A closed-form solution of mobile location can be obtained by minimizing the norm of the error vector of a set of linear equations in spherical interpolation (SI) method. However, it assumes that the intermediate variables are independent though they are related by a quadratic equation. To give an improved position estimate, we use this relationship to help SI method and a new location method is proposed based on the approximate linearization of spherical intersecting constraint. Simulation results for line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight situations show that the proposed method performs significantly better than SI and Chan's method, especially for the cases where large bias and large standard deviation exist in range difference measurements.

Evolvable hardware (EHW) based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) opens up new possibilities towards building efficient adaptive system. State of the art EHW systems based on virtual reconfiguration and dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) both have their limitations. The former has a huge area overhead and circuit delay, and the later has slow configuration speed and low flexibility. Therefore a general low-cost fast hybrid reconfiguration architecture is proposed in this paper, which merges the high flexibility of virtual reconfiguration and the low resource cost of DPR. Moreover, the bitstream relocation technology is introduced to save the bitstream storage space, and the discrepancy configuration technology is adopted to reduce reconfiguration time. And an embedded RAM core is adopted to store bitstreams which accelerate the reconfiguration speed further. The proposed architecture is evaluated by the online evolution of digital image filter implemented on the Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA development board ML605. And the experimental results show that our system has lower resource overhead, higher operating frequency, faster reconfiguration speed and less bitstream storage space in comparison with the previous works.

To solve the problem of metamerism in the color reproduction process, various spectral reflectance reconstruction methods combined with neural network have been proposed in recent years. However, these methods are generally sensitive to initial values and can easily converge to local optimal solutions, especially on small data sets. In this paper, we propose a spectral reflectance reconstruction algorithm based on the Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) and an improved Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA). In this algorithm, to solve the problem that BPNN is sensitive to initial values, we propose to use SSA to initialize BPNN, and we use the sine chaotic mapping to further improve the stability of the algorithm. In the experiment, we tested the proposed algorithm on the X-Rite ColorChecker Classic Mini Chart which contains 24 colors, the results show that the proposed algorithm has significantly better performance compared to other algorithms and moreover it can meet the needs of spectral reflectance reconstruction on small data sets. Code is avaible at https://github.com/LuraZhang/spectral-reflectance-reconsctuction.

This paper studies the problem of recovering an arbitrarily distributed sparse matrix from its one-bit (1-bit) compressive measurements. We propose a matrix sketching based binary method iterative hard thresholding (MSBIHT) algorithm by combining the two dimensional version of BIHT (2DBIHT) and the matrix sketching method, to solve the sparse matrix recovery problem in matrix form. In contrast to traditional one-dimensional BIHT (BIHT), the proposed algorithm can reduce computational complexity. Besides, the MSBIHT can also improve the recovery performance comparing to the 2DBIHT method. A brief theoretical analysis and numerical experiments show the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional ones.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is significantly deteriorated by the random phase noises which are generated by the frequency jitter of the transmit signal and atmospheric turbulence. In this paper, we recast the SAR imaging problem via the phase-corrupted data as for a special case of quadratic compressed sensing (QCS). Although the quadratic measurement model has potential to mitigate the effects of the phase noises, it also leads to a nonconvex and quartic optimization problem. In order to overcome these challenges and increase reconstruction robustness to the phase noises, we proposed a QCS-based SAR imaging algorithm by greedy local search to exploit the spatial sparsity of scatterers. Our proposed imaging algorithm can not only avoid the process of precise random phase noise estimation but also acquire a sparse representation of the SAR target with high accuracy from the phase-corrupted data. Experiments are conducted by the synthetic scene and the moving and stationary target recognition Sandia laboratories implementation of cylinders (MSTAR SLICY) target. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed SAR imaging algorithm.

This letter presents an oblivious and load-balanced routing (OLBR) method without virtual channels for 2D mesh Network-on-chip (NoC). To balance the traffic load of network and avoid deadlock, OLBR divides network nodes into two regions, one region contains the nodes of east and west sides of NoC, in which packets are routed by odd-even turn rule with Y direction preference (OE-YX), and the remaining nodes are divided to the other region, in which packets are routed by odd-even turn rule with alterable priority arbitration (OE-APA). Simulation results show that OLBR's saturation throughput can be improved than related works by 11.73% and OLBR balances the traffic load over entire network.

This paper proposes a novel matching pursuit generalized approximate message passing (MPGAMP) algorithm which explores the support of sparse representation coefficients step by step, and estimates the mean and variance of non-zero elements at each step based on a generalized-approximate-message-passing-like scheme. In contrast to the classic message passing based algorithms and matching pursuit based algorithms, our proposed algorithm saves a lot of intermediate process memory, and does not calculate the inverse matrix. Numerical experiments show that MPGAMP algorithm can recover a sparse signal from compressed sensing measurements very well, and maintain good performance even for non-zero mean projection matrix and strong correlated projection matrix.

In the health IoT (Internet of Things), the specialized sensor devices can be used to monitor remote health and notify the emergency information, e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, etc. These data can help the doctors to rescue the patients. In cloud-based health IoT, patients' medical/health data is managed by the cloud service providers. Secure storage and privacy preservation are indispensable for the outsourced medical/health data in cloud computing. In this paper, we study the integrity checking and sharing of outsourced private medical/health records for critical patients in public clouds (ICS). The patient can check his own medical/health data integrity and retrieve them. When a patient is in coma, some authorized entities and hospital can cooperate to share the patient's necessary medical/health data in order to rescue the patient. The paper studies the system model, security model and concrete scheme for ICS in public clouds. Based on the bilinear pairing technique, we design an efficient ICS protocol. Through security analysis and performance analysis, the proposed protocol is provably secure and efficient.

In this paper, we consider the problem of bearing estimation for spatially distributed sources in unknown spatially-correlated noise. Assumed that the noise covariance matrix is centro-Hermitian, a differential denoising scheme is developed. Combined it with the classic DSPE algorithm, a differential denoising estimator is formulated. Its modified version is also derived. Exactly, the differential processing is first imposed on the covariance matrix of array outputs. The resulting differential signal subspace (DSS) is then utilized to weight array outputs. The noise components orthogonal to DSS are eliminated. Based on eigenvalue decomposition of the covariance matrix of weighted array outputs, the DSPE null spectrum is constructed. The asymptotic performance of the proposed bearing estimator is evaluated in a closed form. Moreover, in order to improve the performance of bearing estimation in case of low signal-to-noise ratio, a modified differential denoising estimator is proposed. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed estimators under the low SNR case. The impacts of angular spread and number of sensors are also investigated.

In this paper, a novel algorithm is presented for blind estimation of the symbol timing and frequency offset for OFDM systems. Time-varying frequency-selective Rayleigh fading multipath channel is considered, which is characterized by the power delay profile and time-varying scattering function and has high reliability for real-world mobile environment. The estimators exploit the intrinsic structures of OFDM signals and rely on the second-order moment rather than the probability distribution function of the received signals. They are totally optimum in sense of minimum mean-square-error and can be implemented easily. In addition, we have presented an improved approach which not only preserves the merits of previously proposed method, but also makes the estimation range of the frequency offset cover the entire subcarrier spacing of OFDM signals and the timing estimator be independent of the frequency offset.

Conventional fast block-matching algorithms, such as TSS and DSWA/IS, are widely used for motion estimation in the low-bit-rate video coding. These algorithms are based on the assumption that when searching in the previous frame for the block that best matches a block in the current frame, the difference between them increases monotonically when a matching block moves away from the optimal solution. Unfortunately, this assumption of global monotonicity is often not valid, which can lead to a high possibility for the matching block to be trapped to local minima. On the other hand, monotonicity does exist in localized areas. In this paper, we proposed a new algorithm called Peano-Hilbert scanning search algorithm (PHSSA). With the Peano-Hilbert image representation, the assumption of global monotonicity is not necessary, while local monotonicity can be effectively explored with binary search. PHSSA selects multiple winners at each search stage, minimizing the possibility of the result being trapped to local minima. The algorithm allows selection of three parameters to meet different search accuracy and process speed: (1) the number of initial candidate intervals, (2) a threshold to remove the unpromising candidate intervals at each stage, and (3) a threshold to control when interval subdivision stops. With proper parameters, the multiple-candidate PHSSA converges to the optimal result faster and with better accuracy than the conventional block matching algorithms.

Battery-powered wireless sensor networks are prone to premature failures because some nodes deplete their batteries more rapidly than others due to workload variations, the many-to-one traffic pattern, and heterogeneous hardware. Most previous sensor network lifetime enhancement techniques focused on balancing the power distribution, assuming the usage of the identical battery. This paper proposes a novel fine-grained cost-constrained lifetime-aware battery allocation solution for sensor networks with arbitrary topologies and heterogeneous power distributions. Based on an energy–cost battery pack model and optimal node partitioning algorithm, a rapid battery pack selection heuristic is developed and its deviation from optimality is quantified. Furthermore, we investigate the impacts of the power variations on the lifetime extension by battery allocation. We prove a theorem to show that power variations of nodes are more likely to reduce the lifetime than to increase it. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique achieves network lifetime improvements ranging from 4–13 over the uniform battery allocation, with no more than 10 battery pack levels and 2-5 orders of magnitudes speedup compared with a standard integer nonlinear program solver (INLP).

The emergence of nature-inspired algorithms (NIA) is a great milestone in the field of computational intelligence community. As one of the NIAs, the artificial immune algorithm (AIS) mimics the principles of the biological immune system, and has exhibited its effectiveness, implicit parallelism, flexibility and applicability when solving various engineering problems. Nevertheless, AIS still suffers from the issues of evolution premature, local minima trapping and slow convergence due to its inherent stochastic search dynamics. Much effort has been made to improve the search performance of AIS from different aspects, such as population diversity maintenance, adaptive parameter control, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-learning operator into the AIS to further enrich the search dynamics of the algorithm. A framework of embedding multiple commonly used mutation operators into the antibody evolution procedure is also established. Four distinct learning operators including baldwinian learning, cauchy mutation, gaussian mutation and lateral mutation are selected to merge together as a multi-learning operator. It can be expected that the multi-learning operator can effectively balance the exploration and exploitation of the search by enriched dynamics. To verify its performance, the proposed algorithm, which is called multi-learning immune algorithm (MLIA), is applied on a number of benchmark functions. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm in terms of convergence speed and solution quality.

A new direction of arrival (DOA) estimation method is introduced with arbitrary array geometry when uncorrelated and coherent signals coexist. The DOAs of uncorrelated signals are first estimated via subspace-based high resolution DOA estimation technique. Then a matrix that only contains the information of coherent signals can be formulated by eliminating the contribution of uncorrelated signals. Finally a subspace block sparse reconstruction approach is taken for DOA estimations of the coherent signals.

The problem of the super-resolution time delay estimation of the real stationary signals is addressed in this paper. The time delay estimation is first converted into a frequency estimation problem. Then a MUSIC-type algorithm to estimate the subsequent frequency from the single-experiment data is proposed, which not only avoids the mathematical model mismatching but also utilizes the advantages of the subspace-based methods. The mean square errors (MSEs) of the time delay estimate of the MUSIC-type method for varying signal-to-noise (SNR) and separation of two received signal components are shown to illustrate that they approximately coincide with the corresponding Cramer-Rao bound (CRB). Finally, the comparison between the MUSIC-type method and the other conventional methods is presented to show the advantages of the proposed method in this paper.

This paper presents a novel approach to pixel decimation for motion estimation in video coding. Early techniques of pixel decimation use regular pixel patterns to evaluate matching criterion. Recent techniques use adaptive pixel patterns and have achieved better efficiency. However, these adaptive techniques require an initial division of a block into a set of uniform regions and therefore are only locally-adaptive in essence. In this paper, we present a globally-adaptive scheme for pixel decimation, in which no regions are fixed at the beginning and pixels are selected only if they have features important to the determination of a match. The experiment results show that when no more than 40 pixels are selected out of a 1616 block, this approach achieves a better search accuracy by 13-22% than the previous locally-adaptive methods which also use features.

In this paper, we present a novel method for vehicle detection based on the Faster R-CNN frame. We integrate MobileNet into Faster R-CNN structure. First, the MobileNet is used as the base network to generate the feature map. In order to retain the more information of vehicle objects, a fusion strategy is applied to multi-layer features to generate a fused feature map. The fused feature map is then shared by region proposal network (RPN) and Fast R-CNN. In the RPN system, we employ a novel dimension cluster method to predict the anchor sizes, instead of choosing the properties of anchors manually. Our detection method improves the detection accuracy and saves computation resources. The results show that our proposed method respectively achieves 85.21% and 91.16% on the mean average precision (mAP) for DIOR dataset and UA-DETRAC dataset, which are respectively 1.32% and 1.49% improvement than Faster R-CNN (ResNet152). Also, since less operations and parameters are required in the base network, our method costs the storage size of 42.52MB, which is far less than 214.89MB of Faster R-CNN(ResNet50).

In this paper, we present a novel discriminative dictionary learning (DDL) method for image classification. The local structural relationship between samples is first built by the Laplacian eigenmaps (LE), and then integrated into the basic DDL frame to suppress inter-class ambiguity in the feature space. Moreover, in order to improve the discriminative ability of the dictionary, the category label information of training samples is formulated into the objective function of dictionary learning by considering the discriminative promotion term. Thus, the data points of original samples are transformed into a new feature space, in which the points from different categories are expected to be far apart. The test results based on the real dataset indicate the effectiveness of this method.

Since the deployment of base stations (BS's) is far from optimum in 3-dimensional (3-D) space, i.e., the vertical baseline is relatively shorter than the planar baseline, the geometric degradation of precision of the altitude estimate is larger than that of the planar location. This paper considers the problem of 3-D range location and attempt to improve the altitude estimate. We first use a volume formula of tetrahedron to transform the range measurements to the volume measurements, then a novel pseudo-linear solution is proposed based on a linear relationship between the rectangular and the volume coordinates. Theory analysis and numerical examples are included to show the improved accuracy of the altitude estimate of mobile location. Finally, an improved estimate of 3-D mobile location is given by solving a set of augmented linear equations.

Based on the reconstruction of the augmented interference-plus-noise (IPN) covariance matrix (CM) and the estimation of the desired signal's extended steering vector (SV), we propose a novel robust widely linear (WL) beamforming algorithm. Firstly, an extension of the iterative adaptive approach (IAA) algorithm is employed to acquire the spatial spectrum. Secondly, the IAA spatial spectrum is adopted to reconstruct the augmented signal-plus-noise (SPN) CM and the augmented IPNCM. Thirdly, the extended SV of the desired signal is estimated by using the iterative robust Capon beamformer with adaptive uncertainty level (AU-IRCB). Compared with several representative robust WL beamforming algorithms, simulation results are provided to confirm that the proposed method can achieve a better performance and has a much lower complexity.