In this letter, we propose a color quantization method based on saliency. In the proposed method, the salient colors are selected as representative colors preferentially by using saliency as weights. Through experiments, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, a balance operation Transimpedance Amplifier (TIA) with low-noise has been implemented for optical receivers in 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS Technology, in which the optimal tradeoff emitter current density and the location of high-frequency noise corner were analyzed for acquiring low-noise performance. The Auto-Zero Feedback Loop (AZFL) without introducing unnecessary noises at input of the TIA, the tail current sink with high symmetries and the balance operation TIA with the shared output of Operational Amplifier (OpAmp) in AZFL were designed to keep balanced operation for the TIA. Moreover, cascode and shunt-feedback were also employed to expanding bandwidth and decreasing input referred noise. Besides, the formula for calculating high-frequency noise corner in Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor (HBT) TIA with shunt-feedback was derived. The electrical measurement was performed to validate the notions described in this work, appearing 9.6 pA/√Hz of input referred noise current Power Spectral Density (PSD), balance operation (VIN1=896mV, VIN2=896mV, VOUT1=1.978V, VOUT2=1.979V), bandwidth of 32GHz, overall transimpedance gain of 68.6dBΩ, a total 117mW power consumption and chip area of 484µm × 486µm.

In this paper, we propose four optimization methods during the Register Transfer Level (RTL) conversion from synchronous RTL models into asynchronous RTL models. The modularization of data-path resources and the use of appropriate D flip-flops reduce the circuit area. Fixing the control signal of the multiplexers and inserting latches for the data-path resources reduce the dynamic power consumption. In the experiment, we evaluated the effect of the proposed optimization methods. The combination of all optimization methods could reduce the energy consumption by 21.9% on average compared to the ones without the proposed optimization methods.

Multiscale retinex is one of the most popular image enhancement methods. However, its control parameters, such as Gaussian kernel sizes, gain, and offset, should be tuned carefully according to the image contents. In this letter, we propose a new method that optimizes the parameters using practical swarm optimization and multi-objective function. The method iteratively verifies the visual quality (i.e. brightness, contrast, and colorfulness) of the enhanced image using a multi-objective function while subtly adjusting the parameters. Experimental results shows that the proposed method achieves better image quality qualitatively and quantitatively compared with other image enhancement methods.

In an internet of things (IoT) system using an energy harvesting device and a secondary (2nd) battery, regardless of the age of the 2nd battery, the power management shortens the lifespan of the entire system. In this paper, we propose a scheme that extends the lifetime of the energy harvesting-based IoT system equipped with a Lithium 2nd battery. The proposed scheme includes several policies of using a supercapacitor as a primary energy storage, limiting the charging level according to the predicted harvesting energy, swinging the energy level around the minimum stress state of charge (SOC) level, and delaying the charge start time. Experiments with natural solar energy measurements based on a battery aging approximation model show that the proposed method can extend the operation lifetime of an existing IoT system from less than one and a half year to more than four years.

This paper investigates the resource allocation problem for the downlink of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. A novel resource allocation method is proposed to deal with the problem of maximizing the system capacity while taking into account user fairness. Since the optimization problem is nonconvex and intractable, we adopt the idea of step-by-step optimization, decomposing it into user pairing, subchannel and power allocation subproblems. First, all users are paired according to their different channel gains. Then, the subchannel allocation is executed by the proposed subchannel selection algorithm (SSA) based on channel priority. Once the subchannel allocation is fixed, to further improve the system capacity, the subchannel power allocation is implemented by the successive convex approximation (SCA) approach where the nonconvex optimization problem is transformed into the approximated convex optimization problem in each iteration. To ensure user fairness, the upper and lower bounds of the power allocation coefficients are derived and combined by introducing the tuning coefficients. The power allocation coefficients are dynamically adjustable by adjusting the tuning coefficients, thus the diversified quality of service (QoS) requirements can be satisfied. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the existing methods in terms of system performance, furthermore, a good tradeoff between the system capacity and user fairness can be achieved.

Random network topologies have been proposed as a low-latency network for parallel computers. Although multicast is a common collective-communication operation, multicast algorithms each of which consists of a large number of unicasts are not well optimized for random network topologies. In this study, we firstly apply a two-opt algorithm for building efficient multicast on random network topologies. The two-opt algorithm creates a skilled ordered list of visiting nodes to minimize the total path hops or the total possible contention counts of unicasts that form the target multicast. We secondly extend to apply the two-opt algorithm for the other collective-communication operations, e.g., allreduce and allgather. The SimGrid discrete-event simulation results show that the two-opt multicast outperforms that in typical MPI implementation by up to 22% of the execution time of an MPI program that repeats the MPI_Bcast function. The two-opt allreduce and the two-opt allgather operations also improve by up to 15% and 14% the execution time when compared to those used in typical MPI implementations, respectively.

Multi-time negotiation which repeats negotiations many times under the same conditions is an important class of automated negotiation. We propose a meta-strategy that selects an agent's individual negotiation strategy for multi-time negotiation. Because the performance of the negotiating agents depends on situational parameters, such as the negotiation domains and the opponents, a suitable and effective individual strategy should be selected according to the negotiation situation. However, most existing agents negotiate based on only one negotiation policy: one bidding strategy, one acceptance strategy, and one opponent modeling method. Although the existing agents effectively negotiate in most situations, they do not work well in particular situations and their utilities are decreased. The proposed meta-strategy provides an effective negotiation strategy for the situation at the beginning of the negotiation. We model the meta-strategy as a multi-armed bandit problem that regards an individual negotiation strategy as a slot machine and utility of the agent as a reward. We implement the meta-strategy as the negotiating agents that use existing effective agents as the individual strategies. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our meta-strategy under various negotiation conditions. Additionally, the results indicate that the individual utilities of negotiating agents are influenced by the opponents' strategies, the profiles of the opponent and its own profiles.

With the rapid development of multimedia, violent video can be easily accessed in games, movies, websites, and so on. Identifying violent videos and rating violence extent is of great importance to media filtering and children protection. Many previous studies only address the problems of violence scene detection and violent action recognition, yet violence rating problem is still not solved. In this paper, we present a novel video-level rating prediction method to estimate violence extent automatically. It has two main characteristics: (1) a two-stream network is fine-tuned to construct effective representations of violent videos; (2) a violence rating prediction machine is designed to learn the strength relationship among different videos. Furthermore, we present a novel violent video dataset with a total of 1,930 human-involved violent videos designed for violence rating analysis. Each video is annotated with 6 fine-grained objective attributes, which are considered to be closely related to violence extent. The ground-truth of violence rating is given by pairwise comparison method. The dataset is evaluated in both stability and convergence. Experiment results on this dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared with the state-of-art classification methods.

Recently, visual trackers based on the framework of kernelized correlation filter (KCF) achieve the robustness and accuracy results. These trackers need to learn information on the object from each frame, thus the state change of the object affects the tracking performances. In order to deal with the state change, we propose a novel KCF tracker using the filter response map, namely a confidence map, and adaptive model. This method firstly takes a skipped scale pool method which utilizes variable window size at every two frames. Secondly, the location of the object is estimated using the combination of the filter response and the similarity of the luminance histogram at multiple points in the confidence map. Moreover, we use the re-detection of the multiple peaks of the confidence map to prevent the target drift and reduce the influence of illumination. Thirdly, the learning rate to obtain the model of the object is adjusted, using the filter response and the similarity of the luminance histogram, considering the state of the object. Experimentally, the proposed tracker (CFCA) achieves outstanding performance for the challenging benchmark sequence (OTB2013 and OTB2015).

Since wild animals are causing more accidents and damages, it is important to safely detect them as early as possible. In this paper, we propose two battery-powered wild animal detection nodes based on deep learning that can automatically detect wild animals; the detection information is notified to the people concerned immediately. To use the proposed nodes outdoors where power is not available, we devise power saving techniques for the proposed nodes. For example, deep learning is used to save power by avoiding operations when wild animals are not detected. We evaluate the operation time and the power consumption of the proposed nodes. Then, we evaluate the energy consumption of the proposed nodes. Also, we evaluate the detection range of the proposed nodes, the accuracy of deep learning, and the success rate of communication through field tests to demonstrate that the proposed nodes can be used to detect wild animals outdoors.

In this paper, we propose L0 norm optimization in a scrambled sparse representation domain and its application to an Encryption-then-Compression (EtC) system. We design a random unitary transform that conserves L0 norm isometry. The resulting encryption method provides a practical orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm that allows computation in the encrypted domain. We prove that the proposed method theoretically has exactly the same estimation performance as the nonencrypted variant of the OMP algorithm. In addition, we demonstrate the security strength of the proposed secure sparse representation when applied to the EtC system. Even if the dictionary information is leaked, the proposed scheme protects the privacy information of observed signals.

Computer aided design (CAD) technology is widely used for architectural design, but current CAD tools still require high-level design specifications from human. It would be significant to construct an intelligent CAD system allowing automatic architectural layout parsing (AutoALP), which generates candidate designs or predicts architectural attributes without much user intervention. To tackle these problems, many learning-based methods were proposed, and benchmark dataset become one of the essential elements for the data-driven AutoALP. This paper proposes a new dataset called SCUT-AutoALP for multi-paradigm applications. It contains two subsets: 1) Subset-I is for floor plan design containing 300 residential floor plan images with layout, boundary and attribute labels; 2) Subset-II is for urban plan design containing 302 campus plan images with layout, boundary and attribute labels. We analyzed the samples and labels statistically, and evaluated SCUT-AutoALP for different layout parsing tasks of floor plan/urban plan based on conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN) models. The results verify the effectiveness and indicate the potential applications of SCUT-AutoALP. The dataset is available at https://github.com/designfuturelab702/SCUT-AutoALP-Database-Release.

Network throughput has become an important issue for big-data analysis on Warehouse-Scale Computing (WSC) systems. It has been reported that randomly-connected inter-switch networks can enlarge the network throughput. For irregular networks, a multi-path routing method called k-shortest path routing is conventionally utilized. However, it cannot efficiently exploit longer-than-shortest paths that would be detour paths to avoid bottlenecks. In this work, a novel routing method called k-optimized path routing to achieve high throughput is proposed for irregular networks. We introduce a heuristic to select detour paths that can avoid bottlenecks in the network to improve the average-case network throughput. Experimental results by network simulation show that the proposed k-optimized path routing can improve the saturation throughput by up to 18.2% compared to the conventional k-shortest path routing. Moreover, it can reduce the computation time required for optimization to 1/2760 at a minimum compared to our previously proposed method.

A simple depth-key-based image composition is proposed, which uses two still images with depth information, background and foreground object. The proposed method can place the object at various locations in the background considering the depth in the 3D world coordinate system. The main feature is that a simple algorithm is provided, which enables us to achieve the depthward movement within the camera plane, without being aware of the 3D world coordinate system. Two algorithms are proposed (P-OMDD and O-OMDD), which are based on the pin-hole camera model. As an advantage, camera calibration is not required before applying the algorithm in these methods. Since a single image is used for the object representation, each of the proposed methods has its limitations in terms of fidelity of the composite image. P-OMDD faithfully reproduces the angle at which the object is seen, but the pixels of the hidden surface are missing. On the contrary, O-OMDD can avoid the hidden surface problem, but the angle of the object is fixed, wherever it moves. It is verified through several experiments that, when using O-OMDD, subjectively natural composite images can be obtained under any object movement, in terms of size and position in the camera plane. Future tasks include improving the change in illumination due to positional changes and the partial loss of objects due to noise in depth images.

Silver electrical contacts were separated at constant opening speed in a 200V-500VDC/10A resistive circuit. Break arcs were extinguished by magnetic blowing-out with transverse magnetic field of a permanent magnet. The permanent magnet was appropriately located to simplify the lengthened shape of the break arcs. Magnetic flux density of the transverse magnetic field was varied from 20 to 140mT. Images of the break arcs were observed from the horizontal and vertical directions using two high speed cameras simultaneously. Arc length just before extinction was analyzed from the observed images. It was shown that shapes of the break arcs were simple enough to trace the most part of paths of the break arcs for all experimental conditions owing to simplification of the shapes of the break arcs by appropriate arrangement of the magnet. The arc length increased with increasing supply voltage and decreased with increasing magnetic flux density. These results will be discussed in the view points of arc lengthening time and arc lengthening velocity.

In this paper, we propose a design method to design asynchronous circuits with bundled-data implementation on commercial Field Programmable Gate Arrays using placement constraints. The proposed method uses two types of placement constraints to reduce the number of delay adjustments to fix timing violations and to improve the performance of the bundled-data implementation. We also propose a floorplan algorithm to reduce the control-path delays specific to the bundled-data implementation. Using the proposed method, we could design the asynchronous circuits whose performance is close to and energy consumption is small compared to the synchronous counterparts with less delay adjustment.

Machine learning models inherently memorize significant amounts of information, and thus hiding not only prediction processes but also trained models, i.e., model obliviousness, is desirable in the cloud setting. Several works achieved model obliviousness with the MNIST dataset, but datasets that include complicated samples, e.g., CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, are also used in actual applications, such as face recognition. Secret sharing-based secure prediction for CIFAR-10 is difficult to achieve. When a deep layer architecture such as CNN is used, the calculation error when performing secret calculation becomes large and the accuracy deteriorates. In addition, if detailed calculations are performed to improve accuracy, a large amount of calculation is required. Therefore, even if the conventional method is applied to CNN as it is, good results as described in the paper cannot be obtained. In this paper, we propose two approaches to solve this problem. Firstly, we propose a new protocol named Batch-normalizedActivation that combines BatchNormalization and Activation. Since BatchNormalization includes real number operations, when performing secret calculation, parameters must be converted into integers, which causes a calculation error and decrease accuracy. By using our protocol, calculation errors can be eliminated, and accuracy degradation can be eliminated. Further, the processing is simplified, and the amount of calculation is reduced. Secondly, we explore a secret computation friendly and high accuracy architecture. Related works use a low-accuracy, simple architecture, but in reality, a high accuracy architecture should be used. Therefore, we also explored a high accuracy architecture for the CIFAR10 dataset. Our proposed protocol can compute prediction of CIFAR-10 within 15.05 seconds with 87.36% accuracy while providing model obliviousness.

Stochastic computing (SC), which is an approximate computation with probabilities, has attracted attention owing to its small area, small power consumption and high fault tolerance. In this paper, we focus on the transient fault tolerance of SC based on linear finite state machines (linear FSMs). We show that state assignment of FSMs considerably affects the fault tolerance of linear FSM-based SC circuits, and present a Markov model for representing the impact of the state assignment on the behavior of faulty FSMs and estimating the expected error significance of the faulty FSM-based SC circuits. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic algorithm for appropriate state assignment that can mitigate the influence of transient faults. Experimental analysis shows that the state assignment has an impact on the transient fault tolerance of linear FSM-based SC circuits and the proposed state assignment algorithm can achieve a quasi-optimal state assignment in terms of high fault tolerance.

In a multiple-user MIMO system in which numerous users simultaneously communicate in a cell, the channel matrix properties depend on the parameters of the individual users in such a way that they can be modeled as points randomly moving within the cell. Although these properties can be simulated by computer, they need to be expressed analytically to develop MIMO systems with diversity. Given a small area with an equivalent multi-path, we assume that a user u is at a certain “user point” $P^u(lambda _p^u,xi _p^u)$ in a cell, or (radius $lambda _p^u$ from origin, angle $xi _p^u)$ and that the user moves with movement $M^u(f_{max}^u, xi_v^u)$ around that point, or (Doppler frequency $f_{max}^u$, direction $xi_v^u$). The MU-MIMO channel model consists of a multipath environment, user parameters, and antenna configuration. A general formula of the correlation $ ho_{i - j,i' - j'}^{u - u'} (bm)$ between the channel matrix elements of users u and u' and one for given multipath conditions are derived. As a feature of the MU-MIMO channel, the movement factor $F^{u - u'}(gamma^u,xi_n ,xi_v^u)$, which means a fall coefficient of the spatial correlation calculated from only the user points of u and u', is also derived. As the difference in speed or direction between u and u' increases, $F^{u - u'}(gamma^u,xi_n ,xi_v^u)$ becomes smaller. Consequently, even if the path is LOS, $ ho_{i - j,i' - j'}^{u - u'} (bm)$ becomes low enough owing to the movement factor, even though the correlation in the single-user MIMO channel is high. If the parameters of u and u' are the same, the factor equals 1, and the channels correspond to the users' own channels and work like SU-MIMO channel. These analytical findings are verified by computer simulation.