Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Dalian, 13-16 August 2006

APPLYING RADIAL BASIS FUNCTION NEURAL NETWORK TO DATA

FUSION FOR TEMPERATURE COMPENSATION
ZHUN YU1, YOU-YIN JING1, YING-BAI XIE1, CHENG TIAN2
1
Department of Power Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Baoding 071003, China
2
Department of Building Services Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
E-MAIL: zhuny@ncepu.edu.cn, jingyouyin@126.com, xieyb@ncepu.edu.cn, tjtiancheng@gmail.com

Abstract:
In order to decrease the impact of environmental
temperature on pressure transducer measurements with
temperature compensation, a new method of data fusion based
on Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network was proposed,
at the same period, a practical test was carried out with the
environmental temperature ranging from 10 to 60 ℃ and the
pressure as 15 kPa. The results of the investigation showed
that the relational curves between output voltage of the
transducer and environmental temperature was horizontal
after compensation, and the convergency of RBF neural
network was faster than BP neural network, in addition, the
maximum difference of the output voltage before
compensation was 9.48 mv while it was 0.03 mv after
compensation. The results of the present work implied that the
objective of temperature compensation has been achieved
essentially, furthermore, RBF neural network was better than
BP neural network while used on temperature compensation
to pressure transducers and the influence of temperature
variation could be greatly reduced.
in Figure 1.
Static calibration was performed to this electric
bridge in the case of various environmental temperatures.
Also, method of least squares was used to fit linearly.
Theoretically, influence of environmental temperature can
be eliminated while each arm of electric bridge has an
identical resistance temperature coefficient, unfortunately,
the characteristic of the four resistances (R1, R2, R3, R4)
cannot be the same completely. Thus the error of former
fitting curves will be enlarged with the variation of
environmental temperature, and transducers should get a
recalibration while the errors exceed prescribed ranges, in
fact, it is very difficult to operate for practical application
[7-9].
C
R1 R4

B
Keywords: A I
RBF neural network; BP neural network; temperature
compensation; pressure transducer
R2 R3
1. Introduction U

Over the past few decades, resistance strain pressure D

transducer has been well recognized as offering a number
of advantages for extensive application in production and
experiments [1-6]. Some of these benefits are: low cost,
high sensitivity, high resolution, being convenient for
setting. However, resistance strain pressure transducer is
very sensitive to environmental parameters, i.e. the physical
dimension and mutual geometric position of its elements
will change while environmental temperature is different,
and then temperature errors can be brought on output
signals. To obtain an accurate measurement without the
influence of environmental temperature, output of
differential electric bridge is adopted commonly, as shown
Figure 1. Structure of electric circuit
RBF (Radial Basis Function) neural network has a
faster rate of convergence than Back Propagation (BP)
neural network, which is used extensively at present,
moreover, RBF neural network can approach random
nonlinearity through practice [10]. Therefore, RBF neural
network has been adopted to realize intelligent
compensation for the temperature property of resistance

1-4244-0060-0/06/$20.00 ©2006 IEEE

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 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Dalian, 13-16 August 2006
strain pressure transducers in this paper.
2. Data fusion based on RBF neural network
2.1. Fusion theory
Pressure
P transducer T the adaptability to environmental temperature variation was
Standard RBF
manometer neural network
K has three layers, which are input-layer, hidden-layer and
Figure 2. Schematic diagram for temperature compensation
Intelligent compensation for the temperature property
of resistance strain pressure transducers with data fusion
based on RBF neural network is shown as Figure 2. As seen,
both pressure and environmental temperature are relative to
the output of transducer in the course of measurement with
resistance strain pressure transducer. Temperature
compensation is necessary to diminish influence degree, at
the same period, compensation value should be self
-adjusted in terms of pressure variation.
For this purpose, the present study took the output of
resistance strain pressure transducer as the input of neural
network as well as environmental temperature, meanwhile,
RBF neural network was used to carry out temperature
compensation, thus compensated output, i.e. the output of
neural network, would be only relative to measured
pressure, and the relationship between them was linear. The
experimental method was described in two steps: ① the
output value of a group of transducers in various pressures
and environmental temperatures were used as the input of
neural network, the data measured by standard
pressure-measuring device were taken as the output of
neural network, based on above results RBF neural network
was trained so that it had a suitable reflection between input
and output. ② since RBF neural network had a favorable
generalization, namely a reasonable output could be
achieved while the input value was out of training data, thus
temperature compensation could be performed to neural
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network without standard pressure meter after the training
has been accomplished.
Generally, transducers will have drift after a long-time
service. To keep a good performance, neural network
should be retrained if its drift affects measurement accuracy.
In Figure 2, the switch K was used between training and
compensation. With the data fusion based on RBF neural
network, the requirement to transducers was decreased and
increased, also, the measurement range was expanded.
2.2. RBF neural network for temperature compensation
As is well known, learning process of BP neural
network is nonlinear, so the reduction of convergent speed
caused by local minimum is unavoidable. To solve this
problem, RBF neural network was used in this study. The
structure of RBF neural network is shown as Figure 3. It
output -layer, neurons in the same layer is not connective
and each neuron connects all neurons of adjacent layer.
RBF was adopted to be the basis of hidden-layer so that
input vector can be reflected to hidden-layer directly
without weight connection, at the same time, hidden-layer
was reflected to output-layer linearly, in this way, output of
the whole network was the linear weighted sum of the
output of hidden-layer. Accordingly, the reflection between
input and output was nonlinear while network output was
linear to adjustable parameters, and network weight could
be obtained through solving linear system of equations, this
not only made training more rapid but also avoided local
minimum effectively.
Ri Ii C1 σ1
Yi
C2 σ2
Fk
∑
Cn σn
Figure 3. Structure of RBF neural network
In our study, Gaussian function was selected to be RBF,
suppose hidden-layer has N neurons, thus the relation
between input and output in each layer can be expressed as
follows:
 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Dalian, 13-16 August 2006

input-layer: I i = Ri ； (1) relational curves were horizontal (see Figure 5). Thus the
result of compensation was achieved.
 Ri − C i 2

hidden-layer: Yi = exp − ； (2)
 σ i2 
N
output-layer: Fk (W , R ) = ∑W
i =1
ik Yi

N  Ri − C i 2

= ∑ Wik exp−  (3)
i =1  σ i2 
Where Ci is the center point of primary function i; σi is
the form parameter of hidden-layer unit i; Wik is joint
weight value between hidden-layer unit i and output unit Figure 5. The relational curves between voltage output
k; ||Ri-Ci|| is the Euclidean distance between each input and pressure after compensation
point and center point.

3. Illustration examples

Figure 4. The relational curves between voltage output and Figure 6. Sum-square error curve for training
pressure before compensation RBF neural network

Consider an actual resistance strain pressure
transducer with full bridge differential electric circuit for its
measurements, a static calibration was performed with the
fluctuation of environmental temperature ranged from 10 to
60 degrees Centigrade, the relational curves between
voltage output of the transducer and pressure as well as
temperature were depicted in Figure 4. As seen voltage
output of the transducer was nonlinear to temperature in a
long range for the same pressure, and it would impact the
transducer severely.
In the course of training, the performance index
(Sum-Square Error) is adopted as 0.01. Figure 5 is the
relational curves between voltage output of the transducer
and pressure in various temperatures after compensation.
When implementing temperature compensation, the
To illustrate the advantage of RBF neural network in
comparison with BP neural network, both of them were
trained with Levenberg - Marquardt optimization method in
uniform error index. Figure 6 and Figure 7 show the results
of sum-square error for RBF neural network and BP neural
network respectively. Table 1 shows the training time of the
two networks in different error index, obviously RBF
neural network has a quick convergent speed.
In order to validate the generalization capacity of RBF
neural network, a group of check data (non-train data) were
chosen to test and satisfying results could be acquired. As a
whole, RBF neural network could achieve a better effect in
temperature compensation.
Acquired data from practical tests showed the effects
of temperature compensation with data fusion based on

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 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Dalian, 13-16 August 2006
RBF neural network. Under the aforementioned
experimental condition (15 kPa, 10 - 60 ℃), the maximum
difference of the voltage output before compensation was
9.48 mv while it was 0.03 mv after compensation, this
indicated that the influence of temperature variation has
been greatly decreased
Figure 7. Sum-square error curve for training BP neural
network
Table 1. Time of training BP and RBF neural network in the
same performance index
Neural Error index 0.01 Error index 0.001
network consumed time (s) consumed time (s)
BP 230.45 423.56
RBF 8.15 12.48
4. Conclusions
In this paper, data fusion based on RBF neural
network was advanced and used to temperature
compensation of resistance strain pressure transducer. The
results of this investigation have shown that RBF neural
network is better than BP neural network when
compensating on temperature characteristic of resistance
strain pressure transducer. Compared to BP neural network,
RBF neural network can approach optional non-linearity
and it has a faster convergent speed. Furthermore, it is
difficult for transducers to compensate with changing
manufacturing technology or adopting hardware circuit,
however, using software to fuse output signals of
transducers, ideal effects can be obtained commonly.
Acknowledgements
This paper is supported by North China Electric Power
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University.
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