Super resolution (SR) image reconstruction has attracted increasing attention these years and many SR image reconstruction algorithms have been proposed for restoring a high-resolution image from one or multiple low-resolution images. However, how to objectively evaluate the quality of SR reconstructed images remains an open problem. Although a great number of image quality metrics have been proposed, they are quite limited to evaluate the quality of SR reconstructed images. Inspired by this, this paper presents a blind quality index for SR reconstructed images using first- and second-order structural degradation. First, the SR reconstructed image is decomposed into multi-order derivative magnitude maps, which are effective for first- and second-order structural representation. Then, log-energy based features are extracted on these multi-order derivative magnitude maps in the frequency domain. Finally, support vector regression is used to learn the quality model for SR reconstructed images. The results of extensive experiments that were conducted on one public database demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over the existing quality metrics. Moreover, the proposed method is less dependent on the number of training images and has low computational cost.

This letter presents an objective quality index for benchmarking image inpainting algorithms. Under the guidance of the masks of damaged areas, the boundary region and the inpainting region are first located. Then, the statistical features are extracted from the boundary and inpainting regions respectively. For the boundary region, we utilize Weibull distribution to fit the gradient magnitude histograms of the exterior and interior regions around the boundary, and the Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) is calculated to measure the boundary distortions caused by imperfect inpainting. Meanwhile, the quality of the inpainting region is measured by comparing the naturalness factors between the inpainted image and the reference image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metric outperforms the relevant state-of-the-art quality metrics.

The quality of edge detection is related to detection angle, scale, and threshold. There have been many algorithms to promote edge detection quality by some rules about detection angles. However these algorithm did not form rules to detect edges at an arbitrary angle, therefore they just used different number of angles and did not indicate optimized number of angles. In this paper, a novel edge detection algorithm is proposed to detect edges at arbitrary angles and optimized number of angles in the algorithm is introduced. The algorithm combines singularity detection with Gaussian wavelet transform and edge detection at arbitrary directions and contain five steps: 1) An image is divided into some pixel lines at certain angle in the range from 45° to 90° according to decomposition rules of this paper. 2) Singularities of pixel lines are detected and form an edge image at the certain angle. 3) Many edge images at different angles form a final edge images. 4) Detection angles in the range from 45° to 90° are extended to range from 0° to 360°. 5) Optimized number of angles for the algorithm is proposed. Then the algorithm with optimized number of angles shows better performances.

Machine reading comprehension with multi-hop reasoning always suffers from reasoning path breaking due to the lack of world knowledge, which always results in wrong answer detection. In this paper, we analyze what knowledge the previous work lacks, e.g., dependency relations and commonsense. Based on our analysis, we propose a Multi-dimensional Knowledge enhanced Graph Network, named MKGN, which exploits specific knowledge to repair the knowledge gap in reasoning process. Specifically, our approach incorporates not only entities and dependency relations through various graph neural networks, but also commonsense knowledge by a bidirectional attention mechanism, which aims to enhance representations of both question and contexts. Besides, to make the most of multi-dimensional knowledge, we investigate two kinds of fusion architectures, i.e., in the sequential and parallel manner. Experimental results on HotpotQA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and verify that using multi-dimensional knowledge, especially dependency relations and commonsense, can indeed improve the reasoning process and contribute to correct answer detection.

Since Smart Antenna technology has powerful spatial processing ability; it is regarded as a promising approach to enhancing the data rates and capacity of wireless LAN systems. In this paper, a small size, practical switched-beam antenna system, well suited for domestic in-home networking in the 2.4 GHz band, is designed and tested. The system has the configuration of regular nine-prism, and nine 1/4 wavelength rectangular patches are symmetrically distributed on the nine sides of the prism. The switching process is based on control of the microstrip used to feed the patch radiators, by placing PIN diodes at the microstrip feeding lines. The antenna array can generate nine beams with a gain of 11 dB. All the beams generated by the system are cophasal excited and have a 40°beamwidth. Compared to the uniform array, the system can guarantee the consistency of every beam and is preferable in shape.

Network structure has a great impact both on hazard spread and network immunization. The vulnerability of the network node is associated with each other, assortative or disassortative. Firstly, an algorithm for vulnerability relevance clustering is proposed to show that the vulnerability community phenomenon is obviously existent in complex networks. On this basis, next, a new indicator called network “hyper-betweenness” is given for evaluating the vulnerability of network node. Network hyper-betweenness can reflect the importance of network node in hazard spread better. Finally, the dynamic stochastic process of hazard spread is simulated based on Monte-Carlo sampling method and a two-player, non-cooperative, constant-sum game model is designed to obtain an equilibrated network immunization strategy.

This letter presents a new image watermarking scheme using Polar Sine Transform (PST), a new kind of orthogonal moment defined on a circular domain. The PSTs are easy to compute and have no numerical stability problem, thus are more suitable for watermarking. In the proposed method, the PSTs are modified according to the binary watermark bits, producing a compensation image. The watermarked image is obtained by adding the compensation image to the original image directly. Simulation results show the advantages of the proposed scheme in terms of both watermark capacity and watermark robustness.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and keyword search (KWS) have more and more found their way into our everyday lives, and their successes could boil down lots of factors. In these factors, large scale of speech data used for acoustic modeling is the key factor. However, it is difficult and time-consuming to acquire large scale of transcribed speech data for some languages, especially for low-resource languages. Thus, at low-resource condition, it becomes important with which transcribed data for acoustic modeling for improving the performance of ASR and KWS. In view of using acoustic data for acoustic modeling, there are two different ways. One is using the target language data, and another is using large scale of other source languages data for cross-lingual transfer. In this paper, we propose some approaches for efficient selecting acoustic data for acoustic modeling. For target language data, a submodular based unsupervised data selection approach is proposed. The submodular based unsupervised data selection could select more informative and representative utterances for manual transcription for acoustic modeling. For other source languages data, the high misclassified as target language based submodular multilingual data selection approach and knowledge based group multilingual data selection approach are proposed. When using selected multilingual data for multilingual deep neural network training for cross-lingual transfer, it could improve the performance of ASR and KWS of target language. When comparing our proposed multilingual data selection approach with language identification based multilingual data selection approach, our proposed approach also obtains better effect. In this paper, we also analyze and compare the language factor and the acoustic factor influence on the performance of ASR and KWS. The influence of different scale of target language data on the performance of ASR and KWS at mono-lingual condition and cross-lingual condition are also compared and analyzed, and some significant conclusions can be concluded.

The Linux kernel has been applied in various security-sensitive fields, so ensuring its security is crucial. Vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel are usually caused by undefined behaviors of the C programming language, the most threatening of which are memory safety vulnerabilities. Both the software-based and hardware approaches to memory safety have disadvantages of poor performance, false positives, and poor compatibility. This paper explores the feasibility of using the safe programming language Rust to reconstruct a Linux kernel component and open-source the component's code. We leverage the Rust FFI mechanism to design a safe foreign interface layer to enable the reconstructed component to invoke other Linux functionalities, and then use Rust to reconstruct the component, during which we leverage Rust's type-safety and ownership mechanisms to improve its security, and finally export the C interface of the component to enable the invocation by the Linux kernel. The performance and memory overhead of the reconstructed component, referred to as “rOOM”, were evaluated, revealing a performance overhead of 8.9% in kernel mode, 5% in user mode, 3% in real time, and a memory overhead of 0.06%. These results suggest that it is possible to develop key components of the Linux kernel using Rust in terms of functionality, performance, and memory overhead.