting the term in the numerator as follows:

𝐴̇ 𝑘 𝐴̇
𝑦𝑘 𝑧̇ ∗𝑘 − 𝑦∗𝑘 𝑧𝑘 = [ ̇ ∗ 𝑦𝑘 − [ 𝑘 + 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃]𝑦
− 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃]𝑦 ̇ 𝑘 𝑦∗ (18)
𝐴𝑘 𝑘 𝐴𝑘 𝑘

= −2𝑗ℑ{𝑧𝑘 𝑦∗𝑘 } (19)

gives after substitution into Eq. (17) :

∑𝐾 ∗
̂̇ 𝑘 𝑗(−2𝑗)ℑ{𝑧𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)}
𝜃(𝑛) = ∑𝐾 (20)
𝑘 2𝛼𝑘 |𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|
2
∑𝐾
ℑ{ 𝑘 𝑧𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦∗𝑘 (𝑛)}
̂̇
→ 𝜃(𝑛) = ∑𝐾 (21)
𝑘 𝛼𝑘 |𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|
2

The advantage of the formulation in Eq. (21) is to embody several harmonics in the demodulation simultaneously. Thanks to the
summation over the squared amplitudes of multiple harmonics, the denominator of Eq. (21) has a low probability of approaching
zero, thus practically guaranteeing a finite variance. This reduces the need to do an a-posteriori smoothing of the resulting speed
profile (which is often necessary for standard single harmonic demodulation). Eq. (21) has an unbounded variance for the case
where only a single harmonic is demodulated (it then boils down to Eq. (8)), since zero values (or close to zero values) are allowed
for |𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|. This means that the ratio can get arbitrarily large, making its mean value unbounded. This unbounded variance makes
it a bad estimator with unbounded mean square error. Eq. (21) has a bounded variance for multiple harmonics due to the positive
denominator, but at the cost of potential bias. In general, this is probably more desirable since the mean square error is bounded
in this case.
For a single harmonic, a band-pass filter is typically defined based on the minimum and maximum expected frequency of that
harmonic. Due to overlapping harmonic content, this approach limits the maximum bandwidth of such a band-pass filter and thus
the maximum amount of speed fluctuation. This can be somewhat mitigated by using a short-time windowed band-pass filtering
approach. For the multi-harmonic demodulation method as proposed above, this overlap issue is avoided in another way. In practice,
the complex harmonic signals 𝑥𝑘 (𝑛) can be obtained by complex demodulation using a rough speed estimation. This way the
harmonics get shifted towards zero frequency (DC) and one can employ a simple and narrower low-pass filter for every harmonic.

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

Fig. 2. Magnitude responses of four differentiators.

The required a-priori rough speed can be obtained in multiple ways that require little input, e.g. using maximum tracking in the
spectrogram. Using the rough speed for the complex demodulation does mean that when calculating 𝜃̇ as specified in Eq. (21), the
result is the deviation of the instantaneous frequency of the estimated speed compared to the rough speed.
Another reason to do complex demodulation plus low-pass filtering prior to using the formula in Eq. (21) is because of the
differentiation involved. Differentiating filters usually increase high-frequency noise as can be seen from their transfer function.
Close to zero frequency they have a linear response and the influence of the multiplication with the frequency in the spectral domain
is reduced when combined with low-pass filtering. An example of the transfer function magnitude responses for four differentiation
schemes is shown in Fig. 2. In the shown applications a simple first order difference is employed since it has the lowest computation
time and the produced results ended up being not significantly influenced by the type of differentiation.

2.2. Maximum likelihood estimation of harmonic weights

Looking at Eq. (21), it can be seen that every narrow-band harmonic included in the estimation will be uniformly weighted.
However, in real signals it is rarely the case that each harmonic has a good overall localized SNR nor is it expected that every
harmonic is well-excited all the time. It is entirely possible that the filtered signal 𝑦𝑘 (𝑛) consists entirely of noise and has no
meaningful phase information when a broad range of harmonic numbers is provided as input parameter to the method. Therefore
it makes sense to try and find a time-dependent weight for each harmonic to take into account when calculating the IAS such that
low SNR harmonics have lower weights than high SNR harmonics. The employed approach derives the maximum likelihood (ML)
estimates of these weights.
After complex demodulation and filtering, a set of signals and their derivatives from the measurements can be formulated:

• {[𝑦1 (𝑛), 𝑧1 (𝑛)], [𝑦2 (𝑛), 𝑧2 (𝑛)], … , [𝑦𝐾 (𝑛), 𝑧𝐾 (𝑛)]}

Starting from the linear relationship between 𝑦𝑘 (𝑛) and 𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) (and ignoring measurement noise 𝜖𝑘 (𝑛)):

𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) = 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛) + 𝜈𝑘 (𝑛) (22)

where 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛) is the regression coefficient and 𝜈𝑘 (𝑛) the process noise. Now three assumptions are made:

• Assumption 1: the process noise is a univariate complex Gaussian distribution with zero bias and unknown variance ∼
𝑁(0, 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛))
• Assumption 2: the statistics of the process noise are independent of time and the number of the harmonic 𝑘
• Assumption 3: the process noises of the different harmonics are assumed to be uncorrelated

The second assumption is an idealization since 𝜈𝑘 (𝑛) does depend on time and the harmonic number 𝑘, but it allows us to use a simple
Gaussian distribution. The probability density function (PDF) of the process noise (a univariate complex Gaussian distribution) can
now be written as follows:
−|𝑧𝑘 (𝑛)−𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|2
∏
𝐾
1 𝜎 2 (𝑛)
𝑃 (𝑦1 , 𝑦2 , … , 𝑦𝑘 |𝜃(𝑛))
̇ = 𝑒 𝑘 (23)
𝑘 𝜋𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)

This equation can be used as the likelihood function, i.e. the density function of 𝑧𝑘 (𝑥) conditioned to 𝛽𝑘 . The idea behind Eq. (23)
is to use the asymptotic minimum variance property of the likelihood estimator to find weights that reduce the estimation variance

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

of 𝜃̇ as much as possible. For a univariate complex Gaussian distribution there is no square root in the PDF nor a factor of 2, thus
rewriting the PDF gives us the following likelihood function:
∑𝐾 −|𝑧𝑘 (𝑛)−𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|2
𝑘=1 𝜎 2 (𝑛)
𝑒 𝑘
𝑃 (𝑦1 , 𝑦2 , … , 𝑦𝑘 |𝜃(𝑛))
̇ = ∏𝐾 ̇
= 𝐿(𝜃(𝑛)) (24)
𝜋 𝐾𝑁 𝑘 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)

̇
Now it is necessary to find 𝜃(𝑛) ̇
that maximizes 𝐿(𝜃(𝑛)), which translates into minimizing the negative log-likelihood.
̂̇ ̇
𝜃(𝑛)𝑀𝐿 = argmax(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛)))
̇
= argmin(−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛))))
(25)
∑
𝐾
|𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|2
= argmin( + 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑡)
𝑘=1 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)
The constant does not depend on 𝜃(𝑛)̇ so this can be ignored for the minimization. To find a local minimum of the log-likelihood
function, the derivative is taken and set equal to zero:
̇
𝛿(−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛))))
=0 (26)
̇
𝛿 𝜃(𝑛)
̇
Taking into account that the likelihood function is actually a function of 𝑦𝑘 (𝜃(𝑛)), ̇
this means that for 𝐿(𝑦𝑘 (𝜃(𝑛))) the following is
valid:

• 𝐿∈R
• 𝑦𝑘 ∈ C
• 𝜃(𝑛)
̇ ∈R

Deriving the real and imaginary part separately gives for the real part:
̇
𝛿(ℜ{−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛)))}) ̇
𝛿(−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛))))
= ℜ{ } (27)
̇
𝛿 𝜃(𝑛) ̇
𝛿 𝜃(𝑛)
Eq. (27) can be rewritten as follows:
(( ) ( )∗ )
̇
𝛿(−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛)))) 1 ̇
𝛿(−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛)))) ̇
𝛿(−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛))))
ℜ{ }= + (28)
̇
𝛿 𝜃(𝑛) 2 ̇
𝛿 𝜃(𝑛) ̇
𝛿 𝜃(𝑛)
using these identities:
𝑧 = 𝑎 + 𝑗𝑏
𝑧 + 𝑧∗
ℜ{𝑧} =
2 (29)
𝑧 − 𝑧∗
ℑ{𝑧} =
2
|𝑧| = 𝑧𝑧∗
where 𝑧 is a complex number (and not 𝑧𝑘 (𝑛)).
The first term within the brackets of Eq. (28) becomes:
̇
𝛿(−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛)))) ∑
𝐾 ∗
[𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)]∗ (−𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)) [𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)](𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝑦𝑘 (𝑛))
= + (30)
̇
𝛿 𝜃(𝑛) 𝜎 2 (𝑛) 𝜎 2 (𝑛)
𝑘=1 𝑘 𝑘
The second term is simply the conjugate of Eq. (30):
( )∗
̇
𝛿(−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛)))) ∑
𝐾
[𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)](𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝑦∗𝑘 (𝑛)) [𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)]∗ (−𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝑦𝑘 (𝑛))
= + (31)
̇
𝛿 𝜃(𝑛) 𝜎 2 (𝑛) 𝜎 2 (𝑛)
𝑘=1 𝑘 𝑘
The real part now becomes:
̇
𝛿(−𝑙𝑛(𝐿(𝜃(𝑛)))) ∑𝐾 ∗
[𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)]∗ (−𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)) [𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)](𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝑦𝑘 (𝑛))
ℜ{ }= + (32)
̇
𝛿 𝜃(𝑛) 2
𝜎𝑘 (𝑛) 2
𝜎𝑘 (𝑛)
𝑘=1
𝑧−𝑧∗
Doing the same derivation for the imaginary part using ℑ{𝑧} = 2
, the first (Eq. (30)) and second term (Eq. (31)) cancel each
other out. Therefore, Eq. (26) becomes:
∑
𝐾
[𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)]𝑦∗𝑘 (𝑛)𝑗𝛼𝑘 [𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)]∗ 𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)(−𝑗)𝛼𝑘
+ =0 (33)
𝑘=1 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛) 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)
𝑧+𝑧∗
In Eq. (33) the structure of ℜ{𝑧} = 2
can be recognized, so rewriting it leads to:

∑
𝐾
[𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)]𝑦∗𝑘 (𝑛)𝑗𝛼𝑘
ℜ{ } =0 (34)
𝑘=1 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

̂̇
To move closer to the expression in Eq. (21) for 𝜃(𝑛), it is necessary to rewrite Eq. (34) with the imaginary part instead, using
following identity:
𝑧 = 𝑎 + 𝑗𝑏
(35)
ℜ{𝑗𝑧} = ℜ{𝑗(𝑎 + 𝑗𝑏)} = −𝑏 = −ℑ{𝑧}
This results in:
∑
𝐾
[𝑧𝑘 (𝑛) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)]𝑦∗𝑘 (𝑛)𝛼𝑘
ℑ{ }=0 (36)
𝑘=1 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)
Splitting the equation up, gives:
∑
𝐾
𝑧𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦∗𝑘 (𝑛)𝛼𝑘 ∑
𝐾
𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)|𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|2 𝛼𝑘
ℑ{ } = ℑ{ } (37)
𝑘=1 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛) 𝑘=1 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)
̇
Now recall that the imaginary part of 𝛽𝑘 (𝑛) is 𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑛) and that the other product factors are real, making the second part equal to:
∑
𝐾
𝛽𝑘 (𝑛)|𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|2 𝛼𝑘 ∑
𝐾
|𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|2 𝛼𝑘2
ℑ{ ̇
} = 𝜃(𝑛) (38)
𝑘=1 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛) 𝑘=1 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)
̇
This then gives the maximum likelihood estimate for 𝜃(𝑛):
∑𝐾 𝑧𝑘 (𝑛)𝑦∗𝑘 (𝑛)𝛼𝑘
ℑ{ 𝑘=1 }
𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)
̂̇
𝜃(𝑛) = (39)
𝑀𝐿
∑𝐾 |𝑦𝑘 (𝑛)|2 𝛼𝑘2
𝑘=1 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)

The optimal weights for each harmonic are therefore defined as:
𝛼𝑘
𝑤𝑘 (𝑛) = (40)
𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛)
As can be seen from Eq. (40), this does require knowledge of the variance of the noise 𝜎𝑘2 (𝑛). Consequently, the maximum likelihood
estimate for the noise variance needs to be derived. The noise variance is assumed to be constant over a short time interval [𝑛−𝐼, 𝑛+𝐼].
The pdf for the noise variance is then given by:
−|𝑧𝑘 (𝑖)−𝛽𝑘 (𝑖)𝑦𝑘 (𝑖)|2
∏
𝑛+𝐼
1 𝜎2
𝑃 (𝑦𝑘 |𝜎𝑘2 ) = 𝑒 𝑘 (41)
𝑖=𝑛−𝐼 𝜋𝜎𝑘2

𝜎̂ 𝑘2 𝑀𝐿 = argmax(𝐿(𝜎𝑘2 )) (42)
with the likelihood in this case being:
∑𝑛+𝐼 −|𝑧𝑘 (𝑖)−𝛽𝑘 (𝑖)𝑦𝑘 (𝑖)|2
1 𝑖=𝑛−𝐼 𝜎2
𝐿(𝜎𝑘2 ) = 𝑒 𝑘 (43)
𝜋 (2𝐼+1) (𝜎𝑘2 )(2𝐼+1)
and the log-likelihood:

1 ∑
𝑛+𝐼
ln(𝐿(𝜎𝑘2 )) = (2𝐼 + 1) ln(𝜋) + (2𝐼 + 1) ln(𝜎𝑘2 ) + −|𝑧𝑘 (𝑖) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑖)𝑦𝑘 (𝑖)|2 (44)
2
𝜎𝑘 𝑖=𝑛−𝐼
Again deriving the maximum log-likelihood now results in:
𝛿(− ln(𝐿(𝜎𝑘2 )))
=0 (45)
𝛿𝜎𝑘2

1 ∑
𝑛+𝐼
1
−(2𝐼 + 1) + |𝑧𝑘 (𝑖) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑖)𝑦𝑘 (𝑖)|2 = 0 (46)
𝜎𝑘2 𝜎𝑘4 𝑖=𝑛−𝐼

1 ∑
𝑛+𝐼
𝜎𝑘2 = |𝑧 (𝑖) − 𝛽𝑘 (𝑖)𝑦𝑘 (𝑖)|2 (47)
2𝐼 + 1 𝑖=𝑛−𝐼 𝑘
𝐴̇ 𝑘 (𝑛)
To simplify further it can be assumed that 𝐴𝑘 (𝑛)
is small compared to the instantaneous frequency:

1 ∑
𝑛+𝐼
𝜎̂ 𝑘2 𝑀𝐿 ≈ |𝑧 (𝑖) − 𝑗𝛼𝑘 𝜃(𝑖)𝑦
̇ 𝑘 (𝑖)|
2
(48)
2𝐼 + 1 𝑖=𝑛−𝐼 𝑘
𝐴̇ 𝑘 (𝑛)
Since the term is ignored, the estimate for 𝜎̂ 𝑘2 will be an overestimation. The idea for the weights is that a high variance of
𝐴𝑘 (𝑛)
the noise will lead to a low weight. The procedure will iteratively switch between estimating 𝜃(𝑛)̂̇ ̂ 𝑘2 𝑀𝐿 . For a first estimate
𝑀𝐿 and 𝜎

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

Fig. 3. Computational time of MHD for a varying number of harmonics 𝑘 ∈ [1, 5, 10, 15] as a function of signal length. The red curves indicate the actual
calculation time on a 2.3 GHz CPU core and the black curves indicate the estimated calculation time based on Eq. (49) when accounted for the CPU clock
speed.

̂ 𝑀𝐿 a guess for 𝜎 2 can be made to be equal to e.g. 1, 𝑘 or 𝑒𝛾𝑘 , depending on the observable evolution of the signal-to-noise
of 𝜃(𝑛) 𝑘
ratio for higher harmonics.

2.3. Computational cost

The computational complexity of the proposed MHD method can be determined by taking into account that there are three
main steps in the algorithm. The first step is the complex demodulation of the 𝐾 harmonics prior to the optimization, the second
̂ 𝑀𝐿 , and the third is the estimation of the weights 𝑤𝑘 (𝑛) and 𝜎 2 . If the complex demodulation is done using
is the estimation of 𝜃(𝑛) 𝑘
non-causal FFT filtering, it requires a forward and backward FFT at an FFT cost denoted by 𝜙(𝑁), with 𝑁 being the signal length.
Adding the number of operations together for these three steps, the computational cost 𝐶𝑀𝐻𝐷 is given by:

𝐶𝑀𝐻𝐷 = 𝐾(2𝜙(𝑁) + 12𝑁𝜂) + 11𝑁𝜂 (49)

with 𝐾 the number of harmonics to demodulate and weight, and 𝜂 the number of iterations.
To illustrate this computation cost, Fig. 3 shows an example of the calculation time of MHD for increasing signal length and for
varying numbers of harmonics. The red curves in Fig. 3 display the measured calculation time on a single 2.3 GHz CPU core and
the black curves indicate the estimated calculation time based on Eq. (49) when accounted for the CPU clock speed.

3. Assessment on simulated data

In order to highlight the influence of the maximum likelihood weighting, a simple simulation example is presented where a
non-stationary vibration signal with a normalized sample rate of 1 Hz and length of 𝑁 = 20000 samples is simulated. The used
vibration model 𝑥(𝑛) with a sample period of 𝑇 consists of multiple harmonics with additive white Gaussian noise 𝜈 convolved with
a single-degree-of-freedom system impulse response ℎ(𝑛) to encompass the transmission path of excitation to the accelerometer. 𝑥(𝑛)
is described by the following signal model:

∑
𝐾 ∑
𝑁−1
𝑥(𝑛) = 𝐴𝑘 (𝑛)𝑠𝑖𝑛(2𝜋𝑇 𝑓𝑚 (𝑛)) + 𝜈(𝑛) ⊛ ℎ(𝑛) (50)
𝑘=1 𝑛=0

where 𝑛 = 0, 1, … , 𝑁 − 1 is the sample number, 𝑘 = 1, 2, … , 𝐾 is the harmonic number, 𝐴𝑘 (𝑛) is the time-varying amplitude of
harmonic 𝑘, 𝑓𝑘 (𝑛) is the varying frequency vector of harmonic 𝑘, the symbol ⊛ is used to describe the convolution.

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

Fig. 4. Spectrogram of the simulated signal.

Fig. 5. Resulting speed profiles of the estimation with and without maximum likelihood estimation of the weights as compared to the true speed.

The signal parameters used for the simulation are the following:

• 5 sinusoidal harmonics with a base rotation speed of 0.03 Hz, but importantly the harmonic numbers are chosen to be odd,
meaning that there are no 2nd , 4th,6th, 8th, nor 10th harmonic present in the signal. This translates into 𝐴2 (𝑛) = 𝐴4 (𝑛) =
𝐴6 (𝑛) = 𝐴8 (𝑛) = 𝐴10 (𝑛) = 0.
• The 5th harmonic is also chosen to be asynchronous with the speed. This means the speed-synchronous signal content actually
only consists of the 1st , 3rd , 7th, and 9th harmonic, or 𝑓𝑘 (𝑛) = 𝑘𝑓1 (𝑛) with 𝑘 ∈ [1, 3, 7, 9]
• Additionally, there is also 1 very lightly damped resonance in the middle of the 7th harmonic with impulse response ℎ(𝑛),
which is also detrimental for the phase demodulation of that harmonic.
• The 5 harmonics are all amplitude modulated to vary their localised SNRs over time. This amplitude modulation can be
observed in Fig. 6.
• Additive white Gaussian noise 𝜈 is added with an SNR of −5 dB

The spectrogram of the resulting simulated signal is shown in Fig. 4. It is easily observed that the 7th harmonic around 0.2 Hz
is masked by the lightly damped resonance and the 5th harmonic around 0.15 Hz is asynchronous. In total the MHD is run for 20
iterations with and without MLE weighting of the harmonics to see the difference in performance.
Fig. 5 displays the resulting speed estimation. It is clearly observed that in this case it is imperative to use harmonic weighting in
order to have a proper selection of the right harmonics for the estimation. Of course, a similar result could be obtained by manually
selecting only the 1st , 3rd , and 9th harmonic for the MHD method without MLE. However, this example illustrates the automation
potential of the full method.
To further illustrate the potential value of the harmonic weighting, the time-dependent weighting is shown in Fig. 6 for the odd
harmonics in red with the actual amplitude modulation of each harmonic in black. Apart from the overall higher weights of the 1st ,
3rd , and 9th harmonic, the figure also indicates that they follow rather well the amplitude modulation pattern.

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

Fig. 6. The ML-estimates of 𝑤𝑘 (𝑛) (Eq. (40)) in time compared to the actual amplitude variation of the excited harmonics.

Fig. 7. Evolution of the MLE harmonic weights per iteration and per harmonic.

Lastly, to get an idea about the convergence of the weights, the time-averaged weights are displayed in Fig. 7 for every iteration
and every harmonic. Apart from the dominance of the weights of the 1st , 3rd , and 9th harmonic, it can be noticed that after
approximately 5 iterations the weights have practically converged to their final values.
To further highlight the accuracy of the proposed MHD method, a comparison is made to two other state-of-the-art methods; the
multi-order probabilistic approach to represent an advanced TFR approach, and the Frequency-Domain Energy Operator (FDEO) to
represent a single harmonic phase demodulation approach. Figs. 8 and 9 show respectively the time-domain estimates of the IAS
and the mean and absolute error for each method. The MOPA method is in this case strongly limited due to its frequency resolution
limitations. The FDEO estimate meanwhile can only use 1 harmonic to improve its IAS estimate and therefore provides a worse
estimate when compared to the MHD method due to the large variance. Using a moving average would improve the FDEO’s result
but only partly resolves the variance issue.

4. Assessment on experimental data

To thoroughly analyse the real-world performance of MHD, the proposed method is tested in three different scenarios. The
first two investigate MHD’s performance on single measurement datasets that were previously used in [10] for benchmarking
seven commonly used IAS estimation techniques. The purpose of the benchmark datasets and publicly available numerical results

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

Fig. 8. Comparison of the time-domain IAS estimates on the simulated vibration signal.

Fig. 9. Comparison of the Mean and Median Absolute Deviation (MAD1 & MAD2) for the simulated case of the three methods, MHD, MOPA and FDEO.

provided in [10] was to offer future method developments a way to compare themselves to the state-of-the-art in vibration-based IAS
estimation on complex machinery. Given that MHD is exactly such a novel development, this section first compares its performance
to that of the other seven benchmark methods in Sections 4.2 and 4.3 on wind turbine and aircraft engine gearbox vibration data
respectively. The third analysis case inspects the performance of MHD on a large gearbox vibration data set consisting of many
measurements taken over multiple years on an offshore wind turbine farm. This case specifically compares the performance of a
single harmonic demodulation approach to MHD and uses the installed angle encoder as a reference. This last case allows for a
statistical analysis of the performance of MHD in an industrial setting.

4.1. Benchmark methods for case 1 & 2

The seven benchmark methods and the proposed multi-harmonic demodulation method are examined for their accuracy and
ease of use. However, for an in-depth explanation of the benchmark methods and the reasoning behind each method’s parameter
settings, the authors would like to refer the reader to [10]. The different methods are abbreviated in the rest of the paper as follows:

• SHD = Single Harmonic Demodulation [12]

• MHD = Multi-Harmonic Demodulation
• ISHD = Iterative Single Harmonic demodulation [30]
• FDEO = Frequency Domain Energy Operator [26,27]
• ViBES = Vibration-Based Estimation of Speed (STFT-based tracking method) [10]
• MOPA = Multi-Order Probabilistic Approach [31,32]
• C-MOPA = Cepstrum-based Multi-Order Probabilistic Approach [10]
• max.tr. + VKF = maximum tracking in the STFT with Vold-Kalman filtering [33]

A general overview of all the input parameters per method is provided in Table 1. While the list of input parameters per technique
is subjective given that an end-user might consider adding or removing inputs for their specific use case, the input parameters in
this paper are defined in such a way that each method can be easily automated. Table 1 shows that methods based on a TFR such
as the STFT need at least three additional parameters for the STFT calculation itself.

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C. Peeters et al. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 167 (2022) 108533

Fig. 10. Visualization of the wind turbine gearbox used in the CMMNO 2014 diagnosis contest.

Table 1
Overview of the input parameters of each method.
Method name
SHD MHD ISHD FDEO MOPA ViBES C-MOPA max. tr. + VKF
𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 𝜔𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 𝜔𝑚𝑖𝑛 𝑁𝑤 𝜔𝑚𝑖𝑛 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡
𝐵𝑤 𝐵𝑤 𝐵𝑤 𝐵𝑤 𝜔𝑚𝑎𝑥 𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 𝜔𝑚𝑎𝑥 𝐵𝑤𝑚𝑎𝑥
𝑁𝑤 𝑁𝑤 𝑁𝑤 {𝐻𝑖 } {𝐻𝑖 } {𝐻𝑖 } {𝐻𝑖 } 𝑁𝑤
{𝐻𝑖 } 𝑁𝑤 {𝑅} 𝑁𝑤 {𝑅}
𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 {𝑍} 𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝
𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 𝜎𝑙2 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 𝑁𝑝
𝐾𝑤 𝜎ℎ2 𝐾𝑤 𝑁𝑚
𝛾 𝛾 𝐵𝑤𝑉 𝐾𝐹
𝑁𝑉 𝐾𝐹

with 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 the IF at the first time index, 𝐵𝑤 the bandwidth of the band-pass filter, 𝜔𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ an initial rough IF estimation for
MHD, {𝐻𝑖 } the list of harmonic orders, 𝑁𝑤 the window size used, 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 the amount of overlap between windows in samples,
𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 the size of the FFT in samples, 𝛾 is the expected acceleration of the IAS in MOPA, 𝐾𝑤 is the number of windows used
for the continuity smoothing in MOPA, {𝑍} the set of illegal frequency regions, {𝑅} the set of mesh ranges of interest with
each range defined by a minimum and maximum value, 𝜎𝑙2 &𝜎ℎ2 the variance threshold values for beginning and stopping track-
and wait-mode of ViBES, 𝑁𝑚 the number of previous time steps taken into account, 𝑁𝑝 the order of the polynomial used for
maximum tracking, 𝜌1 &𝜌2 are weights for the penalised unconstrained cost function, 𝐵𝑤𝑚𝑎𝑥 &𝐵𝑤𝑉 𝐾𝐹 are the bandwidths for the
maximum tracking and the vold-kalman filter respectively, and 𝑁𝑉 𝐾𝐹 is the order of the Vold-Kalman filter.

Table 2
Fundamental orders related to high-speed shaft.
Gear pair Order value
1 1
2/3,1/2 1.025459229
4/5 5.316666667
6/7 29
8/9 15.225
10/11 6.619565217

4.2. Case 1: Wind turbine benchmark data

This data set originates from a diagnosis contest held at the International Conference on Condition Monitoring of Machinery in
Non-Stationary Operations (CMMNO) in 2014 [31]. The vibration signal was measured on a gearbox housing in a wind turbine near
the epicyclic gear train. The sample rate is 5 kHz and the full measurement duration is approximately 550 s. The goal during the
contest was to estimate the IAS of the high-speed shaft (on which gear #7 is mounted in Fig. 10). A reference speed signal that was
measured using an angle encoder is also available. The spectrogram of the measured vibration generated using a Hanning window
of 1 s with 50% overlap is shown in Fig. 11. Table 2 contains the kinematic orders of the gear pairs.
An overview of the used input parameter for each method is shown in Table 3. The multi-harmonic demodulation uses an initial
rough speed estimation obtained by the zero crossings of the second harmonic of the 1.025th order. It then employs the harmonics
of all orders given in Table 2, with the number of harmonics for each order limited to not surpass the Nyquist limit.
The speed profiles of the eight different methods are now compared to the reference angle encoder speed signal measured in
Fig. 12. A zoom of this figure is also shown in Fig. 13 to illustrate how close the MHD speed is to the encoder speed. Since it is

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Fig. 11. Spectrogram of the CMMNO 2014 diagnosis contest data.

Fig. 12. Estimated instantaneous speed profiles of every method on the CMMNO data.

Table 3
Overview of the input parameters for the CMMNO data set.
Method name
SHD MHD ISHD FDEO MOPA ViBES C-MOPA max. tr.+VKF
𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 53 Hz 𝐵𝑤 = 2 Hz 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 53 Hz 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 53 Hz 𝜔𝑚𝑖𝑛 = 15 Hz 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 25 Hz 𝜔𝑚𝑖𝑛 = 15 Hz 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 75 Hz
𝐵𝑤 = 8 Hz 𝑁𝑤 = 10000 𝐵𝑤 = 8 Hz 𝐵𝑤 = 8 Hz 𝜔𝑚𝑎𝑥 = 35 Hz 𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 = 214 𝜔𝑚𝑎𝑥 = 35 Hz 𝐵𝑤𝑚𝑎𝑥 = 2 Hz
𝑁𝑤 = 50000 {𝐻𝑖 } = Table 2 𝑁𝑤 = 50000 𝑁𝑤 = 50000 {𝐻𝑖 } = Table 2 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 = 90% {𝐻𝑖 } = Table 2 𝑁𝑤 = 5000
{𝐻𝑖 } = {2, 10.62} 𝑁𝑤 = 5000 𝑁𝑤 = 10000 𝑁𝑤 = 5000 𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 = 104
𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 = 104 {𝑅} = 𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 = 104 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 = 95%
{[0.9290, 1.1219],
[1.8580, 2.2438],
[2.7871, 3.3657],
[4.8167, 5.8167]}
𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 = 95% {𝑍} = {} 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 = 95% 𝑁𝑝 = 1
𝐾𝑤 = 20 𝜎ℎ2 = [ ] 𝐾𝑤 = 20 𝑁𝑚 = 5
𝛾 = 0.4 𝐻𝑧
𝑠
𝜎𝑙2 = [ ] 𝛾 = 0.4 𝐻𝑧
𝑠
𝐵𝑤𝑉 𝐾𝐹 = 4 Hz
𝑁𝑉 𝐾𝐹 = 2

difficult to visually analyse the accuracy of each method from this figure, the mean and median absolute errors are also calculated
and displayed in Fig. 14.
While most errors are quite low (apart from the cepstrum-based MOPA), the best result is obtained by the newly proposed multi-
harmonic demodulation, closely followed by MOPA. Both MHD and the spectrum-based MOPA perform well thanks to the presence
of a well-defined harmonic structure in the signal and both techniques are capable of utilizing a large portion of all the info contained
within this harmonic structure. The MHD method outperforms the single harmonic demodulation significantly due to taking into

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Fig. 13. Zoom of the estimated IAS profiles of the CMMNO data. The MHD method can be observed to follow most accurately the encoder speed profile.

Fig. 14. Mean and median absolute errors for every method on the CMMNO data using the encoder as reference.

account more harmonics whilst also weighting them, something the SHD method cannot do. Apart from an increase in accuracy for
this case, it is worth mentioning that the MHD method also requires less initial setup than the SHD method. The former simply uses
the harmonics of the kinematic orders of Table 2 that are below Nyquist and lets the automatic harmonic weighting decide which
harmonics are better to demodulate, while the latter requires a manual investigation of the signal to determine the optimal harmonic
for demodulation. During initial testing, it was also observed that it is not strictly necessary to utilize all possible harmonics of all
characteristic orders as input for MHD. Practically identical results are obtained when using only the first 5 harmonics of each
fundamental order. This can be useful since it significantly speeds up the computation time. Fig. 15 shows the evolution of the
estimated time-averaged harmonic weights per iteration of the MLE procedure. The estimated harmonic weights converge after 5
iterations and indicate the most important harmonics for the MHD estimate. In this case the most impactful harmonics include the
first harmonics of the 1st and 1.025 order, the 58th order which is the second harmonic of the high-speed shaft order, and to a
lesser extent the second harmonic of the 5.31 order. This information could now be used in refining the input parameters of MHD
as the weight estimation would be less hindered by noisy harmonics and the computation time can be significantly reduced.

4.3. Case 2: Aircraft engine benchmark data

The second vibration analysis case comes from the Safran contest at the Surveillance 8 conference, held in Roanne, France [34].
The dataset contains vibration and tachometer measurements from a ground test campaign on a civil aircraft engine with two
damaged bearings. Fig. 16 displays the monitored engine together with the location of the damaged bearings and the locations of
the installed sensors. The gearbox is displayed in Fig. 17 and consists of two main shafts and an accessory gearbox with equipment
such as filters, alternators, pumps, and starter. A radial drive shaft RDS and a horizontal drive shaft HDS link the high-pressure shaft
HP to the accessory gearbox. A spectrogram of the analysed signal of accelerometer 2, generated using a Hanning window with a
length of 211 samples with an overlap of 95%, is shown in Fig. 18.

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Fig. 15. Evolution of the estimated time-averaged harmonic weights per iteration for the CMMNO case.

Fig. 16. General overview of the engine and the accessory gearbox. Shafts are identified by labels in amber color.

As can be seen from the spectrogram in Fig. 18, the speed increase of the harmonics is quite significant, covering a large frequency
range. Therefore, the single harmonic phase demodulation is executed on consecutive 1 s windows of the signal. The harmonic used
for the single harmonic phase demodulation techniques is the 38th harmonic of the high-pressure shaft. Since the run-up is very
steep around the 50 s mark, the bandwidth is chosen to be also rather large at 100 Hz. The multi-harmonic demodulation uses the
first 60 harmonics of the high-pressure shaft with a moving window size for the MLE part of 217 samples. The bandwidth for MHD
is set at 3 Hz and it is run for 10 iterations. The rough speed is estimated by using the zero crossings of the filtered first harmonic
of the high-pressure shaft.
Table 4 displays all of the input parameter settings for this case. The main differences to the CMMNO case are the different
harmonic orders and the adjustments necessary to deal with the very rapid speed increase (see Fig. 19).
A comparison of the estimated speed profiles is provided in Fig. 20. The mean and median absolute errors are again calculated
and shown in Fig. 21 to compare the accuracy more easily. As was previously reported in [10], the iterative phase demodulation
performs very well with only MHD attaining practically identical error values. The main reason for the excellent performance of
the iterative phase demodulation is most likely attributable to the 38th harmonic having a very high signal-to-noise ratio overall
without any significant crossing orders, leading to very clean demodulation results. In this case it appears like incorporating more
harmonics than the two most dominant ones does not yield significant improvements. This is confirmed by looking at the harmonic

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Fig. 17. Diagram of the kinematics of the gearbox.

Fig. 18. Spectrogram of the analysed Surveillance 8 aircraft engine vibration data, measured by accelerometer 2.

Table 4
Overview of the input parameters for the Surveillance 8 aircraft engine data set.
Method name
SHD MHD ISHD FDEO MOPA ViBES C-MOPA max. tr.+VKF
𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 6960 Hz 𝐵𝑤 = 3 Hz 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 6960 Hz 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 6960 Hz 𝜔𝑚𝑖𝑛 = 175 Hz 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 178 Hz 𝜔𝑚𝑖𝑛 = 175 Hz 𝜔𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡 = 6960 Hz
𝐵𝑤 = 100 Hz 𝑁𝑤 = 217 𝐵𝑤 = 100 Hz 𝐵𝑤 = 100 Hz 𝜔𝑚𝑎𝑥 = 230 Hz 𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 = 215 𝜔𝑚𝑎𝑥 = 230 Hz 𝐵𝑤𝑚𝑎𝑥 = 50 Hz
𝑁𝑤 = 214 {𝐻𝑖 } = {1} 𝑁𝑤 = 214 𝑁𝑤 = 214 {𝐻𝑖 } = {1, 1.342} 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 = 90% {𝐻𝑖 } = {1, 1.342} 𝑁𝑤 = 214
{𝐻𝑖 } = {38, 75} 𝑁𝑤 = 214 𝑁𝑤 = 31200 𝑁𝑤 = 214 𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 = 214
𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 = 214 {𝑅} = 𝑁𝐹 𝐹 𝑇 = 214 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 = 90%
{[0.9375, 1.0625],
[1.8750, 2.1250],
[2.8125, 3.1875],
[3.7500, 4.2500],
[4.6875, 5.3125],
[5.6250, 6.3750],
[6.5625, 7.4375],
[7.5000, 8.5000]}
𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 = 90% {𝑍} = {} 𝑁𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑎𝑝 = 90% 𝑁𝑝 = 1
𝐾𝑤 = 20 𝜎ℎ2 = [ ] 𝐾𝑤 = 20 𝑁𝑚 = 5
𝛾 = 0.4 𝐻𝑧
𝑠
𝜎𝑙2 = [ ] 𝛾 = 0.4 𝐻𝑧
𝑠
𝐵𝑤𝑉 𝐾𝐹 = 4 Hz
𝑁𝑉 𝐾𝐹 = 2

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Fig. 19. Estimated instantaneous speed profiles of every method on the Surveillance 8 aircraft engine data.

Fig. 20. Errors of estimated instantaneous speed profiles vs encoder speed for every method on the Surveillance 8 aircraft engine data.

weights estimated by the MLE optimization of the MHD method shown in Fig. 22. This figure indicates that also the harmonic
weighting of MHD attributes the largest weight to the 38th harmonic for demodulation.

4.4. Case 3: Large scale data set of offshore wind farm

The last experimental case study investigates more in-depth the performance difference between a single-harmonic phase
demodulation method (i.e. FDEO), a time-frequency representation-based method (i.e. MOPA) and the multi-harmonic demodulation
method in a realistic industrial scenario. The performance of these three methods is examined on about 5 years worth of vibration
measurements on the drivetrains of thirty different multi-megawatt offshore wind turbines. A vibration measurement was recorded
approximately every 2 to 3 days which translates into a data set of more than 26000 measurement sets, with each set containing
vibrations measured at 8 different sensor locations spread out over the drivetrain. The measurements themselves were all sampled
at 25 kHz for a duration of 10 s. All these signals are employed in the analysis to facilitate a statistical summary of the performance
of the methods which in turn can help in determining optimal method combinations in processing pipelines on big data [35,36]. A
one-pulse-per-revolution angle encoder was present on the high-speed shaft to serve as a reference for the speed estimation results.
The speed estimation of the high-speed shaft with each of the methods is done using sensor 1 since this sensor was close to the
high-speed stage of the gearbox and exhibited a suitable harmonic structure. Each method was optimized manually only once using
a few vibration signals measured in different operating regimes to make sure the parameter settings were adequately put. For the
single-harmonic demodulation with FDEO the gear meshing frequency of one of the high-speed gear pairs was used as the best
candidate for demodulation. The location of this peak was determined using a simple maximum tracking algorithm. For MOPA the
speed estimation range was set based on the active power regime at the time of measurement. This resulted in ranges of about 5 Hz
wide. All the available kinematic info of the gearbox was also employed in the pdf generation for MOPA and the window size for the
STFT was set at 1 s with an overlap of 95%. The MHD method also employs a maximum tracking algorithm to get a rough a-priori

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Fig. 21. Mean and median absolute errors for every method on the Surveillance 8 data using the encoder as reference.

Fig. 22. Estimated time-averaged harmonic weights per iteration for the MHD method on the Surveillance 8 aircraft engine data.

estimate of the speed. In total, 25 harmonics were included in the multi-harmonic demodulation process for each measurement,
based on the kinematics.
To assess the speed estimation results, the same metrics as in the previous two cases, i.e. the mean absolute deviation (MAD1)
and the median absolute deviation (MAD2), are used for the comparison. Fig. 23 show boxplots of respectively the MAD1 and
MAD2 for the three methods when compared to the reference speed estimated from the angle encoder. The gray boxes represent
the interquartile range (IQR), from the first to the third quartile (Q1 to Q3), with its middle line representing the median (Q2). The
whiskers represent the minimum and maximum of the distribution.
Based on Fig. 23, one can observe that all three methods generally are quite accurate in determining the instantaneous angular
speed for the 10-second measurements, with the vast majority of estimates having a MAD1 below 0.04 Hz and a MAD2 below
0.02 Hz. The high-speed shaft speed is typically between 15 to 30 Hz, so this generally constitutes a worst-case MAD2 error of
less than 0.2%. MOPA performs on average slightly worse than FDEO and MHD with a median MAD1 of 0.011 Hz and MAD2 of
0.01 Hz, while FDEO and MHD have respectively a median MAD1 of 0.004 Hz and of 0.0032 Hz, and a median MAD2 of 0.003 Hz of
0.0027 Hz. However, MOPA does have lower MAD1 outliers when compared to FDEO and MHD and can thus be considered a very
reliable speed estimation technique, albeit not always the most accurate one. MHD also has a more concentrated IQR compared to
FDEO as can be seen from the width of the rectangles. Nevertheless, FDEO still performs well overall which can mainly be attributed
to the high SNR of the gear meshing frequency that was used for demodulation. In general, MHD was more accurate than MOPA
and FDEO for respectively 84.2% and 81.5% of all measurements, further establishing the reliability of the MHD method. FDEO
was more accurate than MOPA in 69.5% of all cases.

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Fig. 23. Box plots of the mean (left) and median (right) absolute deviation of the different speed estimation techniques. The encoder is used as the reference.

Fig. 24. Density heatmap showing the linear relationship between MAD1 and MAD2 and the dependency on the active power and used methodology.

To examine the potential dependency of the results on the operating regime, a two-dimensional histogram is calculated for each
power bin, ranging from 1 to 5 (with 5 being the highest active power regime). Fig. 24 displays such a histogram for each method
and for each power bin. The x- and y-axes represent the MAD1 and MAD2 values and the colorscale is the number of occurrences
divided by the total count per bin. In general, no large differences are observed between the power production regimes, indicating
that the methods perform equally well in all operating regimes.
To check whether there are any differences between the turbines, a box plot of the MAD1 and MAD2 is generated per turbine
in Figs. 25 and 26. The distributions look very similar to those in Figs. 23(a) and 23(b) and indicate that overall the estimation
accuracy is similar over all turbines. The accuracy thus depends more on the employed technique than on the examined turbine,
which is to be expected since all 30 turbines have identical gearboxes.

While estimating the speed is an important step in practically any vibration processing scheme, the next logical follow-up step is
typically the resampling of the time-domain vibration signal into the angular domain [37]. This resampling offers another manner
of evaluating the performance of the speed estimation methods which is independent of the angle encoder. The harmonics in the
spectrum of a time-domain signal are smeared over several frequency bins when speed fluctuation is present. By transforming the
signal to the angular domain, one can compensate this speed fluctuation and the harmonics should resemble discrete peaks in the
spectrum again. Essentially this re-allocates the energy of the harmonic again in one frequency bin with one peak value as compared
to several bins with lower amplitude values. One way to evaluate the level of success of the angular resampling is to calculate a
sparsity metric such as the L1-norm of the spectrum before and after angular resampling. This norm is normally higher before

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Fig. 25. One box plot per MAD1 distribution of each analyzed turbine.

Fig. 26. One box plot per MAD2 distribution of each analyzed turbine.

resampling, indicating a smeared and thus not-sparse spectrum. After resampling, the spectrum should be more sparse and thus
have a higher energy concentration in just a few peaks.
The estimated speed from sensor 1 is now used to resample the vibration signals of all sensor measurements. The relative
difference in L1-norm is then calculated for each measurement on their entire spectrum. If the L1-norm decreases, indicating an
improvement in sparsity, the percentage by which it improved is positive and vice versa. The encoder speed serves as a reference
for comparison of the potential improvement.
Fig. 27 shows the relative improvements in L1-norm for all sensors. It should be noted that sensor 1 and 2 perform badly in
this case due to their proximity to the converter. Because of electromagnetic interference (EMI), there were a lot of measurements
with high-amplitude constant frequency harmonics present in the time-domain signal. After angular resampling, these harmonics
get smeared and actually cause the L1-norm to worsen leading to negative improvement values. Overall, it is clear that all three
methods succeed at improving the energy concentration of the harmonics and at reducing the fluctuating speed influence. Again,
the MHD comes out on top with results that are very close to those obtained with the encoder.
To further illustrate this analysis, Fig. 28 displays normalized histograms of the L1-norm improvements where it can be seen
that the distributions of MHD and the encoder are nearly identical. In other words, the value of the encoder and the MHD method
is practically the same for the purpose of vibration analysis. This indicates that the MHD method could be a feasible alternative to
a physical device such as the used angle encoder in these turbines.

5. Discussion

Based on the results from the simulated case and the three experimental cases, the proposed multi-harmonic demodulation
(MHD) exhibits a promising performance with regard to accuracy, reliability and ease-of-use. The first aspect of high accuracy can
be observed by comparing the mean and median absolute errors of MHD with other state-of-the-art methods in the experimental
case studies. In the three case studies MHD has the lowest error of all tested methods (case 1), or is tied for the lowest error (case 2),
or has the lowest error for the vast majority of available measurements (case 3). The second aspect of reliability is mainly proven
by the third experimental case where MHD is tested on over 26000 vibration signals and manages to adequately estimating the
speed on all of these data sets whilst also being consistently accurate. The third aspect of ease-of-use primarily ties in with how
little manual investigation of the signal-to-noise ratios of the harmonics in a signal needs to be done. The iterative demodulation
approach is somewhat similar in approach as MHD, but the latter allows for more leniency towards the end-user in choosing the
right harmonics. A whole range of potential harmonics can be given as an input to MHD while the iterative demodulation approach

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Fig. 27. The relative improvement in L1-norm per measurement sensor is shown. These box plots are generated based on the results of analysing over 200.000
vibration signals.

Fig. 28. Normalized histograms of the L1-norm improvement showing a more discrete distribution as compared to the box plots. Note the small mean shifts of
the peaks for the different methods.

does require more expert insight for choosing the appropriate harmonics. Thanks to the possibility of using multiple harmonics
simultaneously and the automated harmonic weighting, the method itself determines the optimal harmonics for demodulation, thus
essentially removing the manual search of the ideal harmonic for an end-user.
The multi-harmonic demodulation method is especially useful in situations where there is not a single harmonic that is well
excited (i.e. has a high local SNR). In such a scenario a multi-harmonic method such as MHD or MOPA will typically outperform

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the single harmonic methods due to a reduction in variance by taking into account multiple harmonics. Another upside of the MLE
weighting of MHD is that it is time-dependent which makes it more robust against fluctuating SNRs of the harmonics as is quite
common in industrial applications.
The two experimental cases presented in Sections 4.2 and 4.3 illustrate these aforementioned aspects of MHD and the iterative
single harmonic demodulation (ISHD) concretely. The latter is strongly dependent on the choice of harmonics and thus on the
signal-to-noise ratio of those harmonics and their separation from potential crossing orders. For case 2, the aircraft engine, there are
2 harmonics, order 38 and 75, that both have a high signal-to-noise ratio and are well-separated from any potential crossing orders.
Both harmonics provide a very clean phase signal to estimate the IAS. The MHD actually confirms this (as can be seen from Fig. 22)
where the maximum likelihood estimation puts the highest weight for harmonic order 38. The difference of MHD compared to ISHD
is that the former determines automatically that harmonic 38 is a good choice while the latter requires more extensive manual data
analysis for the optimal set of harmonics. In contrast, case 1 does not have such very high signal-to-noise ratio harmonics as in
case 2. The wind turbine data is much noisier and has many more crossing orders, making the performance gain after the second
demodulation iteration minimal. The chosen harmonic orders of 2 and 10.62 were found to be optimal for ISHD. Because of the
crossing orders and varying signal-to-noise ratios of the harmonics of case 1, this case highlights the potential benefit of the MHD
method since the maximum likelihood weighting of the harmonics in the MHD method is time-dependent, meaning that when a
harmonic has a sudden drop in amplitude or a crossing order, it will get a low weight for the duration of the drop or crossing, which
is something the ISHD is incapable of taking into account. For case 2 however, this capability of the MHD method is not required to
give an accurate speed estimate since the 38th and 75th order have a consistently high signal-to-noise ratio and no crossing orders.
The MHD method also has its shortcomings with respect to harmonic order selection. For example, if the user provides a ‘‘bad’’
set of harmonic orders as input (‘‘bad’’ being e.g. a far too large range of orders or a set containing only orders with a too low SNR),
the maximum likelihood weighting can possibly converge to a meaningless IAS estimate.
Currently, the primary obstacle for using the MHD method is the need for an initial rough speed estimate. Depending on the
complexity of the data, the difficulty in obtaining such a rough estimate can vary. If the data is fairly stationary, a constant value
could be provided with an appropriate bandwidth without needing to do employ an additional method. If the data is strongly
non-stationary, such as the experimental cases in this paper, the rough speed can be estimated using a windowed zero-crossings
approach or a TFR maximum tracking approach. Based on the results of the third case study, a good potential combination of
subsequent methods would be to first use MOPA and afterwards MHD. MOPA has shown in the third case study that it is very
reliable in dealing with large speed ranges without needing much prior knowledge and is thus a straightforward prior method for
MHD. Using the estimated speed from MOPA, MHD can then further increase the accuracy since it typically outperforms MOPA
(e.g. for 84.2% of the measurements in case study 3). This is of course not the only possible combination and the initial rough speed
estimation is something that will have to be investigated in future research.

6. Conclusion

This paper proposes a novel instantaneous speed estimation method, coined the multi-harmonic demodulation (MHD) method.
The method is based on the idea of extending the commonly used single harmonic phase demodulation method to an approach that
employs multiple harmonics simultaneously. The goal is to utilize more of the information contained within a vibration signal in
order to reduce the variance of the instantaneous angular speed (IAS) estimate and thus improve the estimation accuracy. Since
not all harmonics have sufficiently high signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios in a typical application, a maximum likelihood estimation of
time-varying harmonic weights is incorporated in the method. This allows the MHD method to automatically suppress inaccurate
contributions of low SNR harmonics whilst also being sensitive to potential machine operating regime changes that can alter the
SNRs over time. These two main benefits of the MHD method are demonstrated clearly on a simulated case. The performance of
MHD with regard to its accuracy is then tested on two benchmark experimental vibration data sets measured on a gearbox of a wind
turbine and an aircraft engine. For these two cases MHD is either the most accurate or tied for best accuracy when its IAS estimate
is compared to those of other state-of-the-art IAS estimation methods. The third experimental case study analyses both the accuracy
and the reliability of MHD in a more realistic large-scale industrial scenario. MHD is used to estimate the IAS of the high-speed shafts
of thirty different offshore wind turbines. In total over 26000 vibration data sets are examined allowing for a statistical analysis of
the estimation error of MHD versus an installed one-pulse-per-revolution angle encoder. Based on the analysis results, MHD achieves
overall the best accuracy compared to the multi-order probabilistic approach (MOPA) and the frequency-domain energy operator
(FDEO). When using the sparsity of the angular resampled spectra as an additional evaluation metric, the performance of MHD
is practically identical to that of the angle encoder indicating that MHD can potentially be a viable alternative to such a physical
sensor. The proposed method could hence be a useful solution for when installing an angle encoder is not trivial or too costly.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Cédric Peeters: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review &
editing. Jérôme Antoni: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Supervision. Quentin Leclère: Supervision, Methodology,
Software. Timothy Verstraeten: Software, Writing – review & editing. Jan Helsen: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing,
Supervision, Funding acquisition.

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Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by funding from the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), Belgium through the postdoctoral grant
with application number 1282221N. The authors would also like to thank the Flemish Government, Belgium for their support under
the ‘‘Onderzoeksprogramma Artificiële Intelligentie (AI) Vlaanderen’’ programme.

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