EPCglobal architecture framework is divided into identify, capture, and share layers and defines a collection of standards. It is not fully adequate to build IoT applications because the transducer capability is lacking. IEEE 1451 is a set of standards that defines data exchange format, communication protocols, and various connection interfaces between sensors/actuators and transducer interface modules. By appending IEEE 1451 transducer capability to EPCglobal architecture framework, a consistent EPC scheme expression for heterogeneous things can be achieved at identify layer. It is benefit to extend the upper layers of EPCglobal architecture framework seamlessly. In this paper, we put our emphasis on how to leverage the transducer capability at the capture layer. A device cycle, transducer cycle specification, and transducer cycle report are introduced to collect and process sensor/actuator data. The design and implementation of GS1 EPCglobal Application Level Events (ALE) modules extension are proposed for explaining the design philosophy and verifying the feasibility. It will interact with the capture and query services of EPC Information Services (EPCIS) for IoT applications at the share layer. By cooperating and interacting with these layers of EPCglobal architecture framework, the IoT architecture EPCglobal+ based on international standards is built.

Absorption, scattering, and color distortion are three major issues in underwater optical imaging. Light rays traveling through water are scattered and absorbed according to their wavelength. Scattering is caused by large suspended particles that degrade underwater optical images. Color distortion occurs because different wavelengths are attenuated to different degrees in water; consequently, images of ambient underwater environments are dominated by a bluish tone. In the present paper, we propose a novel underwater imaging model that compensates for the attenuation discrepancy along the propagation path. In addition, we develop a fast weighted guided normalized convolution domain filtering algorithm for enhancing underwater optical images. The enhanced images are characterized by a reduced noise level, better exposure in dark regions, and improved global contrast, by which the finest details and edges are enhanced significantly.

Unsupervised spoken unit discovery or zero-source speech recognition is an emerging research topic which is important for spoken document analysis of languages or dialects with little human annotation. In this paper, we extend our earlier joint training framework for unsupervised learning of discrete density HMM to continuous density HMM (CDHMM) and apply it to spoken unit discovery. In the proposed recipe, we first cluster a group of Gaussians which then act as initializations to the joint training framework of nonnegative matrix factorization and semi-continuous density HMM (SCDHMM). In SCDHMM, all the hidden states share the same group of Gaussians but with different mixture weights. A CDHMM is subsequently constructed by tying the top-N activated Gaussians to each hidden state. Baum-Welch training is finally conducted to update the parameters of the Gaussians, mixture weights and HMM transition probabilities. Experiments were conducted on word discovery from TIDIGITS and phone discovery from TIMIT. For TIDIGITS, units were modeled by 10 states which turn out to be strongly related to words; while for TIMIT, units were modeled by 3 states which are likely to be phonemes.

Cold boot attack is a side channel attack that recovers data from memory, which persists for a short period after power is lost. In the course of this attack, the memory gradually degrades over time and only a corrupted version of the data may be available to the attacker. Recently, great efforts have been made to reconstruct the original data from a corrupted version of AES key schedules, based on the assumption that all bits in the charged states tend to decay to the ground states while no bit in the ground state ever inverts. However, in practice, there is a small number of bits flipping in the opposite direction, called reverse flipping errors. In this paper, motivated by the latest work that formulates the relations of AES key bits as a Boolean Satisfiability problem, we move one step further by taking the reverse flipping errors into consideration and employing off-the-shelf SAT and MaxSAT solvers to accomplish the recovery of AES-128 key schedules from decayed memory images. Experimental results show that, in the presence of reverse flipping errors, the MaxSAT approach enables reliable recovery of key schedules with significantly less time, compared with the SAT approach that relies on brute force search to find out the target errors. Moreover, in order to further enhance the efficiency of key recovery, we simplify the original problem by removing variables and formulas that have relatively weak relations to the whole key schedule. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved MaxSAT approach reduces the scale of the problem and recover AES key schedules more efficiently when the decay factor is relatively large.

Piccolo is a lightweight block cipher proposed by Sony Corporation in 2011. The designers showed two key modes, Piccolo-80 and Piccolo-128, which use an 80-bit secret key and a 128-bit one, respectively. Isobe and Shibutani estimated the security of Piccolo-80, and they showed that 14-round (reduced) Piccolo-80 w/o whitening keys is vulnerable against the Meet-in-the-Middle attack. The time complexity of their attack is about 273, but unfortunately it requires 264 texts, namely, the full code book. In this paper, we propose a new impossible differential attack against 14-round Piccolo-80 w/o whitening keys, and it can recover the secret key without relying on the full code book. The time complexity is 268 and it uses 262.2 distinct know plaintexts.

This paper explores the potential of pitch determination from bone conducted (BC) speech. Pitch determination from normal air conducted (AC) speech signal can not attain the expected level of accuracy for every voice and background conditions. In contrast, since BC speech is caused by the vibrations that have traveled through the vocal tract wall, it is robust against ambient conditions. Though an appropriate model of BC speech is not known, it has regular harmonic structure in the lower spectral region. Due to this lowpass nature, pitch determination from BC speech is not usually affected by the dominant first formant. Experiments conducted on simultaneously recorded AC and BC speech show that BC speech is more reliable for pitch estimation than AC speech. With little human work, pitch contour estimated from BC speech can also be used as pitch reference that can serve as an alternate to the pitch contour extracted from laryngograph output which is sometimes inconsistent with simultaneously recorded AC speech.

This paper proposes a method of watermarking for digital audio signals based on adaptive phase modulation. Audio signals are usually non-stationary, i.e., their own characteristics are time-variant. The features for watermarking are usually not selected by combining the principle of variability, which affects the performance of the whole watermarking system. The proposed method embeds a watermark into an audio signal by adaptively modulating its phase with the watermark using IIR all-pass filters. The frequency location of the pole-zero of an IIR all-pass filter that characterizes the transfer function of the filter is adapted on the basis of signal power distribution on sub-bands in a magnitude spectrum domain. The pole-zero locations are adapted so that the phase modulation produces slight distortion in watermarked signals to achieve the best sound quality. The experimental results show that the proposed method could embed inaudible watermarks into various kinds of audio signals and correctly detect watermarks without the aid of original signals. A reasonable trade-off between inaudibility and robustness could be obtained by balancing the phase modulation scheme. The proposed method can embed a watermark into audio signals up to 100 bits per second with 99% accuracy and 6 bits per second with 94.3% accuracy in the cases of no attack and attacks, respectively.

Reversible data hiding is a technique in which hidden data are embedded in host data such that the consistency of the host is perfectly preserved and its data are restored during extraction of the hidden data. In this paper, a linear prediction technique for reversible data hiding of audio waveforms is improved. The proposed variable expansion method is able to control the payload size through varying the expansion factor. The proposed technique is combined with the prediction error expansion method. Reversible embedding, perfect payload detection, and perfect recovery of the host signal are achieved for a framed audio signal. A smaller expansion factor results in a smaller payload size and less degradation in the stego audio quality. Computer simulations reveal that embedding a random-bit payload of less than 0.4 bits per sample into CD-format music signals provide stego audio with acceptable objective quality. The method is also applied to G.711 µ-law-coded speech signals. Computer simulations reveal that embedding a random-bit payload of less than 0.1 bits per sample into speech signals provide stego speech with good objective quality.

Incoming GPS signals through windows can be often observed indoors. However, conventional indoor positioning systems do not use Global Positioning System (GPS) generally because the signals may come in NLOS (Non Line of Sight). In this paper, we propose a positioning method by fingerprinting based on the incoming GPS signals.

We propose an image restoration technique that uses multiple image integration. The detail of the dark area when acquiring a dark scene is often deteriorated by sensor noise. Simple image integration inherently has the capability of reducing random noises, but it is especially insufficient in scenes that have a dark area. We introduce a novel image integration technique that optimizes the weights for the integration. We find the optimal weight map by solving a convex optimization problem for the weight optimization. Additionally, we apply the proposed weight optimization scheme to a single-image super-resolution problem, where we slightly modify the weight optimization problem to estimate the high-resolution image from a single low-resolution one. We use some of our experimental results to show that the weight optimization significantly improves the denoising and super-resolution performances.

Although many 3D structures have been solved for proteins to date, functions of some proteins remain unknown. To predict protein functions, comparison of local structures of proteins with pre-defined model structures, whose functions have been elucidated, is widely performed. For the comparison, the root mean square deviation (RMSD) has been used as a conventional index. In this work, adaptive deviation was incorporated, along with Bregmann Divergence Regularized Machine, in order to detect analogous local structures with such model structures more effectively than the conventional index.

This paper presents a design methodology for positioning sub-platform from the viewpoint of positioning for smartphone-based location-based services (LBS). To achieve this, we analyze a mechanism of positioning error generation including principles of positioning sub-systems and structure of smartphones. Specifically, we carry out the experiments of smartphone positioning performance evaluation by the smartphone basic API (Application Programming Interface) and by the wireless LAN in various environments. Then, we describe the importance of considering three layers as follows: 1) the lower layer that caused by positioning sub-systems, e.g., GPS, wireless LAN, mobile base stations, and so on; 2) the middle layer that caused by functions provided from the platform such as Android and iOS; 3) the upper layer that caused by operation algorithm of applications on the platform.

Circular Polarized Optical OFDM (CPO-OFDM) is a system that applies OFDM to optical wireless communications. This system separates OFDM signals into positive and negative signals and converts these signals into left-handed and right-handed polarization and then multiplexes the resulting polarized signals. In CPO-OFDM, the separated signals must be combined at the receiver. Then, as a noise-reduction method, the comparison method compares the signal amplitudes of the positive and negative signals and uses the signal having the larger amplitude as the received signal. However, if we use the comparison method when the received signals have background light, the combined signals are distorted. In the present paper, we herein report a method by which the receiver estimates the amplitude of the background light and then removes the background light, which is easily accomplished. Furthermore, we also report a theoretical method for analyzing the bit error rate (BER). We develop a closed form of the theoretical formula for the BER in an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. By using this formula and through numerical integration, we investigate the theoretical BER for a scintillation channel. We compare the results of the theoretical analysis with those of the simulations. As a result, the theoretical BER is generally coincident with the BER obtained through simulation. Even if we use the closed-form formula, we can derive the BER with sufficient accuracy.

This paper addresses the designability of Boolean networks, i.e., the existence of a Boolean function satisfying an attractor condition under a given network structure. In particular, we present here a necessary and sufficient condition of the designability of Boolean networks with multiple attractors. The condition is characterized by the cyclicity of network structures, which allows us to easily determine the designability.

Product packaging is a significant factor in a buyer's purchasing decision. We have developed a method for creating package images reflecting consumers' taste impressions that balances the need to provide product information and the need to motivate purchasing. It uses a database showing the correspondence between adjectives and colors as extracted from consumer reviews. This correspondence is used to revise the colors in the original package image. Evaluation was done by having 40 participants drink target beverages and answer questions before and after drinking regarding their impressions of the taste and their desire to drink the beverage. The results revealed that displaying appropriately revised images reduced the gap between the expected taste when viewing the image and the actual taste. Displaying appropriately revised images should motivate purchasing decisions as well as increase product satisfaction.

We deal with the scattering of a plane wave by the end-face of a waveguide system by the numerical method based on the sinc function and calculate the electric field on the end-face. It is shown that the results obtained analytically by the perturbation method are in relatively good agreement with the numerical results.

In this paper, a method of calculating the mean channel capacity based on S-parameter of MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) antenna is proposed. This method exploits the correlation matrix calculated from the antenna S-parameter matrix, and offers highly accurate estimates of the mean channel capacity without dependence on SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio). The numerical and experimental results revealed that the proposed method can calculate the channel capacity with fair accuracy independent of the number and spacing of the antenna elements if the radiation efficiency is sufficiently high.