This paper proposes a novel service configuration approach that can realize dynamic critical Quality of Service (QoS) adaptation to ever-changing and resource-limited ubiquitous computing environments. In the approach, service configuration is reduced to a Fuzzy Control System (FCS) which aims to achieve critical QoS variations on minimal level with less power cost. Two configuration strategies, service chain reconfiguration and QoS parameters adjustment, along with a configuration algorithm, are implemented to handle different types of QoS variations. A self-optimizing algorithm is designed to enhance the adaptation of the FCS. Simulation results validate the proposed approach.

Online learning is a method which updates the model gradually and can modify and strengthen the previous model, so that the updated model can adapt to the new data without having to relearn all the data. However, the accuracy of the current online multiclass learning algorithm still has room for improvement, and the ability to produce sparse models is often not strong. In this paper, we propose a new Multiclass Truncated Gradient Confidence-Weighted online learning algorithm (MTGCW), which combine the Truncated Gradient algorithm and the Confidence-weighted algorithm to achieve higher learning performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the accuracy of MTGCW algorithm is always better than the original CW algorithm and other baseline methods. Based on these results, we applied our algorithm for phishing website recognition and image classification, and unexpectedly obtained encouraging experimental results. Thus, we have reasons to believe that our classification algorithm is clever at handling unstructured data which can promote the cognitive ability of computers to a certain extent.

In recent years, with the popularization of video collection devices and the development of the Internet, it is easy to copy original digital videos and distribute illegal copies quickly through the Internet. It becomes a critical task to uphold copyright laws, and this problem will require a technical solution. Therefore, as a challenging problem, copy detection or video identification becomes increasingly important. The problem addressed here is to identify a given video clip in a given set of video sequences. In this paper, an extension to the video identification approach based on video tomography is presented. First, the feature extraction process is modified to enhance the reliability of the shot signature with its size unchanged. Then, a new similarity measurement between two shot signatures is proposed to address the problem generated by the original approach when facing the query shot with a short length. In addition, the query scope is extended from one shot only to one clip (several consecutive shots) by giving a new definition of similarity between two clips and describing a search algorithm which can save much of the computation cost. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is more suitable for identifying shots with short lengths than the original approach. The clip query approach performs well in the experiment and it also shows strong robustness to data loss.

Long-term coherent integration can significantly improve the ability to detect maneuvering targets by radar. Especially for weak targets, longer integration times are needed to improve. But for non-radially moving targets, the time-varying angle between target moving direction and radar line of sight will cause non-linear range migration (NLRM) and non-linear Doppler frequency migration (NLDFM) within long-time coherent processing, which precludes existing methods that ignore angle changes, and seriously degrades the performance of coherent integration. To solve this problem, an efficient method based on Radon Fourier transform (RFT) with modified variant angle model (ARFT) is proposed. In this method, a new parameter angle is introduced to optimize the target motion model, and the NLRM and NLDFM are eliminated by range-velocity-angle joint three-dimensional searching of ARFT. Compared with conventional algorithms, the proposed method can more accurately compensate for the NLRM and NLDFM, thus achieving better integration performance and detection probability for non-radial moving weak targets. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.

This paper proposes a new method that reduces the computational cost of the phase-only correlation (POC)-based methods for displacement estimation in old film sequences. Conventional POC-based methods calculate all the points of the POC and only use the highest peak of the POC and its neighboring points to estimate the displacement with subpixel accuracy. Our proposed method reduces the computational cost by calculating the POC in a small region, instead of all the points of the POC. The proposed method combines a displacement pre-estimation with a modified inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT). The displacement pre-estimation uses the 1-D POCs of frame projections to pre-estimate the displacement with pixel accuracy and chooses a small region in the POC including the desired points for displacement estimation. The modified IDFT is then used to calculate the points in this small region for displacement estimation. Experimental results show that use of the proposed method can effectively reduce the computational cost of the POC-based methods without compromising the accuracy.

Considering an uncertain multi-objective optimization system with interval coefficients, this letter proposes an interval multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm. In order to improve its performance, a crowding distance measure based on the distance and the overlap degree of intervals, and a method of updating the archive based on the acceptance coefficient of decision-maker, are employed. Finally, results show that our algorithm is capable of generating excellent approximation of the true Pareto front.

In this paper, we propose a successive signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR) based precoding with geometric mean decomposition (GMD) for the downlink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. The known leakages are canceled at the transmit side, and SLNR is calculated with the unknown leakages. GMD is applied to cancel the known leakages, so the subchannels for each receiver have equal gain. We further improve the proposed precoding scheme by ordering users. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes have a considerable bit error rate (BER) improvement over the original SLNR scheme.

This paper presents an active quality of service (QoS) aware service composition protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), with the goal of conserving resources subject to QoS requirements. A problem of QoS based service composition in MANETs is transformed into a problem of the service path discovery. We extend Dynamic Source Routing protocol to discover and compose elementary services across the network. Some message processing measures are taken to effectively reduce control overhead. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.

Visual adaptation is a universal phenomenon associated with human visual system. This adaptation affects not only the perception of low-level visual systems processing color, motion, and orientation, but also the perception of high-level visual systems processing complex visual patterns, such as facial identity and expression. Although it remains unclear for the mutual interaction mechanism between systems at different levels, this issue is the key to understand the hierarchical neural coding and computation mechanism. Thus, we examined whether the low-level adaptation influences on the high-level aftereffect by means of cross-level adaptation paradigm (i.e. color, figure adaptation versus facial identity adaptation). We measured the identity aftereffects within the real face test images on real face, color chip and figure adapting conditions. The cross-level mutual influence was evaluated by the aftereffect size among different adapting conditions. The results suggest that the adaptation to color and figure contributes to the high-level facial identity aftereffect. Besides, the real face adaptation obtained the significantly stronger aftereffect than the color chip or the figure adaptation. Our results reveal the possibility of cross-level adaptation propagation and implicitly indicate a high-level holistic facial neural representation. Based on these results, we discussed the theoretical implication of cross-level adaptation propagation for understanding the hierarchical sensory neural systems.

In text-independent online writer identification, the Gaussian Mixture Model(GMM) writer model trained with the GMM-Universal Background Model(GMM-UBM) framework has acquired excellent performance. However, the system assumes the items in the observation sequence are independent, which neglects the dynamic information between observations. This work shows that although in the text-independent application, the dynamic information between observations is still important for writer identification. In order to extend the GMM-UBM system to use the dynamic information, the hidden Markov model(HMM) with Gaussian observation model is used to model each writer's handwriting in this paper and a new training schematic is proposed. In particular, the observation model parameters of the writer specific HMM are set with the Gaussian component parameters of the GMM writer model trained with the GMM-UBM framework and the state transition matrix parameters are learned from the writer specific data. Experiments show that incorporating the dynamic information is capable of improving the performance of the GMM-based system and the proposed training method is effective for learning the HMM writer model.

As the basis of fine breeding management and animal husbandry insurance, individual recognition of dairy cattle is an important issue in the animal husbandry management field. Due to the limitations of the traditional method of cow identification, such as being easy to drop and falsify, it can no longer meet the needs of modern intelligent pasture management. In recent years, with the rise of computer vision technology, deep learning has developed rapidly in the field of face recognition. The recognition accuracy has surpassed the level of human face recognition and has been widely used in the production environment. However, research on the facial recognition of large livestock, such as dairy cattle, needs to be developed and improved. According to the idea of a residual network, an improved convolutional neural network (Res_5_2Net) method for individual dairy cow recognition is proposed based on dairy cow facial images in this letter. The recognition accuracy on our self-built cow face database (3012 training sets, 1536 test sets) can reach 94.53%. The experimental results show that the efficiency of identification of dairy cows is effectively improved.

Reversible data hiding has been a hot research topic since both the host media and hidden data can be recovered without distortion. In the past several years, more and more attention has been paid to reversible data hiding schemes for images in compressed formats such as JPEG, JPEG2000, Vector Quantization (VQ) and Block Truncation Coding (BTC). Traditional data hiding schemes in the BTC domain modify the BTC encoding stage or BTC-compressed data according to the secret bits, and they have no ability to reduce the bit rate but may reduce the image quality. This paper presents a novel reversible data hiding scheme for BTC-compressed images by further losslessly encoding the BTC-compressed data according to the secret bits. First, the original BTC technique is performed on the original image to obtain the BTC-compressed data which can be represented by a high mean table, a low mean table and a bitplane sequence. Then, the proposed reversible data hiding scheme is performed on both the high mean table and low mean table. Our hiding scheme is a lossless joint hiding and compression method based on 22 blocks in mean tables, thus it can not only hide data in mean tables but also reduce the bit rate. Experiments show that our scheme outperforms three existing BTC-based data hiding works, in terms of the bit rate, capacity and efficiency.

The aim of this study is to improve the accuracy of flicker parameters estimation in old film sequences in which moving objects are present. Conventional methods tend to fail in flicker parameters estimation due to the effects of moving objects. Our proposed method firstly utilizes an adaptive Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based method to detect the moving objects in the film sequences, and combines the detected results with the histogram-matched frames to generate reference frames for flicker parameters estimation. Then, on the basis of a linear flicker model, the proposed method uses an M-estimator with the reference frames to estimate the flicker parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy of flicker parameters estimation when the moving objects are present in the film sequences.

This paper presents a faster one-dimensional (1-D) phase-only correlation (POC)-based method for estimations of translations, rotation, and scaling in images. The proposed method is to project two-dimensional (2-D) images horizontally and vertically onto 1-D signals, and uses 1-D POCs of the 1-D signals to estimate the translations in images. Combined with a log-polar transform, the proposed method is extended to scaling and rotation estimations. Compared with conventional 2-D and 1-D POC-based methods, the proposed method performs in a lower computational cost. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of estimating large translations, rotation and scaling in images, and its accuracy is comparable to those of the conventional POC-based methods. The experimental results also show that the computational cost of the proposed method is much lower than those of the conventional POC-based methods.

Network tomography is an appealing technology to infer link delay distributions since it only relies on end-to-end measurements. However, most approaches in network delay tomography are usually computationally intractable. In this letter, we propose a Fast link Delay distribution Inference algorithm (FDI). It estimates the node cumulative delay distributions by explicit computations based on a subtree-partitioning technique, and then derives the individual link delay distributions from the estimated cumulative delay distributions. Furthermore, a novel discrete delay model where each link has a different bin size is proposed to efficiently capture the essential characteristics of the link delay. Combining with the variable bin size model, FDI can identify the characteristics of the network-internal link delay quickly and accurately. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our method.

By using a strong oxidizing agent in liquid phase, more than 7 nm-thick silicon dioxide has been grown thermally in a single-crystal silicon substrate at 252 within 8 hrs under normal-pressure conditions. The oxidation characteristics have been presented. Its application to amorphous silicon MOS transistors has been also described. The field-effect mobility of the transistor was more than 0.22 cm2/Vs.

Recently, proportionate adaptive algorithms have been proposed to speed up convergence in the identification of sparse impulse response. Although they can improve convergence for sparse impulse responses, the steady-state misalignment is limited by the constant step-size parameter. In this article, based on the principle of least perturbation, we first present a derivation of normalized version of proportionate algorithms. Then by taking the disturbance signal into account, we propose a variable step-size proportionate NLMS algorithm to combine the benefits of both variable step-size algorithms and proportionate algorithms. The proposed approach can achieve fast convergence with a large step size when the identification error is large, and then considerably decrease the steady-state misalignment with a small step size after the adaptive filter reaches a certain degree of convergence. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In this paper, an effective per-antenna successive signal-to-leakage-plus-noise-ratio (PA-SSLNR) based precoding is proposed for multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel. The signal-to-leakage-plus-noise-ratio (SLNR) of per-antenna is calculated only using the unknown leakages and the known leakages are cancelled at the transmit side by Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP). The proposed scheme is different from per-user SSLNR. It does not need QR decomposition. The proposed precoding scheme is further improved by ordering antennas. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes exhibit a considerable bit error rate (BER) improvement over conventional SLNR scheme.