Maneuvering target tracking under mixed line-of-sight/non-line-of-sight (LOS/NLOS) conditions has received considerable interest in the last decades. In this paper, a hierarchical interacting multiple model (HIMM) method is proposed for estimating target position under mixed LOS/NLOS conditions. The proposed HIMM is composed of two layers with Markov switching model. The purpose of the upper layer, which is composed of two interacting multiple model (IMM) filters in parallel, is to handle the switching between the LOS and the NLOS environments. To estimate the target kinetic variables (position, speed and acceleration), the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) with the current statistical (CS) model is used in the lower-layer. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, which obtains better tracking accuracy than the traditional IMM.

This paper introduces a simple but effective way to boost the performance of scene classification through a novel approach to the LLC coding process. In our proposed method, a local descriptor is encoded not only with k-nearest visual words but also with k-farthest visual words to produce more discriminative code. Since the proposed method is a simple modification of the image classification model, it can be easily integrated into various existing BoF models proposed in various areas, such as coding, pooling, to boost their scene classification performance. The results of experiments conducted with three scene datasets: 15-Scenes, MIT-Indoor67, and Sun367 show that adding k-farthest visual words better enhances scene classification performance than increasing the number of k-nearest visual words.

An application of laser annealing process, which is used to form the shallow P-type Base junction for 20-V planar power MOSFETs (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors) is proposed. We demonstrated that the fabricated devices integrated with laser annealing process have superior electrical characteristics than those fabricated according to the standard process. Moreover, the threshold voltage variation of the devices applied by the new annealing process is effectively suppressed. This is due to that a uniform impurity distribution at the channel region is achieved by adopting laser annealing. Laser annealing technology can be applied as a reliable, effective, and advantageous process for the low-voltage power MOSFETs.

This research develops a method for trajectory planning of robotic systems with differential constraints based on hierarchical partitioning of a continuous state space. Unlike conventional roadmaps which is constructed in the configuration space, the proposed state roadmap also includes additional state information, such as velocity and orientation. A bounded domain of the additional state is partitioned into sub-intervals with multiple resolution levels. Each node of a state roadmap consists of a fixed position and an interval of additional state values. A valid transition is defined between a pair of nodes if any combination of additional states, within their respective intervals, produces a trajectory that satisfies a set of safety constraints. In this manner, a trajectory connecting arbitrary start and goal states subject to safety constraints can be obtained by applying a graph search technique on the state roadmap. The hierarchical nature of the state roadmap reduces the computational cost of roadmap construction, the required storage size of computed roadmaps, as well as the computational cost of path planning. The state roadmap method is evaluated in the trajectory planning examples of an omni-directional mobile robot and a car-like robot with collision avoidance and various types of constraints.

This paper investigates current-gain and high-frequency characteristics of double heterojunction bipolar transistors (DHBTs) with a uniform GaAsSb, compositionally graded GaAsSb, uniform InGaAsSb, or compositionally graded InGaAsSb base. DHBTs with a compositionally graded InGaAsSb base exhibit a high current gain of ∼75 and fT=504GHz. In order to boost fmax of DHBTs with a compositionally graded InGaAsSb base, a highly doped GaAsSb base contact layer is inserted. The fabricated DHBTs exhibit fT/fmax=513/637GHz and a breakdown voltage of 5.2V.

In this work, the bias polarity dependent resistive switching behaviors in Cu/Si3N4/p+ Si RRAM memory cell have been closely studied. Different switching characteristics in both unipolar and bipolar modes after the positive forming are investigated. The bipolar switching did not need a forming process and showed better characteristics including endurance cycling, uniformity of switching parameters, and on/off resistance ratio. Also, the resistive switching characteristics by both positive and negative forming switching are compared. It has been confirmed that both unipolar and bipolar modes after the negative forming exhibits inferior resistive switching performances due to high forming voltage and current.

Layout strategies including source edge to substrate space (SESS) and inserted substrate-pick stripes of gate-grounded NMOS(ggNMOS) are optimized in this work for on-chip electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. In order to fully investigate influences of substrate resistors on triggering and conduction behaviors of ggNMOS, various devices are designed and fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process. Direct current (DC), transmission-line-pulsing (TLP), human body model (HBM) and very-fast TLP (VF-TLP) tests are executed to fully characterize performance of fabricated ggNMOS. Test results reveal that an enlarged SESS parameter results in an earlier triggering behavior of ggNMOS, which presents a layout option for subtle adjustable triggering behaviors. Besides, inserted substrate-pick stripes are proved to have a bell-shape influence on the ESD robustness of ggNMOS and this bell-shape influence is valid in TLP, HBM and VF-TLP tests. Moreover, the most ESD-robust ggNMOS optimized under different inserted substrate-pick stripes always achieves a higher HBM level over the traditional ggNMOS at each concerned total device-width. Physical mechanisms of test results will be deeply discussed in this work.

Vector data differs in the rasterized height field by data type. It is difficult to render dynamic vectors on height field because their shapes and locations may change at any time. This letter proposes a novel method: View-dependent Projective Atlases (VdPAs). As an intermediate data source, VdPAs act as rendering targets which enable height field and vectors to be rasterized at the same resolution. Then, VdPAs can be viewed as super-tiles. State of art height field rendering algorithms can be used for scenario rendering. Experimental results demonstrate that atlases are able to make dynamic vectors to be rendered on height field with real-time performance and high quality.

Flow classification is of great significance for network management. Machine-learning-based flow classification is widely used nowadays, but features which depict the non-Gaussian characteristics of network flows are still absent. In this paper, we propose the Windowed Higher-order Statistical Analysis (WHOSA) for machine-learning-based flow classification. In our methodology, a network flow is modeled as three different time series: the flow rate sequence, the packet length sequence and the inter-arrival time sequence. For each sequence, both the higher-order moments and the largest singular values of the Bispectrum are computed as features. Some lower-order statistics are also computed from the distribution to build up the feature set for contrast, and C4.5 decision tree is chosen as the classifier. The results of the experiment reveals the capability of WHOSA in flow classification. Besides, when the classifier gets fully learned, the WHOSA feature set exhibit stronger discriminative power than the lower-order statistical feature set does.

Network virtualization environments (NVEs) are emerging to meet the increasing diversity of demands by Internet users where a virtual network (VN) can be constructed to accommodate each specific application service. In the future Internet, diverse service providers (SPs) will provide application services on their own VNs running across diverse infrastructure providers (InPs) that provide physical resources in an NVE. To realize both efficient resource utilization and good QoS of each individual service in such environments, SPs should perform adaptive control on network and computational resources in dynamic and competitive resource sharing, instead of explicit and sufficient reservation of physical resources for their VNs. On the other hand, two novel concepts, software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), have emerged to facilitate the efficient use of network and computational resources, flexible provisioning, network programmability, unified management, etc., which enable us to implement adaptive resource control. In this paper, therefore, we propose an architectural design of network orchestration for enabling SPs to maintain QoS of their applications aggressively by means of resource control on their VNs efficiently, by introducing virtual network provider (VNP) between InPs and SPs as 3-tier model, and by integrating SDN and NFV functionalities into NVE framework. We define new north-bound interfaces (NBIs) for resource requests, resource upgrades, resource programming, and alert notifications while using the standard OpenFlow interfaces for resource control on users' traffic flows. The feasibility of the proposed architecture is demonstrated through network experiments using a prototype implementation and a sample application service on nation-wide testbed networks, the JGN-X and RISE.

The automatic transcription of out-of-vocabulary words into their corresponding phoneme strings has been widely adopted for speech synthesis and spoken-term detection systems. By combining various methods in order to meet the challenges of grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion, this paper proposes a phoneme transition network (PTN)-based architecture for G2P conversion. The proposed method first builds a confusion network using multiple phoneme-sequence hypotheses generated from several G2P methods. It then determines the best final-output phoneme from each block of phonemes in the generated network. Moreover, in order to extend the feasibility and improve the performance of the proposed PTN-based model, we introduce a novel use of right-to-left (reversed) grapheme-phoneme sequences along with grapheme-generation rules. Both techniques are helpful not only for minimizing the number of required methods or source models in the proposed architecture but also for increasing the number of phoneme-sequence hypotheses, without increasing the number of methods. Therefore, the techniques serve to minimize the risk from combining accurate and inaccurate methods that can readily decrease the performance of phoneme prediction. Evaluation results using various pronunciation dictionaries show that the proposed model, when trained using the reversed grapheme-phoneme sequences, often outperformed conventional left-to-right grapheme-phoneme sequences. In addition, the evaluation demonstrates that the proposed PTN-based method for G2P conversion is more accurate than all baseline approaches that were tested.

This paper claims to use a new question expansion method for question classification in cQA services. The input questions consist of only a question whereas training data do a pair of question and answer. Thus they cannot provide enough information for good classification in many cases. Since the answer is strongly associated with the input questions, we try to create a pseudo answer to expand each input question. Translation probabilities between questions and answers and a pseudo relevant feedback technique are used to generate the pseudo answer. As a result, we obtain the significant improved performances when two approaches are effectively combined.

In this letter, we propose a lattice reduction (LR) aided joint precoding design for MIMO-relay broadcast communication with the average bit error rate (BER) criterion. We jointly design the signal process flow at both the base station (BS), and the relay station (RS), using the reduced basis of two-stage channel matrices. We further modify the basic precoding design with a novel shift method and a modulo method to improve the power efficiency at the BS and the RS respectively. In addition, the MMSE-SIC algorithm is employed to improve the performance of precoding. Simulations show that, the proposed schemes achieve higher diversity order than the traditional precoding without LR, and the modified schemes significantly outperform the basic design, proving the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

In our previous work [12], [13], we introduced generalized feed-forward shift registers (GF2SR, for short) to apply them to secure and testable scan design. In this paper, we introduce another class of generalized shift registers called generalized feedback shift registers (GFSR, for short), and consider the properties of GFSR that are useful for secure scan design. We present how to control/observe GFSR to guarantee scan-in and scan-out operations that can be overlapped in the same way as the conventional scan testing. Testability and security of scan design using GFSR are considered. The cardinality of each class is clarified. We also present how to design strongly secure GFSR as well as GF2SR considered in [13].

Tor is the most popular and well-researched low-latency anonymous communication network provides sender privacy to Internet users. It also provides recipient privacy by making TCP services available through “hidden service”, which allowing users not only to access information anonymously but also to publish information anonymously. However, based on our analysis of the hidden service protocol, we found a special combination of cells, which is the basic transmission unit over Tor, transmitted during the circuit creation procedure that could be used to degrade the anonymity. In this paper, we investigate a novel protocol-feature based attack against Tor's hidden service. The main idea resides in fact that an attacker could monitor traffic and manipulate cells at the client side entry router, and an adversary at the hidden server side could cooperate to reveal the communication relationship. Compared with other existing attacks, our attack reveals the client of a hidden service and does not rely on traffic analysis or watermarking techniques. We manipulate Tor cells at the entry router to generate the protocol-feature. Once our controlled entry onion routers detect such a feature, we can confirm the IP address of the client. We implemented this attack against hidden service and conducted extensive theoretical analysis and experiments over Tor network. The experiment results validate that our attack can achieve high rate of detection rate with low false positive rate.

Ranking as an important task in information systems has many applications, such as document/webpage retrieval, collaborative filtering and advertising. The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in the study of learning to rank as a means to leverage training information in a system. In this paper, we propose a new learning to rank method, i.e. BLM-Rank, which uses a linear function to score samples and models the pairwise preference of samples relying on their scores under a Bayesian framework. A stochastic gradient approach is adopted to maximize the posterior probability in BLM-Rank. For industrial practice, we have also implemented the proposed algorithm on Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). Experimental results on LETOR have demonstrated that the proposed BLM-Rank method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, including RankSVM-Struct, RankBoost, AdaRank-NDCG, AdaRank-MAP and ListNet. Moreover, the results have shown that the GPU implementation of the BLM-Rank method is ten-to-eleven times faster than its CPU counterpart in the training phase, and one-to-four times faster in the testing phase.

Despite logic families based on floating-gate MOS (FGMOS) transistors achieve significant reductions in terms of power and transistor count, these logics have had little impact on VLSI design due to their sensitivity to noise. In order to attain robustness to this phenomenon, Positive-Feedback Floating-Gate logic (PFFGL) uses a differential architecture and positive feedback; data obtained from a 0.5µm ON Semiconductors test chip and from SPICE simulations shows PFFGL to be immune to noise from parasitic couplings as well as to leakage even when minimum device size is used.

A low-voltage controller-based all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) utilized in the medical implant communication service (MICS) frequency band was designed in this study. In the proposed design, controller-based loop topology is used to control the phase and frequency to ensure the reliable handling of the ADPLL output signal. A digitally-controlled oscillator with a delta-sigma modulator was employed to achieve high frequency resolution. The phase error was reduced by a phase selector with a 64-phase signal from the phase interpolator. Fabricated using a 130-nm CMOS process, the ADPLL has an active area of 0.64 mm2, consumes 840 µW from a 0.7-V supply voltage, and has a settling time of 80 µs. The phase noise was measured to be -114 dBc/Hz at an offset frequency of 200 kHz.