Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195

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Electric Power Systems Research

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A new wavelet selection method for partial discharge denoising

Caio F.F.C. Cunha a,b , André T. Carvalho a,b , Mariane R. Petraglia a , Antonio C.S. Lima a,∗
a
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, COPPE/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
b
Electrical Energy Research Center, CEPEL/ELETROBRAS, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Partial discharge signals are used to evaluate the insulation condition in several power devices. Their
Received 7 January 2015 measurements are often heavily contaminated by noise from different sources and thus the use of noise
Received in revised form 7 April 2015 reduction techniques is required. Wavelet shrinkage denoising methods are frequently employed and
Accepted 8 April 2015
several wavelet basis selection approaches have been discussed recently in the literature. This paper
Available online 25 May 2015
presents a new method for choosing the wavelet basis, comprising a novel approach for determining the
number of wavelet decomposition levels based on the energy spectral density of the signals, and a scale-
Keywords:
dependent algorithm for selecting the wavelet functions based on signal to noise ratios computed from
Partial discharge
Partial discharge measurement
the wavelet coefficients. At each decomposition stage, the predominant band of the partial discharge
Dielectric measurement pulse, called the signal band, is identified as the one that has the highest coefficient magnitude. The other
Wavelet transforms band is assumed to contain predominantly noise, and at each level the method selects the wavelet that
Signal Denoising maximizes the signal to noise ratio. The proposed approach is compared to the correlation based wavelet
Signal reconstruction selection (CBWS) and to the energy based wavelet selection (EBWS) methods for signals simulated and
obtained from high voltage equipment, showing better filtering performance for over 70% of the tested
signals and a smaller processing time.
© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction proposed [2], denoising by wavelet shrinkage is the most frequently

In power systems there is a high demand for diagnosing and
monitoring operating conditions of power equipment in an effi-
cient and accurate way. In recent years this need has considerably
grown, since any unexpected downtime results in very high costs.
Furthermore, as power systems grow older, the number of aging
devices becomes substantial, leading to a need to increase their
lifetime, thereby reducing power outages and economic losses.
The monitoring of partial discharges (PD) is an effective tool
for the evaluation of insulating system degradation in high volt-
age equipment. A typical PD signal is often hampered by the
presence of several noise sources. This contamination may over-
whelm the PD signal and cause errors in the assessment of the
insulation conditions. In this scenario, the use of digital filtering
techniques is a critical step for the evaluation of PD signals. In par-
ticular, the wavelet transform (WT) has proved a powerful tool for
PD denoising, in view of its time-frequency localization proper-
ties [1]. Among several noise reduction algorithms that have been
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +552139388599.
E-mail addresses: caiocunha@cepel.br (C.F.F.C. Cunha), tomaz@cepel.br
(A.T. Carvalho), mariane@pads.ufrj.br (M.R. Petraglia), acsl@dee.ufrj.br
(A.C.S. Lima).
employed approach to reduce wideband noise and discrete spec-
tral interference [3–13]. For the extraction of pulse-shaped noise,
additional denoising strategies have been successfully used after
the wavelet shrinkage, such as the ones based on back-propagation
neural networks [11] and support vector machines [14]. To effec-
tively suppress pulse-shaped noise, the wavelet shrinkage filtering
operation must minimize signal distortions to preserve as much as
possible the PD waveform [10]. In [15], linear discriminant analysis
was applied to multi-scale fractal dimensions and energy parame-
ters of ultra-high PD signals in order to recognize defects. In [16],
spectral power analyses of PD pulses was employed to classify PD
sources and noise by means of a graphical representation. In [17],
modern methods for robust measurement and monitoring of high-
voltage apparatus are described, while in [18] and [19] the designs
of Hilbert fractal antenna and stacked Hilbert antenna array to
increase the frequency bandwidth and sensitivity of the PD mea-
surement system are discussed.
The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) decomposes discrete sig-
nals into a particular basis of the vector space of finite-energy
complex series l2 (Z). The wavelet basis of the DWT is determined
by the number of decomposition levels and by the wavelet filters
adopted in each level. The separation of PD pulses immersed in
wideband noise in the WT domain is possible because the noise
energy is uniformly distributed among the wavelet coefficients,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsr.2015.04.005
0378-7796/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195
while the PD pulse energy is concentrated on a limited number
of coefficients with amplitudes above those of the correspond-
ing noise coefficients. This separation will be more efficient as the
wavelet basis better represents the PD pulses with the smallest
number of high amplitude coefficients [5]. Therefore, the problem
of finding the best wavelet basis for PD denoising can be formulated
as a search for the wavelet basis that maximizes the reference pulse
wavelet coefficients that are above the wideband noise level.
Despite the fundamental importance of determining an appro-
priate number of wavelet decomposition levels [6], very little
attention has been given to this issue in the literature. Most articles
have reported either the use of the maximum possible number or
the trial and error approach [4,5,7,9,10]. Regarding the selection of
the wavelet filters (associated to the wavelet function, also called
wavelet mother), two important techniques have been proposed:
the correlation based wavelet selection (CBWS) method [9], which
searches the wavelet function that best correlates to the PD pulse
and applies it in all decomposition levels, and the energy based
wavelet selection (EBWS) method [10], which, for each level, selects
the wavelet filters that maximize the energy of the approximation
coefficients located in the lower frequency subband. According to
[10], EBWS provides better denoising results than CBWS.
In this work we propose a new approach for the selection of
the number of wavelet decomposition levels based on the energy
spectral density (ESD) of a reference pulse, resulting in the min-
imum number of levels necessary to represent the pulse mainly
in the detail subbands. As the ESD is independent from the WT,
the number of decomposition levels can be calculated beforehand
and provides essential information to the wavelet filter selection
method. We also propose a new scale-dependent wavelet selec-
tion method that identifies, at each level, the predominant band
of the PD signal and selects the wavelet filters that maximize the
signal to noise ratio (SNR) between the complementary decompo-
sition bands considering their peak coefficient values. The proposed
SNR based wavelet selection (SNRBWS) method tends to concen-
trate the information of the PD signal on fewer coefficients with
higher values, producing better filtering results and reducing signal
distortions when compared to other techniques.
The remaining of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
presents an overview of the wavelet-shrinkage denoising method,
describing the most employed thresholding approaches. Section 3
describes the proposed method for the selection of the number of
wavelet decomposition levels, hereafter denoted as NWDLS. Sec-
tion 4 introduces the proposed wavelet basis selection technique,
SNRBWS, as well as the previously proposed CBWS and EBWS
methods. Section 5 shows the partial discharge signals used in the
denoising evaluations. The outputs are discussed in Section 6 and
concluding remarks are given in Section 7.
2. Wavelet-based denoising technique for PD detection
The decomposition process of a measured PD signal S through a
wavelet transform allows us to separate in different coefficients
most of the existing noise and the signal of interest, making it
possible to mitigate or even eliminate the noise by the use of a
threshold shrinkage function. The dyadic digital wavelet transform
is the most frequently employed transform in data denoising tech-
niques [5,6,20] due to its desirable time-frequency characteristics
[1]. The practical implementation of a dyadic digital wavelet trans-
form as an analysis filter bank is depicted in Fig. 1. In the first stage,
the PD signal S passes through a two-channel filter bank composed
of a low-pass filter G(n), corresponding to the scale function, and
a high-pass filter H(n), corresponding to the wavelet function, fol-
lowed by factor-of-two decimators (down-samplers). The outputs
of the first stage are two signals whose lengths are equal to half of
185
Fig. 1. Bank structure for wavelet decomposition (analysis).
that of the input signal. These two signals are denoted as approxi-
mation a1 and detail d 1 coefficients, respectively. In the next stage
the coefficients a1 are applied to the low-pass and high-pass filters
followed by decimators, to generate the new approximation a2 and
detail d 2 coefficients. The decomposition process is repeated until
the final approximation aJ and detail d J coefficients are obtained.
The filter bank composed by the low-pass and high-pass filters,
which are also referred to as quadrature mirror filters (QMF), are
designed such that it is possible to obtain a perfect reconstruction
of the original signal by applying the inverse digital wavelet trans-
form (IDWT), which can be implemented by a synthesis filter bank
with factor of two interpolators (up-samplers) at each level.
The denoising of a signal S by the wavelet shrinkage technique
can be summarized as follows:
1. Determine the number of decomposition levels J and choose the
wavelet filters for each level j, where j = 1, 2, . . ., J; then perform
the decomposition to obtain the DWT coefficients [21].
2. Obtain the thresholded coefficient values, considering hard or
soft approaches.
3. Reconstruct the signal by applying the IDWT to the thresholded
coefficients to obtain the denoised signal.
The selection of the thresholding function and its parame-
ters determines which wavelet coefficients will be associated to
noise and hence eliminated. The thresholding procedure, known
as wavelet shrinkage, can be divided into three steps:
1. Calculate the threshold value, which is frequently performed in
one of the following four different rules [7]: rigrsure, sqtwolog,
heursure and minimax.
2. Apply a multiplicative threshold rescaling method [7], according
to one of the following procedures:
a. sln: estimates the noise level based on the first detail
coefficients d1 only, since in most cases they are mainly
formed by noise, with a standard deviation that can be esti-
mated as
MAD|d1 |
= (1)
q
where MAD|d1 | is the median absolute deviation of the detail
coefficients, and q may vary between 0.4 and 1, with typical
value equal to 0.6745. The combination of the threshold selec-
tion rule sqtwolog with the multiplicative threshold rescaling
sln corresponds to the well-known global thresholding rule
[22] given by
MAD|d1 | 
thr = 2 log(N) (2)
0.6745
b. mln: similar to sln, but the estimation of the noise variance
based on the coefficients of each level. The jth level noise
variance is estimated by
MAD|dj |
j = (3)
q
186 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195
The use of the sqtwolog rule with multiplicative threshold
rescaling given by
MAD|dj | 
thr j = 2 log(N)
0.6745
is frequently employed since it tends to eliminate a smaller
amount of the PD signal energy when compared to (2), and
because the wavelet coefficients patterns of the PD pulse and
of the noise are level dependent [5].
3. Apply a threshold to the wavelet coefficients, which will deter-
mine how such coefficients will be attenuated or zeroed in order
to eliminate or reduce the noise distributed among them. The
most frequently used threshold functions are the hard and soft
functions [23,24]. The hard threshold function, given by

t, |t| ≥ thr
fH (t, thr) =
0, otherwise
is commonly applied in denoising operations of PD signals,
because it preserves the signal magnitude characteristics, which
provides a better SNR [5,9]. Therefore, the hard function was
used in this work to compare the performance of the different
algorithms, rather than the soft function employed in [10].
3. Number of wavelet decomposition levels selection
(NWDLS)
In the literature, a few procedures have been adopted for the
automatic selection of the number of wavelet decomposition levels
employed in the denoising of PD signals. In most cases [4,5,7,9,10],
however, this selection is made at random or by verifying that, for
a particular PD signal, a certain number of levels J is enough to
provide good denoising results. Although pointed out in [6] that
the number of levels must be related to the sampling rate and spec-
trum of the PD pulse, its maximum possible value was employed.
Considering that the signal length at the highest level of decompo-
sition must be at least equal to the length of the wavelet filter, the
maximum number of decomposition levels is given by
  N

J = fix log2
NW − 1
where N is the signal length and NW is the length of the decom-
position filter associated to the mother wavelet. However, such
method cannot be applied to a scale-dependent wavelet selection
algorithm, which employs different wavelet filters in each level,
since a priori knowledge of all wavelet functions would be nec-
essary to determine the number of decomposition levels. In this
case, a wavelet independent maximum value could be calculated
as Jmax = fix(log 2 N) [6].
In this work we propose that the number of decomposition lev-
els be selected based on the value of the lowest representative
frequency component present in the PD signal, obtained from its
energy spectral density (ESD), as follows:
  F 
S
J = fix log2
Fmin
where Fmin is determined by the lowest frequency component,
whose energy is greater than a certain percentage of the total sig-
nal energy. Such percentage is used with the purpose of discarding
the frequency components that do not contain significant energy.
If J exceeds the maximum allowable number of levels, then J = Jmax
must be adopted.
Consider, for example, the PD signal of length N =10,000 and
sampling frequency FS =2500 MHz shown in Fig. 2a, and its energy
spectral density in Fig. 2b. The horizontal dashed line in Fig. 2b
indicates the level where the energy is 15% of the total energy of
the signal, and the vertical dashed line indicates the lowest fre-
quency component whose energy is greater than that indicated by
the horizontal line, which in this case is Fmin = 5.4932 MHz. Substi-
(4) tuting these values in (7) we found J = 8 decomposition levels, and
by this procedure we ensured at least 85% of the pulse energy to be
represented in detail subbands.
Besides providing a good wavelet decomposition through the
selection of an appropriate number of decomposition levels, this
method avoids the need for decomposing the signal in its maximum
number of levels, which would be Jmax = 13 in the above example. As
a result, large process time savings is obtained in both the wavelet
selection and the denoising process.
4. Wavelet filters selection
In this section we briefly describe the previously proposed
(5)
CBWS and EBWS methods [9,10]. Subsequently, we present a new
approach for selecting the mother wavelet of each stage of the PD
signal decomposition, named SNRBWS, which has shown itself an
efficient alternative to the CBWS and EBWS methods.
4.1. CBWS and EBWS methods
In the CBWS procedure [9,10], the wavelet selection is made
with the purpose of maximizing the correlation  between the
ideal PD signal and the wavelet function chosen from a library of
wavelets. The selected wavelet is not scale-dependent, and hence
the same mother wavelet is employed in all decomposition levels.
The correlation is computed as
n−1
(xi − x̄)(yi − ȳ)
=  i=0
n−1
(8)
n−1 2 2
(xi − x̄) (yi − ȳ)
i=0 i=0
where xi and yi represent the ith samples of the PD signal of inter-
est and of the wavelet function, respectively, and the variables x
and y are their average values. The main difficulty associated to
the CBWS method, however, is the determination of the appropri-
ate scale for the wavelet function in which the correlation with
the PD pulse should be calculated. In [10] the authors proposed a
(6) heuristic determination of this scale, rescaling in time and align-
ing the wavelet function in order to coincide with the PD pulse in
their maximum and in their first point of zero crossing after their
maximum. This approach was also adopted in this work.
An alternative procedure to select scale-depended wavelet fil-
ters is to apply the EBWS method presented in [10], which performs
the search by an optimal wavelet at each level from a library of
wavelet filters, by the maximization of the energy percentage in the
approximation aj , which leads to a reduction of the energy percent-
age in d j . The energy percentage of the approximation coefficients
Eaj is calculated by

k
(aj,k )2
Eaj =  2
j  2
(9)
(aj,k ) + (di,k )
k i=1 k
(7) where j is the wavelet coefficient index. According to the results
presented in [10], the EBWS method outperformed CBWS in both
noise filtering and runtime.
4.2. SNRBWS method
The proposed SNRBWS method stemmed from the fact that
the EBWS approach, always seeking to maximize the energy of
the approximation coefficients, not necessarily concentrates the
energy of the PD signals in as few levels as possible, which is the
main goal of the wavelet filters selection for PD denoising [9]. For
example, consider again the ESD of the PD pulse in Fig. 2. Until the
 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195
Fig. 2. Illustration of the NWDLS method: (a) PD signal, and (b) its energy spectral density (ESD). The vertical dashed line indicates the lowest frequency component whose
energy is larger than 15% of the total pulse energy. With an 8-level decomposition, at least 85% of the pulse energy is in the detail subbands.
6th level, where the energy of the pulse was still concentrated on
the approximation bands, the EBWS method chose the best filters
in order to maximize the energy corresponding to the pulse. How-
ever, at level 7 the EBWS still tried to maximize the energy on the
approximation band, while the energy of the PD pulse was concen-
trated on the detail coefficients. Consequently, the filters selected
from this level on were not the best ones to concentrate the wavelet
coefficients energy, but rather to spread it.
To circumvent this difficulty, the proposed method identifies, at
each decomposition level, the predominant band of the PD pulse
(called the signal band) as the one that has the maximum absolute
coefficient value. The complementary band, which is assumed to
contain less relevant information, is then identified as the noise
band. The wavelet filters for each level are then chosen in order
to maximize the peak signal to noise ratio (SNR) between the two
complementary decomposition subbands.
Assuming that the band with the highest energy concentration
corresponds to the band with the highest absolute coefficient value,
the SNRBWS method maximizes, at each level, the energy differ-
ence between the adjacent approximation and detail subbands. By
finding the wavelet filters that maximize the energy in those bands
where supposedly the energy of the analyzed PD pulse is larger,
this method concentrates the pulse energy in a smaller number of
coefficients with larger amplitudes. Similar objective was applied
in [9].
The proposed method is detailed next. At the jth stage, the
signal decomposition is performed for each filter pair of a can-
didate wavelet, generating the approximation aj and the detail
coefficients d j . The signal coefficients are identified as aj or
d j , whichever has the highest magnitude. The remaining set of
coefficients is identified as noise. Summarizing:
if max(|dj |) ≥ max(|aj |) then signal = d j and noise = aj
else signal = aj and noise = d j
The SNR is then calculated by
SNR = max(|signal|)/ max(|noise|)
The wavelet filters with the highest SNR are then selected for this
stage.
187
Various wavelet filters suitable for signal decomposition are
available in the literature [1,21]. Among the ones commonly
applied to PD signals are the wavelets of Daubechies (db), Coiflets
(coif) and Symlets (sym) families [9,10], because of properties such
as compactness, orthogonality, speed and symmetry, that are desir-
able in the analysis of fast transient and irregular pulses as PD
signals [25,26]. The wavelet library employed in this work com-
prised Daubechies wavelets of orders 1–40 (db1–db40), Symlets
wavelets of orders 2–15 (sym2–sym15), and Coiflets wavelets of
orders 1–5 (coif1–coif5).
In summary, the selection process of the wavelet by the SNRBWS
algorithm is composed of the following steps:
1. Create a library of wavelet function t,i , for each type of wavelet
family (type t = 1, 2, ..., p) and selected wavelet orders (order i = 1,
2, ..., N); initialize j = 1;
2. Perform a single-level decomposition of the PD signal S with each
wavelet of the library, generating the approximation aj and the
detail d j coefficients;
3. Compare the peak values of aj and d j , assigning the coefficients
with the highest peak to signal and the others to noise, and
calculate the SNR(t,i) defined by (10);
4. Find the maximum SNR(t,i) , for t = 1, 2, . . ., p and i = 1, 2, . . ., N, and
save the corresponding wavelet T,I as the best for that decom-
position level; thus, T and I correspond to the best values of t and
i;
5. Repeat steps 2–4, with j = j + 1, until the maximum number of lev-
els J is reached, taking the approximation coefficients obtained
with the best wavelet T,I at level j − 1 as the signal S to the jth
level.
The flowchart describing the whole procedure of SNRBWS algo-
rithm is shown in Fig. 3, where the number of decomposition levels
J is obtained by the method NDWLS.
Since the wavelet filters selected by SNRBWS tend to concen-
trate components with higher amplitudes in the frequency bands
(10) that contain most of the desired PD signal information, there is
a tendency that the reconstructed PD signals present less distor-
tion with better denoising results when compared to the other
methods, particularly in low SNR conditions. A large number of
188 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195

Fig. 3. Flowchart of SNRBWS.

experimental results confirming the above statement are presented originated, the calibration pulse will be shaped by the trans-
in Section 6. fer function of the measurement circuit, as would the real PD
As the calculation of the maxima of the complementary bands is pulse.
computationally less expensive than the calculation of their energy,
the SNRBWS method usually presents lower runtimes than does the
EBWS. In [27], we employed the SNR metric in dB. In the present 5. Partial discharge signals
work, however, we adopted Eq. (10) that, being less expensive than
the log equation, made the method even faster, while producing the In order to evaluate the performance of PD signals denoising,
same results. Simulation results presented in Section 6 confirm that experiments were carried out with both simulated and measured
the SNRBWS is faster than the other methods. PD signals.
A practical limitation of the three methods discussed above for
the wavelet basis selection may be the previous determination of a
typical PD pulse waveform, which can be difficult in very low SNR
conditions [11,14,16]. Usually, any PD pulse with high amplitude Table 1
Parameters for S3 –S5 .
can be used whenever available. When the noise level is too high,
a reference PD pulse waveform can be calculated by the average of Pulse  (␮s) f0 (kHz)
a set of normalized noisy pulses. When no PD pulse waveform is S3 2 1000
available, a calibration pulse can be adopted as a reference. Even S4 2.5 250
without carrying any information about how the PD signal was S5 2 500
 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195 189

Table 2
Parameters for S6 and S7 .

Pulse A1 A2 A3 A4 f1 (MHz) f2 (MHz) f3 (MHz) f4 (MHz)

S6 1.06 0.70 −1.06 −0.01 30 20 15 10

S7 −1.09 −1.00 −0.41 0.01 60 40 30 20

Table 3 Table 4
Sampling rates of simulated signals. Measured PD signals and sampling frequencies.

Signal S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 Designation Equipment Fs (MHz)

Sampling rate (MHz) 60 60 10 10 10 1000 1000 S8 Stator bar 250

S9 Circuit breaker 500
S10 Generator 500
5.1. Simulated PD Signals S11 GIS 1000
S12 Surge arrester 2500
S13 Transformer 2500
Seven signals proposed in the literature were employed. The S14 Current transformer 1000
signals S1 and S2 , adopted in [9], are given by

S1 = A(e−˛1 t − e−˛2 t ) (11)

−˛1 t −˛2 t
S2 = A(e cos(ωt − )) − e cos()) (12)

where A = 1.5, ˛1 = 1 ×106 s−1 , ˛2 = 1 ×107 s−1 , ω = 2 × 106 rad/s.

The signals S3 , S4 and S5 , proposed in [20], are defined as
⎧
⎪ t − t0
⎨ −
A(e  cos(2f0 (t − t0 ))), t ≥ t0
Sn = (13)
⎪
⎩ 0, t < t0

where A = 1.0 and t0 = 1 ␮s. The values of  and f0 are shown in
Table 1 for the signals S3 , S4 and S5 . Finally, signals S6 and S7 ,
proposed in [8], are
⎧
⎪ A sin(2f1 t), t1 ≤t < t2
⎨ 1
Sn = e−ıt A2 sin(2f2 t), t2 ≤t < t3
⎪
⎩
A3 sin(2f3 t) + A4 sin(2f4 t), t3 ≤t < t4
where ı = 7 ×106 , t1 = 200 ns, t2 = 300 ns, t3 = 500 ns, and t4 = 1000 ns.
The remaining parameters are presented in Table 2. The sampling
rates of all simulated pulses are given in Table 3.
5.2. Measured PD Signals
The PD measuring circuit presented in [25] and shown in Fig. 4
was employed in our laboratory experiments. In this configuration,
the object under test, Ca , is placed in parallel with a coupling capac-
itor Ck in series with a coupling device Z, from which the PD is
detected and passed through a coaxial cable to the data acquisition
system. A synchronization signal is obtained from the capacitive
voltage divider composed by capacitors C1 and C2 , so that the sys-
tem can identify the main phase where each PD pulse occurs. The
measurement circuit is fed by a high voltage source in series with
an inductor that acts as a filter to reduce the high frequency noise
Fig. 5. Impedance used for the transformer, generator, stator bar and breaker mea-
surements.
components that may come from the source. This filter can only be
(14) used offline or in laboratory measurements, since in on-line mea-
surements it would be impractical to insert a filter in the supply
branch that comes to equipment, both for security reasons as not
to interrupt the operation of the equipment under analysis. In this
work, an inductor of 3 H was employed to evaluate a generator sta-
tor bar and a circuit breaker. For the generator, GIS, surge arrester,
transformer and current transformer, the measurements were per-
formed on site, and the arrangement was that of Fig. 4, except for
the filter. The coupling device Z varied according to the equipment.
The list of analyzed equipment is shown in Table 4, along with the
corresponding sampling rates.
In the transformer, generator, stator bar and circuit breaker
measurements, the impedance Zm , shown in Fig. 5, was employed,
where Cm , Rm and Lm are the measuring capacitance, resistance
and inductance, respectively, which are accompanied by a gas cur-
rent suppressor at both circuit input and output in order to protect
the measuring system. The impedance Zm corresponds to a high-
pass filter and its component values are selected to provide a
cutoff frequency of about 1.2 kHz, which is sufficient to remove the

Fig. 4. PD measurement circuit used in laboratory.

190 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195
Fig. 6. Photographs of evaluated generator, GIS and current transformer.
Table 5
Selected wavelets for obtaining the reference signals.
Signal S8 S9 S10 S11 S12 S13
Levels 13 7 8 13 10 6 8
Wavelet coif5 sym11 coif2 db4 db10 sym12
60 Hz component and its possible harmonics.1 . For the gas insu-
lated switchgear (GIS) measurements, a capacitive strap was used
as a coupling capacitor to collect the PD signal, without external
impedance. On the evaluation of transformers, the coupling capac-
itor Ck is situated inside the bushing, and hence the impedance is
connected directly to its tap output [28]. For the surge arrester and
the current transformer, which have higher capacitances, a high
frequency current transformer connected to the ground cable of
the object under test was employed as the sensor, dismissing the
use of Ck . Photographs of the measured generator, GIS and cur-
rent transformer are shown in Fig. 6. The measurement system
bandwidth is determined by the characteristics of the measure-
ment equipment and cables [28]. Although the data were obtained
at different sampling rates, each signal was analyzed considering
10,000 samples.
In order to obtain filtered reference pulses from the measured
signals, we applied a procedure similar to the one employed in
[10]. The signals were filtered through the wavelet shrinkage algo-
rithm with the hard thresholding function, with threshold values
obtained by the sqtwolog method and mln rescaling approach. The
number of decomposition levels employed in this process was
selected by the NWDLS method described in Section 3, and the
wavelets were selected by the CBWS method applied directly to
the measured signals. Table 5 presents both parameters used to
denoise each of the acquired signals. The reference pulses selected
from the denoised signals, as well as the simulated pulses described
in Section 5.1, are shown in Fig. 7.
1
In our experiments, the following values were adopted: Cm = 10 ␮F, Lm = 820 ␮H
and Rm = 1 k .
6. Results
S14 The results of the SNRBWS method applied to the various PD
reference signals described in Section 5 are next compared to those
coif3 obtained with the EBWS and CBWS methods.
6.1. Wavelet basis selection
The total number of decomposition levels for each reference sig-
nal was obtained from (7), using the NWDLS method described in
Section 3. The frequency Fmin was calculated in order to concentrate
90% of the energy of the pulses in the details subbands. Fig. 8 shows
the normalized ESD of each pulse and the decomposition bands
generated with the calculated number of decomposition levels.
Table 6 shows for each signal the optimal wavelets obtained
with the CBWS, EBWS and SNRBWS methods in all decomposition
levels. Note that for the EBWS and SNRBWS algorithms a different
wavelet is obtained for each level, whereas for the CBWS algorithm
a single wavelet is selected for all levels.
As originally stated in [9], the objective of the wavelet basis
selection is to concentrate the energy of the pulses in as few levels as
possible in order to generate better denoising results. Fig. 9 presents
the energy distributions by levels produced by each method for all
signals. Note that the SNRBWS approach yielded the largest energy
concentration for all the measured pulses, and for all the simu-
lated pulses except for S1 and S4 . For signals S1 and S4 the methods
EBWS and CBWS, respectively, resulted in better energy concen-
tration. This fact confirms that no method can always produce the
best energy concentration, as the result depends on the waveform
and on the initial time of each pulse.
6.2. Runtime comparison
Considering all decomposition levels and all signals, a total of
111 wavelet selections were performed by the SNRBWS and EBWS
approaches, while only 14 wavelet selections were performed by
the CBWS technique. The total processing time required for each
method is shown in Table 7. The simulations were carried out on
a processor Intel Core2 Duo 2.4 GHz personal computer. Although
the number of wavelet selections was considerably smaller in the
CBWS method, it should be noted that considering together all
 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195 191

Fig. 7. Reference pulses: S1 –S7 (simulated) and S8 –S14 (filtered from measured signals).

analyzed signals, both EBWS and SNRBWS approaches spent less
than half of the time required by the CBWS, confirming the result
pointed in [10] that the CBWS method performs much slower
than the multilevel techniques. However, as the processing time
of EBWS (and also of SNRBWS) is proportional to the number of
decomposition levels, its difference to the CBWS processing time
was not as large as found in [10].
The relative execution times of each method are shown in
Fig. 10. It should be noted that for signal S11 the CBWS method
required less time than the other two, indicating that the processing

Fig. 8. Normalized ESD and decomposition subbands for signals S1 –S14 with the NWDLS method for 90% of the pulses energy decomposed in the detail subbands (see Fig. 2).
192 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195

Table 6
Wavelets selected by: (A) CBWS, (B) EBWS and (C) SNRBWS.

PD Decomposition level

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

S1 A db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3
B coif1 db2 db2 db5 db5 db27 db5 db3 db6 sym7 db3 db4 db4
C coif2 db1 db1 db1 db4 db1 db3 db1 db2 db1 db1 db4 sym4
S2 A sym6 sym6 sym6 sym6 sym6 sym6
B coif2 db9 sym4 db12 db2 db34
C coif2 db39 sym7 db11 db2 sym4
S3 A db3 db3 db3 db3
B sym5 sym10 db1 db2
C sym5 db40 coif2 db15
S4 A sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4 sym4
B db1 sym5 sym4 db2 db4 coif1 coif1 coif1 coif1 coif1 db2 coif1 coif1
C db1 db1 db8 sym7 sym5 db1 db1 db1 coif1 db1 db1 sym11 db1
S5 A db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3
B sym5 sym4 sym6 db3 db2 db2
C db1 sym13 coif2 db36 coif1 db2
S6 A db10 db10 db10 db10 db10 db10 db10 db10 db10
B sym5 coif2 coif2 db9 sym5 sym12 db35 db1 db3
C db37 db8 sym5 db39 sym11 db21 db28 db40 db2
S7 A sym13 sym13 sym13 sym13 sym13 sym13 sym13 sym13
B sym12 coif2 coif2 coif3 db9 db34 db1 db3
C coif1 db4 db3 sym7 db5 db37 db28 db6
S8 A coif3 coif3 coif3 coif3 coif3 coif3 coif3
B db2 db9 sym12 sym11 sym12 db4 db1
C coif5 db3 db5 sym12 db12 sym8 db1
S9 A sym11 sym11 sym11 sym11 sym11 sym11 sym11
B sym5 db7 db16 db15 db37 db37 db1
C sym4 db5 sym13 db12 db28 db22 db19
S1 0 A coif2 coif2 coif2 coif2 coif2 coif2 coif2 coif2
B coif2 coif2 coif2 coif2 coif3 coif2 db1 db1
C sym4 coif2 sym7 db5 sym6 db9 db13 db19
S1 1 A db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3 db3
B sym5 db6 db4 sym5 db3 db7 db39 db1 db5
C sym4 sym11 sym6 db6 coif3 db3 coif1 db4 db1
S1 2 A db10 db10 db10 db10 db10 db10 db10 db10
B sym5 db15 sym9 db40 db3 db37 coif1 db4
C db38 db22 sym12 db37 db9 db35 db39 db21
S1 3 A sym13 sym13 sym13 sym13 sym13 sym13
B db11 db13 db11 db12 db33 db1
C db33 db18 sym10 sym10 db32 sym12
S1 4 A coif4 coif4 coif4 coif4 coif4 coif4 coif4
B coif3 db36 db34 db36 db1 db1 db1
C coif3 db35 db35 db2 db39 sym13 db1

Table 7 The shrinkage wavelet filtering was performed with the hard
Total runtime required by each method to select the wavelet basis for all signals.
thresholding function, using the sqtwolog method with the mln scal-
Method CBWS EBWS SNRBWS ing to find the threshold values. To reconstruct the signals, only
Total runtime (s) 525.12 205.69 203.06 the decomposition bands in which the percentage energy of the
reference pulse was greater than 1% were used. This procedure
presented better denoising results than the simple sqtwolog-mln
approach, and was inspired by the visual band selection implemen-
time also depends on the pulse waveform, and that there is no guar- tation previously published in [29].
antee that any method always performs faster than the other ones. To evaluate the distortion introduced in the denoised signals, we
Table 7 shows that CBWS spent 155.29% more time than EBWS, and compared the resulting pulse waveforms with the reference ones
that EBWS spent 1.30% more time than SNRBWS. Although the exe- before the addition of noise. The parameters employed to quantify
cution times of SNRBWS and EBWS are similar, SNRBWS executed such distortion were the correlation coefficient (CC) and the mean
faster in 11 out of the 14 analyzed signals, as can be seen in Fig. 10. squared error (MSE), defined as

1  2
6.3. Denoising results N
MSE = x1 (i) − x2 (i) (15)
N
Noise is usually defined as an unwanted component of a mea- i=1
sured signal that has no relationship with the signal of interest
[2]. The most common sources of noise in PD measurements are N
x (i) x2 (i)
i=1 1
described in [6]. Wavelet shrinkage denoising results are affected CC =  N
(16)
not only by the waveform of the pulse and its relative initial time, N 2 2
x (i)
i=1 1
x (i)
i=1 1
but also by the stochastic noise sample added to the pulse. To pro-
duce more general results, for each SNR, 50 independent noise
signals were added to each PD pulse, and the average results of The best filtering results correspond to the largest CC and/or
the 50 simulations are presented. lowest MSE.
 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195 193

Fig. 9. Percent energy distributions among levels obtained by CBWS, EBWS and SNRBWS for signals S1 –S14 .

Fig. 10. Relative time of wavelet basis selection methods for signals S1 –S14 .

6.3.1. Wideband stochastic additive noise

To evaluate the filtering performance of each basis selection
method for each reference signal, 50 independent Gaussian white
noise signals were generated with five different SNR values (0.25,
0.5, 1, 2 and 4), and each of such signals was added to each of the
14 PD pulses, performing a total of 10,500 filtering simulations. We Fig. 11. Mean value of the correlation coefficient for each method and signal with
present next the mean results obtained for each signal and SNR additive Gaussian white noise: (a) SNR = 0.25, (b) SNR = 0.5, (c) SNR = 1, (d) SNR = 2,
(e) SNR = 4.
value.
Fig. 11 shows the mean values of CC. It should be noted that,
Table 8
especially in low SNR conditions (Fig. 11a and b), the SNRWBS
Number of signals, from S1 to S14 , for which the SNRBWS produced the best results
method produced higher CC for most of the signals. Fig. 12 presents for each SNR.
the resulting MSE mean values for all signals and SNR conditions.
SNR Best CC value Best MSE value
For better visual comparison, we show the logarithm of the mean
MSE. Again it can be seen that the basis produced by SNRBWS pro- 0.25 10 12
duced lower mean MSE values for all SNR values, particularly in low 0.5 11 11
1 11 11
SNR conditions (Fig. 12a and b). Table 8 displays, for each value of
2 12 12
SNR, the number of signals for which the basis selected by the pro- 4 10 10
posed method produced the best denoising results when compared
to CBWS and EBWS. Considering the universe of 10,500 filtering
simulations, Table 9 shows the percentage of best filtering results Fig. 13 illustrates the filtering results for signal S11 in pres-
obtained by each of the wavelet selection methods. Regarding both ence of additive Gaussian white noise with SNR = 0.25. Note that
CC and MSE parameters, the SNRBWS method presented the best the wavelet shrinkage filtering removes most of the wideband
performance in over 70% of the cases. noise using any of the three proposed basis selection methods.
194 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195

Fig. 12. Logarithm of the MSE mean value for each method and signal with additive Fig. 14. (a) Mean value of the correlation coefficient for each method and signal
Gaussian white noise: (a) SNR = 0.25, (b) SNR = 0.5, (c) SNR = 1, (d) SNR = 2, (e) SNR = 4. with additive DSI noise of SNR = 1; (b) logarithm of the MSE mean value for each
method and signal with additive DSI noise of SNR = 1.
Table 9
Percentage of best results obtained by each method in the universe of 10,500
simulations.

Method CBWS EBWS SNRBWS

Best CC (%) 4 25 71
Best MSE (%) 8 19 73

However, this example clearly shows that the filtering operation

using the SNRBWS basis yields better preservation of the wave-
form and amplitude of the original pulse than does the CBWS. The
EBWS method, although performing better than CBWS in preser-
ving the pulse shape, kept some noise power where no signal was
expected.

6.3.2. Discrete spectral interference

Although the wavelet shrinkage processing is theoretically more
appropriate for wideband noise removal from pulsing signals, its
performance was here evaluated in the presence of discrete spectral

Fig. 15. Filtering results (in blue) for signal S8 in presence of DSI noise with SNR = 1
and Gaussian white noise with SNR = 1. The original reference signal is shown (in red)
for visual comparison: (a) noisy signal; (b) filtered signal using the CBWS basis; (c)
filtered signal using the EBWS basis; and (d) filtered signal using the SNRBWS basis.
(For interpretation of the references to color in this legend, the reader is referred to
the web version of the article.)

interference (DSI). As suggested in [6], the AM noise was generated

by

nAM = (c + m sin(2fm t)) sin(2fi t) (17)

i=1

with c = 1, m = 0.4, fm = 1 kHz and fi varying from 600 kHz to

Fig. 13. Filtering results (in blue) for signal S11 in presence of additive Gaussian
white noise with SNR = 0.25. The original reference signal is shown (in red) in all
graphs for visual comparison: (a) noisy signal; (b) filtered signal using the CBWS
basis; (c) filtered signal using the EBWS basis; (d) filtered signal using the SNRBWS
basis. (For interpretation of the references to color in this legend, the reader is
referred to the web version of the article.)
1400 kHz in steps of 200 kHz. We added to the reference signals
the AM noise defined by (17) with SNR = 1 and a stochastic Gaussian
white noise with SNR = 1, and performed for each signal 50 filtering
simulations. The obtained CC and MSE mean values are shown in
Fig. 14. The SNRBWS method again outperformed CBWS and EBWS,
yielding higher CC in 10 out of 14 signals, and lower MSE in 11 out
of 14 signals.
Fig. 15 shows the filtering results of signal S8 in presence of addi-
tive AM noise with SNR = 1 and Gaussian white noise with SNR = 1.
Again the wavelet shrinkage filtering process was able to remove
 C.F.F.C. Cunha et al. / Electric Power Systems Research 125 (2015) 184–195
most of the wideband noise in all cases, but only the filtering with
the SNRBWS basis preserved the waveform and the amplitude of
the original pulse. In this case the EBWS approach was unable to
filter all the DSI noise, and consequently presented worse results
than did the other methods.
7. Conclusions
The proposed methodology for obtaining the best wavelet basis
for PD denoising is composed of two parts: a new approach for
determining the wavelet decomposition level and a new scale-
dependent wavelet selection method based on a peak SNR measure
between approximation and detail coefficients at each decomposi-
tion level.
The proposed NWDLS method determines the minimum num-
ber of decomposition levels necessary to ensure the decomposition
of a given percentage of the energy of a PD pulse into detail sub-
bands. As the number of levels is calculated from the pulse ESD and
the sampling rate, the method is independent from the wavelet
functions adopted for the basis, and thus can be used with any other
wavelet selection method. Avoiding the use of the maximum num-
ber of decomposition levels, the proposed method saves runtime
on the selection of the wavelet functions, as well as on the wavelet
shrinkage denoising processing. This contribution may fill a gap in
determining wavelet basis for PD denoising, since the selection of
WDL has not received as much attention in the literature as has the
selection of the wavelet functions.
The proposed SNRBWS method finds, at each level, the wavelet
function that maximizes the difference between the peak ampli-
tudes of complementary subbands. Simulation results indicated
that the SNRBWS method outperformed the CBWS and the EBWS
methods in over 70% of the cases, producing greater concentration
of the energy of the pulses in the wavelet domain, better denois-
ing regarding the minimization of pulse distortions, and smaller
runtimes.
The proposed NWDLS and the SNRBWS methods comprise
therefore a more effective methodology to select the best wavelet
decomposition to denoise PD signals, providing better denoising
results and lower computational load. Its application is expected
to greatly improve on-site PD measurements and, consequently,
on-line diagnosis of high voltage electrical equipment.
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