Face verification in the presence of age progression is an important problem that has not been widely addressed. Despite appearance changes for same person due to aging, they are more similar compared to facial images from different individuals. Hence, we design common and adapted vocabularies, where common vocabulary describes contents of general population and adapted vocabulary represents specific characteristics of one of image facial pairs. And the other image is characterized with a concatenation histogram of common and adapted visual words counts, termed as “age-invariant distinctive representation”. The representation describes whether the image content is best modeled by the common vocabulary or the corresponding adapted vocabulary, which is further used to accomplish the face verification. The proposed approach is tested on the FGnet dataset and a collection of real-world facial images from identification card. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for verification of identity at a modest computational cost.

This paper focuses on the power of comments to predict fault-prone programs. In general, comments along with executable statements enhance the understandability of programs. However, comments may also be used to mask the lack of readability in the program, therefore well-written comments are referred to as “deodorant to mask code smells” in the field of code refactoring. This paper conducts an empirical analysis to examine whether Lines of Comments (LCM) written inside a method's body is a noteworthy metric for analyzing fault-proneness in Java methods. The empirical results show the following two findings: (1) more-commented methods (the methods having more comments than the amount estimated by size and complexity of the methods) are about 1.6 - 2.8 times more likely to be faulty than the others, and (2) LCM can be a useful factor in fault-prone method prediction models along with the method size and the method complexity.

In this paper, we propose Configurable Query Processing Hardware (CQPH), an FPGA-based accelerator for continuous query processing over data streams. CQPH is a highly optimized and minimal-overhead execution engine designed to deliver real-time response for high-volume data streams. Unlike most of the other FPGA-based approaches, CQPH provides on-the-fly configurability for multiple queries with its own dynamic configuration mechanism. With a dedicated query compiler, SQL-like queries can be easily configured into CQPH at run time. CQPH supports continuous queries including selection, group-by operation and sliding-window aggregation with a large number of overlapping sliding windows. As a proof of concept, a prototype of CQPH is implemented on an FPGA platform for a case study. Evaluation results indicate that a given query can be configured within just a few microseconds, and the prototype implementation of CQPH can process over 150 million tuples per second with a latency of less than a microsecond. Results also indicate that CQPH provides linear scalability to increase its flexibility (i.e., on-the-fly configurability) without sacrificing performance (i.e., maximum allowable clock speed).

Recognition of second language (L2) speech is still a challenging task even for state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, partly because pronunciation by L2 speakers is usually significantly influenced by the mother tongue of the speakers. The authors previously proposed using a reduced phoneme set (RPS) instead of the canonical one of L2 when the mother tongue of speakers is known, and demonstrated that this reduced phoneme set improved the recognition performance through experiments using English utterances spoken by Japanese. However, the proficiency of L2 speakers varies widely, as does the influence of the mother tongue on their pronunciation. As a result, the effect of the reduced phoneme set is different depending on the speakers' proficiency in L2. In this paper, the authors examine the relation between proficiency of speakers and a reduced phoneme set customized for them. The experimental results are then used as the basis of a novel speech recognition method using a lexicon in which the pronunciation of each lexical item is represented by multiple reduced phoneme sets, and the implementation of a language model most suitable for that lexicon is described. Experimental results demonstrate the high validity of the proposed method.

Even though the IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines processes for handling the loss of beacon frames in beacon-enabled low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs), they are not efficient nor detailed. This letter proposes an enhanced process to improve the throughput performance of LR-WPANs under the losses of beacon frames. The key idea of our proposed enhancement is to make devices that have not received a beacon frame, due to packet loss, to transmit their data in the contention period and even in the inactive period instead of holding pending frames during the whole superframe period. The proposed protocol is evaluated using mathematical analysis as well as simulations, and the throughput improvement of LR-WPANs is proved.

Satellite-borne or aircraft-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is useful for high resolution imaging analysis for terrain surface monitoring or surveillance, particularly in optically harsh environments. For surveillance application, there are various approaches for automatic target recognition (ATR) of SAR images aiming at monitoring unidentified ships or aircraft. In addition, various types of analyses for full polarimetric data have been developed recently because it can provide significant information to identify structure of targets, such as vegetation, urban, sea surface areas. ATR generally consists of two processes, one is target feature extraction including target area determination, and the other is classification. In this paper, we propose novel methods for these two processes that suit full polarimetric exploitation. As the target area extraction method, we introduce a peak signal-to noise ratio (PSNR) based synthesis with full polarimetric SAR images. As the classification method, the circular polarization basis conversion is adopted to improve the robustness especially to variation of target rotation angles. Experiments on a 1/100 scale model of X-band SAR, demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of target area extraction and classification, even in noisy or target rotating situations.

In this paper, we propose SimCS (similarity based on contribution scores) to compute the similarity of scientific papers. For similarity computation, we exploit a notion of a contribution score that indicates how much a paper contributes to another paper citing it. Also, we consider the author dominance of papers in computing contribution scores. We perform extensive experiments with a real-world dataset to show the superiority of SimCS. In comparison with SimCC, the-state-of-the-art method, SimCS not only requires no extra parameter tuning but also shows higher accuracy in similarity computation.

The two-dimensional (2D) interference is one of the major impairments in bit-patterned media recording (BPMR) systems due to small bit and track pitches, especially at high recording densities. To alleviate this problem, we introduced a rate-4/5 constructive inter-track interference (CITI) coding scheme to prevent the destructive data patterns to be written onto a magnetic medium for an uncoded BPMR system, i.e., without error-correction codes. Because the CITI code produces only the hard decision, it cannot be employed in a coded BPMR system that uses a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code. To utilize it in an iterative decoding scheme, we propose a soft CITI coding scheme based on the log-likelihood ratio algebra implementation in Boolean logic mappings in order that the soft CITI coding scheme together with a modified 2D soft-output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) detector and a LDPC decoder will jointly perform iterative decoding. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides a significant performance improvement, in particular when an areal density (AD) is high and/or the position jitter is large. Specifically, at a bit-error rate of 10-4 and no position jitter, the proposed system can provide approximately 1.8 and 3.5 dB gain over the conventional coded system without using the CITI code at the ADs of 2.5 and 3.0 Tera-bit per square inch (Tb/in2), respectively.

A threshold secret sharing scheme can realize reliable delivery of important content using redundant routes through a network. Furthermore, multicast delivery of threshold secret shared content can achieve efficient resource utilization thanks to the application of multicast and network coding techniques to multiple pieces of the content. Nevertheless, a tradeoff exists between reliability and efficiency if multicast content delivery uses network coding. This paper proposes a flexible multicast delivery scheme for threshold secret shared content that can control the tradeoff between reliability and efficiency. The proposed scheme classifies all the pieces obtained from the original content into multiple groups, and each group is subjected to network coding independently. An optimization procedure is proposed for the multicast delivery scheme, which involves two different heuristic delivery route computation methods applicable to large-scale networks. Evaluation results show that the optimized multicast delivery scheme adopting an appropriate grouping method and classifying the pieces into a suitable number of groups can minimize the required link bandwidth while satisfying a specified content loss probability requirement.

The challenges of providing a divide-and-conquer strategy for tackling large geospatial raster data input/output (I/O) are longstanding. Solutions need to change with advances in the technology and hardware. After analyzing the reason for the problems of traditional parallel raster I/O mode, a parallel I/O strategy using file view is proposed to solve these problems. Message Passing Interface I/O (MPI-IO) is used to implement this strategy. Experimental results show how a file view approach can be effectively married to General Parallel File System (GPFS). A suitable file view setting provides an efficient solution to parallel geospatial raster data I/O.

Postcopy live migration is a promising alternative of virtual machine (VM) migration, which transfers memory pages after switching the execution host of a VM. It allows a shorter and more deterministic migration time than precopy migration. There is, however, a possibility that postcopy migration would degrade VM performance just after switching the execution host. In this paper, we propose a performance improvement technique of postcopy migration, extending the para-virtualized page fault mechanism of a virtual machine monitor. When the guest operating system accesses a not-yet-transferred memory page, our proposed mechanism allows the guest kernel to defer the execution of the current process until the page data is transferred. In parallel with the page transfer, the guest kernel can yield VCPU to other active processes. We implemented the proposed technique in our postcopy migration mechanism for Qemu/KVM. Through experiments, we confirmed that our technique successfully alleviated performance degradation of postcopy migration for web server and database benchmarks.

We conduct, in accordance with IEC 61000-4-2, an electrostatic discharge (ESD) test for a small size battery-operated control circuit board in a myoelectric artificial hand system to investigate the influence of the induced noises by indirect ESDs from an ESD generator to a horizontal coupling plane (HCP) and a vertical coupling plane (VCP). A photo-coupler is set between the small size control board and a motor control circuit to suppress noise in the pulse width modulation (PWM) signals. Two types of ESD noise are observed at the output pins of PWM signals. One type is the ESD noise itself (called Type A) and the other one is the ESD noise superimposed over the PWM pulses (Type B). No matter which polarity the charge voltages of the ESD generator have, both types can be observed and the Type A is dominant in the output pulses. Moreover, the ESD interference in the HCP case is found to be stronger than that in the VCP case usually. In the PWM signals observed at the photo-coupler output, on the other hand, Type A noises tend to increase for positive polarity and decrease for negative polarity, while Type B noises tend to increase at -8kV test level in the HCP case. These results suggest that the photo-coupler does not work well for ESD noise suppression. One of the reasons has been demonstrated to be due to the driving capability of the photo-coupler, and other one is due to the presence of a parasitic capacitance between the input and output of the photo-coupler. The parasitic capacitance can yield a capacitive coupling so that high-frequency ESD noises pass through the photo-coupler.

The tree-based routing approach has been known as an efficient method for node mobility management and data packet transmission between two long-distance parties; however, its parameter adjustment must balance control overhead against the convergence speed of topology information according to node mobility. Meanwhile, location-based routing works more efficiently when the distance between the source and destination is relatively short. Therefore, this paper proposes a roadside unit (RSU) based hybrid routing protocol, called RSU-HRP that combines the strengths of both protocols while offsetting their weaknesses. In RSU-HRP, the tree construction is modified to take into account the link and route quality to construct a robust and reliable tree against high node mobility, and an optimized broadcast algorithm is developed to reduce control overhead induced by the advertisement message periodically sent from a roadside unit. In addition, the two routing methods are selectively used based on the computed distance in hops between a source and a destination. Simulation results show that RSU-HRP far outperforms TrafRoute in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and control overhead in both Vehicle-to-Infrastructure and Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication models.

Superconducting single-flux-quantum (SFQ) device is an emerging device which can realize digital circuits with high switching speed and low power consumption. In SFQ digital circuits, voltage pulses are used for carrier of information, and the representation of logic values is different from that of CMOS circuits. Design methods exclusive to SFQ circuits have been developed. In this paper, we present timing analysis and functional verification methods for SFQ circuits based on new timing model which we call delay-based time frame model. Assuming that possible pulse arrival is periodic, the model defines comprehensive time frames and representation of logic values. In static timing analysis, expected pulse arrival time is checked based on the model, and the order among pulse arrival times is calculated for each logic gate. In functional verification, the circuit behavior is abstracted in a form similar to a synchronous sequential circuit using the order of pulse arrival times, and then the behavior is verified using formal verification tools. Using our proposed methods, we can verify the functional behavior of SFQ circuits with complex clocking scheme, which appear often in practical design but cannot be dealt with in existing verification method. Experimental results show that our method can be applied to practical designs.

In this letter, we propose a novel supervised pre-training technique for deep neural network (DNN)-hidden Markov model systems to achieve robust speech recognition in adverse environments. In the proposed approach, our aim is to initialize the DNN parameters such that they yield abstract features robust to acoustic environment variations. In order to achieve this, we first derive the abstract features from an early fine-tuned DNN model which is trained based on a clean speech database. By using the derived abstract features as the target values, the standard error back-propagation algorithm with the stochastic gradient descent method is performed to estimate the initial parameters of the DNN. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated on Aurora-4 DB, and better results were observed compared to a number of conventional pre-training methods.

In many radio frequency identification (RFID) applications, the reader identifies the tags in its scope repeatedly. For these applications, many algorithms, such as an adaptive binary splitting algorithm (ABS), a single resolution blocking ABS (SRB), a pair resolution blocking ABS (PRB) and a dynamic blocking ABS (DBA) have been proposed. All these algorithms require the staying tags to reply with their IDs to be recognized by the reader. However, the IDs of the staying tags are stored in the reader in the last identification round. The reader can verify the existence of these tags when identifying them. Thus, we propose an anti-collision algorithm with short reply for RFID tag identification (ACSR). In ACSR, each staying tag emits a short reply to indicate its continued existence. Therefore, the data amount transmitted by staying tags is reduced significantly. The identification rate of ACSR is analyzed in this paper. Finally, simulation and analysis results show that ACSR greatly outperforms ABS, SRB and DBA in terms of the identification rate and average amount of data transmitted by a tag.

The authors proposed an algorithm for calculation of new lower bound (rank bounded distance) using the discrete Fourier transform in 2010. Afterward, we considered some algorithms to improve the original algorithm with moving the row or column. In this paper, we discuss the calculation method of the rank bounded distance by conjugate elements for cyclic codes.

Bugs in industrial financial systems have not been extensively studied. To address this gap, we focused on the empirical study of bugs in three systems, PMS, β-Analyzer, and OrderPro. Results showed the 3 most common types of bugs in industrial financial systems to be internal interface (19.00%), algorithm/method (17.67%), and logic (15.00%).