The quality assessment of screen content images (SCIs) has been attractive recently. Different from natural images, SCI is usually a mixture of picture and text. Traditional quality metrics are mainly designed for natural images, which do not fit well into the SCIs. Motivated by this, this letter presents a simple and effective method to naturalize SCIs, so that the traditional quality models can be applied for SCI quality prediction. Specifically, bicubic interpolation-based up-sampling is proposed to achieve this goal. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Train-borne video captured from the camera installed in the front or back of the train has been used for railway environment surveillance, including missing communication units and bolts on the track, broken fences, unpredictable objects falling into the rail area or hanging on wires on the top of rails. Moreover, the track condition can be perceived visually from the video by observing and analyzing the train-swaying arising from the track irregularity. However, it's a time-consuming and labor-intensive work to examine the whole large scale video up to dozens of hours frequently. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective method to detect the train-swaying quickly and automatically. We first generate the long rail track panorama (RTP) by stitching the stripes cut from the video frames, and then extract track profile to perform the unevenness detection algorithm on the RTP. The experimental results show that RTP, the compact video representation, can fast examine the visual train-swaying information for track condition perceiving, on which we detect the irregular spots with 92.86% recall and 82.98% precision in only 2 minutes computation from the video close to 1 hour.

Railway inspection is important in railway maintenance. There are several tasks in railway inspection, e.g., defect detection and bolt detection. For those inspection tasks, the detection of rail surface is a fundamental and key issue. In order to detect rail defects and missing bolts, one must know the exact location of the rail surface. To deal with this problem, we propose an efficient Rail Surface Detection (RSD) algorithm that combines boundary and region information in a uniform formulation. Moreover, we reevaluate the rail location by introducing the top down information–bolt location prior. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can detect the rail surface efficiently.

Automatic thresholding is an important technique for rail defect detection, but traditional methods are not competent enough to fit the characteristics of this application. This paper proposes the Maximum Weighted Object Correlation (MWOC) thresholding method, fitting the features that rail images are unimodal and defect proportion is small. MWOC selects a threshold by optimizing the product of object correlation and the weight term that expresses the proportion of thresholded defects. Our experimental results demonstrate that MWOC achieves misclassification error of 0.85%, and outperforms the other well-established thresholding methods, including Otsu, maximum correlation thresholding, maximum entropy thresholding and valley-emphasis method, for the application of rail defect detection.

In this paper, a novel approach for central angle estimation of coherently distributed targets that utilizes electric vector sensors in bistatic MIMO radar is proposed. First, the coherently distributed targets signal model in bistatic MIMO radar that equipped with electric vector sensors is reconstructed. The Hadamard product rotation invariance property of the coherently distributed targets' steering vectors is found to get the initial estimation of direction of departure (DOD). 1-D MUSIC is then used to estimate the accurate central angles of direction of arrival (DOA) and DOD. The proposed method can estimate the central angles of DOA and DOD efficiently and accurately without pairing even in the situation where the angular signal distribution functions are unknown. Our method has better performance than Guo's algorithm. Numerical results verify the improvement and performance of the proposed algorithm.

With the development of the Internet, there are more and more shared resources on the Web. Personalized search becomes increasingly important as users demand higher retrieval quality. Personalized search needs to take users' personalized profiles and information needs into consideration. Collaborative tagging (also known as folksonomy) systems allow users to annotate resources with their own tags (features) and thus provide a powerful way for organizing, retrieving and sharing different types of social resources. To capture and understand user preferences, a user is typically modeled as a vector of tag: value pairs (i.e., a tag-based user profile) in collaborative tagging systems. In such a tag-based user profile, a user's preference degree on a group of tags (i.e., a combination of several tags) mainly depends on the preference degree on every individual tag in the group. However, the preference degree on a combination of tags (a tag-group) cannot simply be obtained from linearly combining the preference on each tag. The combination of a user's two favorite tags may not be favorite for the user. In this article, we examine the limitations of previous tag-based personalized search. To overcome their problems, we model a user profile based on combinations of tags (tag-groups) and then apply it to the personalized search. By comparing it with the state-of-the-art methods, experimental results on a real data set shows the effectiveness of our proposed user profile method.

Topology of a network greatly affects the network performance. Depending on the purpose of a network, a specific topology may perform much better than any other topologies. Since the ad hoc networks are formed for a specific purpose, determining, and constructing the network topology based on the application requirements will enhance system performance. This paper proposes Bluetooth scatternet forming protocol in which the network topology is determined by three parameters. The parameters affecting the topology are the number of maximum slaves in a piconet, the number of maximum piconets that a gateway Bluetooth device can service, and the number of loops needed in the formed scatternet. These parameters can be read from a script file prior to the network formation. This process of reading the important parameters from the file would give users freedom in determining the network topology. The proposed protocol also includes a role negotiation process to accommodate different capabilities of the participating devices. The negotiation process of the protocol allows the resource-limited nodes to participate in the network. Different types of scatternet topologies like star, mesh, ring and line can be formed by specifying the parameters. This paper also discusses theoretical information necessary for calculating network topologies in detail. The protocol is verified with help of simulations, and implementations using commercially available Bluetooth devices. The detailed results are also presented in this paper.

An unsupervised algorithm is proposed for learning overcomplete topographic representations of nature image. Our method is based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) model due to its superiority on feature extraction, and overcomes the weakness of traditional method in fast overcomplete learning. Besides, the learnt topographic representation, resembling receptive fields of complex cells, can be used as descriptors to extract invariant features. Recognition experiments on Caltech-101 dataset confirm that these complex cell descriptors are not only efficient in feature extraction but achieve comparable performances to traditional descriptors.

In this paper, we developed the latest IoT honeypots to capture IoT malware currently on the loose, analyzed IoT malware with new features such as persistent infection, developed malware removal methods to be provided to IoT device users. Furthermore, as attack behaviors using IoT devices become more diverse and sophisticated every year, we conducted research related to various factors involved in understanding the overall picture of attack behaviors from the perspective of incident responders. As the final stage of countermeasures, we also conducted research and development of IoT malware disabling technology to stop only IoT malware activities in IoT devices and IoT system disabling technology to remotely control (including stopping) IoT devices themselves.

In this paper, a new method for canceling the interchannel interference in the presence of crosstalk is proposed. The cancellation problem is formulated as a system identification problem, and then the transmission path and the interference path of each channel are estimated with the Recursive Prediction Error Method. IIR adaptive filters are used to implement interference cancelers. In addition, this method is shown to be able to apply to the noise canceling problem. The performance of the new method is verified by computer simulations.

In this paper, we investigate the channel characteristics of underwater optical wireless communications (UOWC) based on Monte Carlo simulation method. The impulse response and channel time dispersion of the link are discussed. Also we consider the channel parameters comprehensively like the water type, attenuation length, divergence angle, beam width, field-of-view (FOV), receiver aperture and position. Simulation results suggest that in clear water, the channel can effectively be considered as non inter-symbol interference (ISI) when working over distance of up to 40m. Therefore, in practice the receiver does not need to perform computationally complex signal processing operations. However, in harbor water, the channel time dispersion will enlarge with larger FOV or divergence angle, and reduce the data transmission efficiency. When the attenuation length is smaller than diffused length, larger receivers offer lower intensity than smaller ones. In contrast, the intensity enhances with larger receiver at the small FOV, however, they trend to similar regardless of the apertures at large FOV. Furthermore, we study the effect of misalignment of the transmitter and receiver on the received intensity. The results give us some insight in terms of what constitutes an accurate UOWC channel.

End-to-end delay and loss measurement is an efficient way for a host to examine the network performance. Unnoticed clock errors that influence the accuracy of the timestamp may result in fatal system errors. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics and defects of the existing clock distortion adjustment algorithms. Those algorithms are not applicable to process a long-term delay trace, which contains periodical NTP clock adjustment. Therefore, we propose a relatively robust algorithm to resolve the problem. The algorithm employs window function to partition the long-term trace into short segments, improves the precision of the estimation of the time and amount of NTP clock adjustment To evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm, we practice it in adjusting the clock distortion of the real delay traces collected from Internet. The results indicate that our proposed algorithm has excellent effect on the removal of the clock distortion from the long-term delay traces.