To determine the thickness from MR images, segmentation, that is, boundary detection, of the two adjacent thin structures (e.g., femoral cartilage and acetabular cartilage in the hip joint) is needed before thickness determination. Traditional techniques such as zero-crossings of the second derivatives are not suitable for the detection of these boundaries. A theoretical simulation analysis reveals that the zero-crossing method yields considerable biases in boundary detection and thickness measurement of the two adjacent thin structures from MR images. This paper studies the accurate detection of hip cartilage boundaries in the image plane, and a new method based on a model of the MR imaging process is proposed for this application. Based on the newly developed model, a hip cartilage boundary detection algorithm is developed. The in-plane thickness is computed based on the boundaries detected using the proposed algorithm. In order to correct the image plane thickness for overestimation due to oblique slicing, a three-dimensional (3-D) thickness computation approach is introduced. Experimental results show that the thickness measurement obtained by the new thickness computation approach is more accurate than that obtained by the existing thickness computation approaches.

Many basic tasks in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) rely heavily on the availability and accuracy of target locations. Since the number of targets is usually limited, localization benefits from Compressed Sensing (CS) in the sense that measurements can be greatly reduced. Though some CS-based localization schemes have been proposed, all of these solutions make an assumption that all targets are located on a pre-sampled and fixed grid, and perform poorly when some targets are located off the grid. To address this problem, we develop an adaptive dictionary algorithm where the grid is adaptively adjusted. To achieve this, we formulate localization as a joint parameter estimation and sparse signal recovery problem. Additionally, we transform the problem into a tractable convex optimization problem by using Taylor approximation. Finally, the block coordinate descent method is leveraged to iteratively optimize over the parameters and sparse signal. After iterations, the measurements can be linearly represented by a sparse signal which indicates the number and locations of targets. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed adaptive dictionary algorithm provides better performance than state-of-the-art fixed dictionary algorithms.

The compressive sensing has been applied to develop an effective framework for simultaneously localizing multiple targets in wireless sensor networks. Nevertheless, existing methods implicitly use analog measurements, which have infinite bit precision. In this letter, we focus on off-grid target localization using quantized measurements with only several bits. To address this, we propose a novel localization framework for jointly estimating target locations and dealing with quantization errors, based on the novel application of the variational Bayesian Expectation-Maximization methodology. Simulation results highlight its superior performance.

Unmanned aerial vehicle mounted base stations (UAV-BSs) can provide wireless cellular service to ground users in a variety of scenarios. The efficient deployment of such UAV-BSs while optimizing the coverage area is one of the key challenges. We investigate the deployment of UAV-BS to maximize the coverage of ground users, and further analyzes the impact of the deployment of UAV-BS on the fairness of ground users. In this paper, we first calculated the location of the UAV-BS according to the QoS requirements of the ground users, and then the fairness of ground users is taken into account by calculating three different fairness indexes. The performance of two genetic algorithms, namely Standard Genetic Algorithm (SGA) and Multi-Population Genetic Algorithm (MPGA) are compared to solve the optimization problem of UAV-BS deployment. The simulations are presented showing that the performance of the two algorithms, and the fairness performance of the ground users is also given.

A method based on covariance differencing for a uniform linear array is proposed to counter the problem of direction finding of narrowband signals under a colored noise environment. By assuming a Hermitian symmetric Toeplitz matrix for the unknown noise, the array covariance matrix is transformed into a centrohermitian matrix in an appropriate way allowing the noise component to be eliminated. The modified covariance differencing algorithm provides accurate direction of arrival (DOA) estimation when the incident signals are uncorrelated or just two of the signals are coherent. If there are more than two coherent signals, the presented method combined with spatial smoothing (SS) scheme can be used. Unlike the original method, the new approach dispenses the need to determine the true angles and the phantom angles. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of presented algorithm.

In the large-scale multi-UAV systems, the direct link may be invalid for two remote nodes on account of the constrained power or complex communication environment. Idle UAVs may work as relays between the sources and destinations to enhance communication quality. In this letter, we investigate the opportunistic relay selection for the UAVs dynamic network. On account of the time-varying channel states and the variable numbers of sources and relays, relay selection becomes much more difficult. In addition, information exchange among all nodes may bring much cost and it is difficult to implement in practice. Thus, we propose a decentralized relay selection approach based on mood-driven mechanism to combat the dynamic characteristics, aiming to maximize the total capacity of the network without information exchange. With the proposed approach, the sources can make decisions only according to their own current states and update states according to immediate rewards. Numerical results show that the proposed approach has attractive properties.

Blind beamforming plays an important role in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Systems, radar, cognitive radio, and system identification. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for multiple blind beamforming algorithm based on the least square constant modulus algorithm (LSCMA). The new method consists of the following three parts: (a) beamforming of one signal with LSCMA. (b) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of the remaining signals by rooting the weight vector polynomial. (c) beamforming of the remaining signals with linear constraints minimum variance (LCMV) method. After the convergence of LSCMA, one signal is captured and the arrival angles of the remaining signals can be obtained by rooting the weight vector polynomial. Therefore, beamforming can be quickly established for the remaining signals using LCMV method. Simultaneously the DOA of the signals can also be obtained. Simulation results show the performance of the presented method.

We research device-free (DF) multi-target tracking scheme in this paper. The existing localization and tracking algorithms are always pay attention to the single target and need to collect a large amount of localization information. In this paper, we exploit the sparse property of multiple target locations to achieve target trace accurately with much less sampling both in the wireless links and the time slots. The proposed approach mainly includes the target localization part and target trace recovery part. In target localization part, by exploiting the inherent sparsity of the target number, Compressive Sensing (CS) is utilized to reduce the wireless links distributed. In the target trace recovery part, we exploit the compressive property of target trace, as well as designing the measurement matrix and the sparse matrix, to reduce the samplings in time domain. Additionally, Kronecker Compressive Sensing (KCS) theory is used to simultaneously recover the multiple traces both of the X label and the Y Label. Finally, simulations show that the proposed approach holds an effective recovery performance.

As a hot topic of speech signal processing, speech emotion recognition methods have been developed rapidly in recent years. Some satisfactory results have been achieved. However, it should be noted that most of these methods are trained and evaluated on the same corpus. In reality, the training data and testing data are often collected from different corpora, and the feature distributions of different datasets often follow different distributions. These discrepancies will greatly affect the recognition performance. To tackle this problem, a novel corpus-invariant discriminant feature representation algorithm, called transfer discriminant analysis (TDA), is presented for speech emotion recognition. The basic idea of TDA is to integrate the kernel LDA algorithm and the similarity measurement of distributions into one objective function. Experimental results under the cross-corpus conditions show that our proposed method can significantly improve the recognition rates.

The compressive sensing (CS) theory has been recognized as a promising technique to achieve the target localization in wireless sensor networks. However, most of the existing works require the prior knowledge of transmitting powers of targets, which is not conformed to the case that the information of targets is completely unknown. To address such a problem, in this paper, we propose a novel CS-based approach for multiple target localization and power estimation. It is achieved by formulating the locations and transmitting powers of targets as a sparse vector in the discrete spatial domain and the received signal strengths (RSSs) of targets are taken to recover the sparse vector. The key point of CS-based localization is the sensing matrix, which is constructed by collecting RSSs from RF emitters in our approach, avoiding the disadvantage of using the radio propagation model. Moreover, since the collection of RSSs to construct the sensing matrix is tedious and time-consuming, we propose a CS-based method for reconstructing the sensing matrix from only a small number of RSS measurements. It is achieved by exploiting the CS theory and designing an difference matrix to reveal the sparsity of the sensing matrix. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our localization and power estimation approach.

As an emerging and promising technique, device-free localization (DFL) has drawn considerable attention in recent years. By exploiting the inherent spatial sparsity of target localization, the compressive sensing (CS) theory has been applied in DFL to reduce the number of measurements. In practical scenarios, a prior knowledge about target locations is usually available, which can be obtained by coarse localization or tracking techniques. Among existing CS-based DFL approaches, however, few works consider the utilization of prior knowledge. To make use of the prior knowledge that is partly or erroneous, this paper proposes a novel faulty prior knowledge aided multi-target device-free localization (FPK-DFL) method. It first incorporates the faulty prior knowledge into a three-layer hierarchical prior model. Then, it estimates location vector and learns model parameters under a variational Bayesian inference (VBI) framework. Simulation results show that the proposed method can improve the localization accuracy by taking advantage of the faulty prior knowledge.