In this paper, we study simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in two-way relay channels where two users exchange information with each other via a multi-antenna relay node. The signals forwarded by the relay node are also used to supply the power to two users. We formulate a max-min optimization problem aiming to maximize the minimum harvested energy between two users to achieve fairness. We jointly optimize the relay beamforming matrix and allocating powers at the two users subject to the quality of service (QoS) constraints. To be specific, we consider the amplify-and-forward (AF) relay strategy and the time splitting SWIPT strategy. To this end, we propose two different time splitting protocols to enable relay to supply power to two users. To solve the non-convex joint optimization problem, we propose to split the original optimization problem into two subproblems and solving them iteratively to obtain the final solution. It is shown that the first subproblem dealing with the beamforming matrix can be optimally solved by using the technique of relaxed semidefinite programming (SDR), and the second subproblem, which deals with the power allocation, can be solved via linear programming. The performance comparison of two schemes as well as the one-way relaying scheme are provided and the effectiveness of the proposed schemes is verified.

In this paper, we consider Bayesian image denoising based on a Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF) model, for which we propose an new algorithm. Our method can solve Bayesian image denoising problems, including hyperparameter estimation, in O(n)-time, where n is the number of pixels in a given image. From the perspective of the order of the computational time, this is a state-of-the-art algorithm for the present problem setting. Moreover, the results of our numerical experiments we show our method is in fact effective in practice.

Operations, such as text entry and zooming, are simple and frequently used on mobile touch devices. However, these operations are far from being perfectly supported. In this paper, we present our prototype, BackAssist, which takes advantage of back-of-device input to augment front-of-device touch interaction. Furthermore, we present the results of a user study to evaluate whether users can master the back-of-device control of BackAssist or not. The results show that the back-of-device control can be easily grasped and used by ordinary smart phone users. Finally, we present two BackAssist supported applications - a virtual keyboard application and a map application. Users who tried out the two applications give positive feedback to the BackAssist supported augmentation.

Automatic detection of heart cycle abnormalities in a long duration of ECG data is a crucial technique for diagnosing an early stage of heart diseases. Concretely, Paroxysmal stage of Atrial Fibrillation rhythms (ParAF) must be discriminated from Normal Sinus rhythms (NS). The both of waveforms in ECG data are very similar, and thus it is difficult to completely detect the Paroxysmal stage of Atrial Fibrillation rhythms. Previous studies have tried to solve this issue and some of them achieved the discrimination with a high degree of accuracy. However, the accuracies of them do not reach 100%. In addition, no research has achieved it in a long duration, e.g. 12 hours, of ECG data. In this study, a new mechanism to tackle with these issues is proposed: “Door-to-Door” algorithm is introduced to accurately and quickly detect significant peaks of heart cycle in 12 hours of ECG data and to discriminate obvious ParAF rhythms from NS rhythms. In addition, a quantitative method using Artificial Neural Network (ANN), which discriminates unobvious ParAF rhythms from NS rhythms, is investigated. As the result of Door-to-Door algorithm performance evaluation, it was revealed that Door-to-Door algorithm achieves the accuracy of 100% in detecting the significant peaks of heart cycle in 17 NS ECG data. In addition, it was verified that ANN-based method achieves the accuracy of 100% in discriminating the Paroxysmal stage of 15 Atrial Fibrillation data from 17 NS data. Furthermore, it was confirmed that the computational time to perform the proposed mechanism is less than the half of the previous study. From these achievements, it is concluded that the proposed mechanism can practically be used to diagnose early stage of heart diseases.

We measured head and eye movements while subjects viewed 4K high-definition images to clarify the influence of different viewing positions. Subjects viewed three images from nine viewing positions: three viewing distances x three viewing positions. Though heads rotated toward the center irrespective of viewing screen positions, they also tended to turn straight forward as the viewing distance became close to an image.

By interleaving known Z-periodic complementary (ZPC) sequence set, a new ZPC sequence set is constructed with multiple ZPC sequence subsets based on an orthogonal matrix in this work. For this novel ZPC sequence set, which refer to as asymmetric ZPC (AZPC) sequence set, its inter-subset zero cross-correlation zone (ZCCZ) is larger than intra-subset zero correlation zone (ZCZ). In particular, if select a periodic perfect complementary (PC) sequence or PC sequence set and a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) matrix, the resultant sequence set is an inter-group complementary (IGC) sequence set. When a suitable shift sequence is chosen, the obtained IGC sequence set will be optimal in terms of the corresponding theoretical bound. Compared with the existing constructions of IGC sequence sets, the proposed method can provide not only flexible ZCZ width but also flexible choice of basic sequences, which works well in both synchronous and asynchronous operational modes. The proposed AZPC sequence sets are suitable for multiuser environments.

This paper derives highly accurate and effective closed-form formulas for the average upper bound on the pairwise error probability (PEP) of the multi-carrier index keying orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MCIK-OFDM) system with low-complexity detection (i.e., greedy detection) in two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP) fading channels. To be specific, we utilize an exact moment generating function (MGF) of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) under TWDP fading to guarantee highly precise investigations of error probability performance; existing formulas for average PEP employ the approximate probability density function (PDF) of the SNR for TWDP fading, thereby inducing inherent approximation error. Moreover, some special cases of TWDP fading are also considered. To quantitatively reveal the achievable modulation gain and diversity order, we further derive asymptotic formulas for the upper bound on the average PEP. The obtained asymptotic expressions can be used to rapidly estimate the achievable error performance of MCIK-OFDM with the greedy detection over TWDP fading in high SNR regimes.

Most people are concerned about their appearance, and the easiest way to change the appearance is to change the hairstyle. However, except for professional hairstylists, it is difficult to objectively judge which hairstyle suits them. Currently, oval faces are generally said to be the ideal facial shape in terms of suitability to various hairstyles. Meanwhile, field of visual perception (FVP), proposed recently in the field of cognitive science, has attracted attention as a model to represent the visual perception phenomenon. Moreover, a computation model for digital images has been proposed, and it is expected to be used in quantitative evaluation of sensibility and sensitivity called “kansei.” Quantitative evaluation of “goodness of patterns” and “strength of impressions” by evaluating distributions of the field has been reported. However, it is unknown whether the evaluation method can be generalized for use in various subjects, because it has been applied only to some research subjects, such as characters, text, and simple graphics. In this study, for the first time, we apply FVP to facial images with various hairstyles and verify whether it has the potential of evaluating impressions of female faces. Specifically, we verify whether the impressions of facial images that combine various facial shapes and female hairstyles can be represented using FVP. We prepare many combinational images of facial shapes and hairstyles and conduct a psychological experiment to evaluate their impressions. Moreover, we compute the FVP of each image and propose a novel evaluation method by analyzing the distributions. The conventional and proposed evaluation values correlated to the psychological evaluation values after normalization, and demonstrated the effectiveness of the FVP as an image feature quantity to evaluate faces.

In this paper, we propose a boundary-aware superpixel segmentation method, which could quickly and exactly extract superpixel with a non-iteration framework. The basic idea is to construct a minimum spanning tree (MST) based on structure edge to measure the local similarity among pixels, and then label each pixel as the index with shortest path seeds. Intuitively, we first construct MST on the original pixels with boundary feature to calculate the similarity of adjacent pixels. Then the geodesic distance between pixels can be exactly obtained based on two-round tree recursions. We determinate pixel label as the shortest path seed index. Experimental results on BSD500 segmentation benchmark demonstrate the proposed method obtains best performance compared with seven state-of-the-art methods. Especially for the low density situation, our method can obtain the boundary-aware oversegmentation region.

In this letter, we propose a solution for managing multiple adaptive streaming clients running on different devices in a wireless home network. Our solution consists of two main aspects: a manager that determines bandwidth allocated for each client and a client-based throughput control mechanism that regulates the video traffic throughput of each client. The experimental results using a real test-bed show that our solution is able to effectively improve the quality for concurrent streaming clients.

This paper proposes route advertisement policies (RAP) and an inbound traffic engineering (ITE) technique for a multihomed autonomous system (AS) employing the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and provider aggregatable (PA) addressing. The proposed RAP avail the advantage of address aggregation benefit of PA addressing. If multiple address spaces are allocated to each of the ASes that are multihomed to multiple upstream ASes, reduction of the forwarding information base (FIB) and quick convergence are achieved. However, multihoming based on PA addressing raises two issues. First, more specific address information is hidden due to address aggregation. Second, multiple allocated address spaces per AS does not provide the capability of ITE. To cope with these two limitations, we propose i) RAP to ensure connectivity among ASes with fewer routes installed in the FIB of each top-tier AS, and ii) an ITE technique to control inbound routes into multihomed ASes. Our ITE technique does not increase the RIB and FIB sizes in the Internet core. We implement the proposed RAP in an emulation environment with BGP using the Quagga software suite and our developed Hierarchical Automatic Number Allocation (HANA) protocols. We use HANA as a tool to automatically allocate hierarchical PA addresses to ASes. We confirm that with our proposed policies the FIB and RIB (routing information base) sizes in tier-1 ASes do not change with the increase of tier-3 ASes, and the number of BGP update messages exchanged is reduced by up to 69.9% from that achieved with conventional BGP RAP. We also confirmed that our proposed ITE technique, based on selective prefix advertisement, can indeed control inbound traffic into a multihomed AS employing PA addressing.

This paper discusses the effect of pre-grouping on vector classification based on the self-organizing map (SOM). The SOM is an unsupervised learning neural network, and is used to form clusters of vectors using its topology preserving nature. The use of SOMs for practical applications, however, may pose difficulties in achieving high recognition accuracy. For example, in image recognition, the accuracy is degraded due to the variation of lighting conditions. This paper considers the effect of pre-grouping of feature vectors on such types of applications. The proposed pre-grouping functionality is also based on the SOM and introduced into a new parallel configuration of the previously proposed SOM-Hebb classifers. The overall system is implemented and applied to position identification from images obtained in indoor and outdoor settings. The system first performs the grouping of images according to the rough representation of the brightness profile of images, and then assigns each SOM-Hebb classifier in the parallel configuration to one of the groups. Recognition parameters of each classifier are tuned for the vectors belonging to its group. Comparison between the recognition systems with and without the grouping shows that the grouping can improve recognition accuracy.

Stereoscopic vision technology is applied in a wide range of fields, from 3D movies to medical care. Stereoscopic vision makes it possible to observe images in parallax between both eyes. However, parallax images cannot be used all the time due to a situation called “occlusion”, in which an object is hidden in the depths by another object. In this case, different images are projected on the right and left retina. Here, we propose a psychology experiment to elucidate the function of parvocellular cells in the LGN of the visual cortex of the brain using occlusion perception. As a new psychology experiment to clarify whether parvocellular cells in the LGN of the visual cortex, said to process chromatic and luminance information, can detect a disagreement between the retinal images produced by each eye, we measured convergence eye movement when gazing at the rim of a column under occlusion using an equiluminance random dot pattern. When eye movement prevented the disagreement of the retinal images caused by occlusion, we thought that convergence eye movement to move both eyes in front of the rim or divergence eye movement to move them behind the rim would occur. In other words, we thought that we could clarify whether there was parvocellular system process agreement or disagreement between the right and left retinal images under equiluminance. Therefore, we examined whether a system to detect disagreement between the retinal images exists in the brain when gazing at the rim of a column onto which an equiluminance random dot texture was mapped. Results suggested that the mechanism to avoid disagreement between the retinal images of the eyes caused by occlusion occurs in the parvocellular cells, which mainly process color information, as well as in the magnocellular cells, which process binocular disparity.

In this paper, we present a hybrid message logging protocol consisting of three modules for two-level hierarchical and distributed architectures to address the drawbacks of sender-based message logging. The first module reduces the number of in-group control messages and, the rest, the number of inter-group control messages while localizing recovery. In addition, it can distribute the load of logging and keeping inter-group messages to group members as evenly as possible. The simulation results show the proposed protocol considerably outperforms the traditional protocol in terms of message logging overhead and scalability.

In this research, we propose an effective stability analysis method to impacting systems with periodically moving borders (periodic borders). First, we describe an n-dimensional impacting system with periodic borders. Subsequently, we present an algorithm based on a stability analysis method using the monodromy matrix for calculating stability of the waveform. This approach requires the state-transition matrix be related to the impact phenomenon, which is known as the saltation matrix. In an earlier study, the expression for the saltation matrix was derived assuming a static border (fixed border). In this research, we derive an expression for the saltation matrix for a periodic border. We confirm the performance of the proposed method, which is also applicable to systems with fixed borders, by applying it to an impacting system with a periodic border. Using this approach, we analyze the bifurcation of an impacting system with a periodic border by computing the evolution of the stable and unstable periodic waveform. We demonstrate a discontinuous change of the periodic points, which occurs when a periodic point collides with a border, in the one-parameter bifurcation diagram.

Functional encryption is a new paradigm of public-key encryption that allows a user to compute f(x) on encrypted data CT(x) with a private key SKf to finely control the revealed information. Multi-input functional encryption is an important extension of (single-input) functional encryption that allows the computation f(x1,...,xn) on multiple ciphertexts CT(x1),...,CT(xn) with a private key SKf. Although multi-input functional encryption has many interesting applications like running SQL queries on encrypted database and computation on encrypted stream, current candidates are not yet practical since many of them are built on indistinguishability obfuscation. To solve this unsatisfactory situation, we show that practical two-input functional encryption schemes for inner products can be built based on bilinear maps. In this paper, we first propose a two-input functional encryption scheme for inner products in composite-order bilinear groups and prove its selective IND-security under simple assumptions. Next, we propose a two-client functional encryption scheme for inner products where each ciphertext can be associated with a time period and prove its selective IND-security. Furthermore, we show that our two-input functional encryption schemes in composite-order bilinear groups can be converted into schemes in prime-order asymmetric bilinear groups by using the asymmetric property of asymmetric bilinear groups.

Based on Bezout's theorem, the feasibility condition for interference alignment (IA) is established in a two-way small cell network where part of cells transmit in downlink while the others in uplink. Moreover, the sufficient and necessary condition for the two-way network to achieve as many degrees of freedom (DoFs) as the traditional one-way network is presented. We find that in certain cases every small cell can independently decide to work in either downlink mode or uplink mode as needed without causing performance degradation of IA.

We consider a physical-layer network coding (PNC) scheme based on M-ary continuous phase frequency shift keying (M-CPFSK) modulation for a bidirectional relay network. In this scheme, the maximum-likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) algorithm for the relay receiver over Rayleigh fading channels is discussed. Moreover, an upper bound on the minimum Euclidean distance for the superimposed signals is analyzed and the corresponding lower bound for the average symbol error rate (SER) at the relay is derived. Numerical results are also sustained by simulations which corroborate the exactness of the theoretical analysis.

In this letter, we present a new expression of ergodic capacity for two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP) fading channels. The derived formula is relatively concise and consists of well-known functions even in infinite series form. Especially, the truncated approximate expression and asymptotic formula are also presented, which enable us to obtain useful and physical insights on the effect of TWDP fading on the ergodic capacity for various fading conditions.

This paper proposes a lossy image coding method for still images. In this method, recursive and non-recursive type intra prediction techniques are adaptively selected on a block-by-block basis. The recursive-type intra prediction technique applies a linear predictor to each pel within a prediction block in a recursive manner, and thus typically produces smooth image values. In this paper, the non-recursive type intra prediction technique is extended from the angular prediction technique adopted in the H.265/HEVC video coding standard to enable interpolative prediction to the maximum possible extent. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves better coding performance than the conventional method that only uses the recursive-type prediction technique.