This paper presents a two-dimensional (2D) DOA algorithm for double L-shaped arrays. The algorithm is applied to the underwater environment for eliminating the performance error caused by the sound speed uncertainty factor. By introducing the third dimensional array, the algorithm eliminates the sound velocity variable in the depression angle expression, so that the DOA estimation no longer considering the true value of unknown sound velocity. In order to determine the parameters of a three-dimensional array, a parameter matching method with the double L-shaped array is also proposed. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional 2D-DOA estimation algorithm in unknown sound velocity environment.

This paper analyzes and compares two methods to estimate electromagnetically coupled noises introduced to an antenna due to the nearby circuits at a circuit design stage. One of them is to estimate the power spectrum, and the other one is to estimate the active S11 parameter at the victim antenna, respectively, and both of them use simulated standard S-parameters for the electromagnetic coupling in the circuit. They also need the assumed or measured excitation of noise sources. To confirm the validness of the two methods, an evaluation board consisting of an antenna and noise sources were designed and fabricated in which voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) chips are placed as noise sources. The generated electromagnetic noises are transferred to an antenna via loop-shaped transmission lines, degrading the performance of the antenna. In this paper, detailed analysis procedures are described using the evaluation board, and it is shown that the two methods are equivalent to each other in terms of the induced voltages in the antenna. Finally, a procedure to estimate antenna performance degradation at the design stage is summarized.

In this paper, we describe a novel low-delay 4K 120-fps real-time HEVC decoder with a parallel processing architecture that conforms to the HEVC main 4:2:2 10 profile. It supports the hierarchical temporal scalable streams required for Ultra High Definition high-frame-rate broadcasting and also supports low-delay and high-bitrate decoding for video transmission uses. To achieve this support, the decoding processes are parallelized and pipelined at the frame level, slice level, and coding tree unit row level. The proposed decoder was implemented on three FPGAs operated at 133 and 150 MHz, and it achieved 300-Mbps stream decoding and 37-msec end-to-end delay with our concurrently developed 4K 120-fps encoder.

Many countries have deregulated their electricity retail markets to offer lower electricity charges to consumers. However, many consumers have not switched their suppliers after the deregulation, and electricity suppliers do not tend to reduce their charges intensely. This paper proposes an electricity market model and evolutionary game to analyze the behavior of consumers in electricity retail markets. Our model focuses on switching costs such as an effort at switching, costs in searching for other alternatives, and so on. The evolutionary game examines whether consumers choose a strategy involving exploration of new alternatives with the searching costs as “cooperators” or not. Simulation results demonstrate that the share of cooperators was not improved by simply giving rewards for cooperators as compensation for searching costs. Furthermore, the results also suggest that the degree of cooperators in a network among consumers has a vital role in increasing the share of cooperators and switching rate.

The demand response is attracting attention to perform electric power load leveling. In this paper, we consider a power consumption reduction problem with an aggregator that requests electric power consumption reduction to consumers by allocating a part of its profit to them as an incentive. We formulate interactions among consumers as a game, where the incentive to each consumer is determined by his/her contribution to the total power consumption reduction, and the consumer determines his/her own reduction amount selfishly to maximize his/her payoff. The uniqueness of best responses of each consumer and an equilibrium condition of the game are also derived. By using numerical simulations, we show relationship among incentive allocation rate, realized total reduction amount through the game, and the aggregator's payoff for the cases with the for-profit and the nonprofit aggregator.

The requirement of safety, roadway capacity and efficiency in the vehicular network, which makes vehicular platoons concept continue to be of interest. For the authentication in vehicular platoons, efficiency and cooperation are the two most important things. Cooperative authentication is a way to recognize false identities and messages as well as saving resources. However, taking part in cooperative authentication makes the vehicle more vulnerable to privacy leakage which is commonly done by location tracking. Moreover, vehicles consume their resources when cooperating with others during the process of cooperation authentication. These two significant factors cause selfish behaviors of the vehicles not to participate in cooperate cooperation actively. In this paper, an infinitely repeated game for cooperative authentication in vehicular platoons is proposed to help analyze the utility of all nodes and point out the weakness of the current collaborative authentication protocol. To deal with this weakness, we also devised an enhanced cooperative authentication protocol based on mechanisms which makes it easier for vehicles to stay in the cooperate strategy rather than tend to selfish behavior. Meanwhile, our protocol can defense insider attacks.

We present an accurate and easy-to-use multi-sensor fusion toolbox for autonomous vehicles. It includes a ‘target-less’ multi-LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), and Camera-LiDAR calibration, sensor fusion, and a fast and accurate point cloud ground classifier. Our calibration methods do not require complex setup procedures, and once the sensors are calibrated, our framework eases the fusion of multiple point clouds, and cameras. In addition we present an original real-time ground-obstacle classifier, which runs on the CPU, and is designed to be used with any type and number of LiDARs. Evaluation results on the KITTI dataset confirm that our calibration method has comparable accuracy with other state-of-the-art contenders in the benchmark.

A set of spanning trees of a graphs G are called completely independent spanning trees (CISTs for short) if for every pair of vertices x, y∈V(G), the paths joining x and y in any two trees have neither vertex nor edge in common, except x and y. Constructing CISTs has applications on interconnection networks such as fault-tolerant routing and secure message transmission. In this paper, we investigate the problem of constructing two CISTs in the balanced hypercube BHn, which is a hypercube-variant network and is superior to hypercube due to having a smaller diameter. As a result, the diameter of CISTs we constructed equals to 9 for BH2 and 6n-2 for BHn when n≥3.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNS) have a strong ability to understand and judge images. However, the enormous parameters and computation of CNNS have limited its application in resource-limited devices. In this letter, we used the idea of parameter sharing and dense connection to compress the parameters in the convolution kernel channel direction, thus greatly reducing the number of model parameters. On this basis, we designed Shared and Dense Channel-wise Convolutional Networks (SDChannelNets), mainly composed of Depth-wise Separable SD-Channel-wise Convolution layer. The advantage of SDChannelNets is that the number of model parameters is greatly reduced without or with little loss of accuracy. We also introduced a hyperparameter that can effectively balance the number of parameters and the accuracy of a model. We evaluated the model proposed by us through two popular image recognition tasks (CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100). The results showed that SDChannelNets had similar accuracy to other CNNs, but the number of parameters was greatly reduced.

Volleyball video analysis plays important roles in providing data for TV contents and developing strategies. Among all the topics of volleyball analysis, qualitative player action recognition is essential because it potentially provides not only the action that being performed but also the quality, which means how well the action is performed. However, most action recognition researches focus on the discrimination between different actions. The quality of an action, which is helpful for evaluation and training of the player skill, has only received little attention so far. The vital problems in qualitative action recognition include occlusion, small inter-class difference and various kinds of appearance caused by the player change. This paper proposes a 3D global and multi-view local features combination based recognition framework with global team formation feature, ball state feature and abrupt pose features. The above problems are solved by the combination of 3D global features (which hide the unstable and incomplete 2D motion feature caused by occlusion) and the multi-view local features (which get detailed local motion features of body parts in multiple viewpoints). Firstly, the team formation extracts the 3D trajectories from the whole team members rather than a single target player. This proposal focuses more on the entire feature while eliminating the personal effect. Secondly, the ball motion state feature extracts features from the 3D ball trajectory. The ball motion is not affected by the personal appearance, so this proposal ignores the influence of the players appearance and makes it more robust to target player change. At last, the abrupt pose feature consists of two parts: the abrupt hit frame pose (which extracts the contour shape of the player's pose at the hit time) and abrupt pose variation (which extracts the pose variation between the preparation pose and ending pose during the action). These two features make difference of each action quality more distinguishable by focusing on the motion standard and stability between different quality actions. Experiments are conducted on game videos from the Semifinal and Final Game of 2014 Japan Inter High School Games of Men's Volleyball in Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. The experimental results show the accuracy achieves 97.26%, improving 11.33% for action discrimination and 91.76%, and improving 13.72% for action quality evaluation.

High frame rate and ultra-low delay matching system plays an important role in various human-machine interactive applications, which demands better performance in matching deformable and out-of-plane rotating objects. Although many algorithms have been proposed for deformation tracking and matching, few of them are suitable for hardware implementation due to complicated operations and large time consumption. This paper proposes a hardware-oriented template update and recovery method for high frame rate and ultra-low delay deformation matching system. In the proposed method, the new template is generated in real time by partially updating the template descriptor and adding new keypoints simultaneously with the matching process in pixels (proposal #1), which avoids the large inter-frame delay. The size and shape of region of interest (ROI) are made flexible and the Hamming threshold used for brute-force matching is adjusted according to pixel position and the flexible ROI (proposal #2), which solves the problem of template drift. The template is recovered by the previous one with a relative center-shifting vector when it is judged as lost via region-wise difference check (proposal #3). Evaluation results indicate that the proposed method successfully achieves the real-time processing of 784fps at the resolution of 640×480 on field-programmable gate array (FPGA), with a delay of 0.808ms/frame, as well as achieves satisfactory deformation matching results in comparison with other general methods.

This paper investigates the spectrum allocation problem. Under the current spectrum management mode, large amount of spectrum resource is wasted due to uncertainty of user's demand. To reduce the impact of uncertainty, a presale mechanism is designed based on spectrum pool. In this mechanism, the spectrum manager provides spectrum resource at a favorable price for presale aiming at sharing with user the risk caused by uncertainty of demand. Because of the hierarchical characteristic, we build a spectrum market Stackelberg game, in which the manager acts as leader and user as follower. Then proof of the uniqueness and optimality of Stackelberg Equilibrium is given. Simulation results show the presale mechanism can promote profits for both sides and reduce temporary scheduling.

In this letter, we investigate the price-based power allocation for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks, where the base station (BS) can admit the users to transmit by pricing their power. Stackelberg game is utilized to model the pricing and power purchasing strategies between the BS and the users. Based on backward induction, the pricing problem of the BS is recast into the non-convex power allocation problem, which is equivalent to the rate allocation problem by variable replacement. Based on the equivalence problem, an optimal price-based power allocation algorithm is proposed to maximize the revenue of the BS. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to the existing pricing algorithm in items of the revenue of BS and the number of admitted users.

Parameter estimation theorems for LFM signals have been developed due to the advantages of fractional Fourier transform (FrFT). The traditional estimation methods in the fractional Fourier domain (FrFD) are almost based on two-dimensional search which have the contradiction between estimation performance and complexity. In order to solve this problem, we introduce the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) into the FrFD, propose a modified optimization method to estimate initial frequency and final frequency of fractional bandlimited LFM signals. In this algorithm, the differentiation fractional spectrum which is used to form observation matrix in OMP is derived from the spectrum analytical formulations of the LFM signal, and then, based on that the LFM signal has approximate rectangular spectrum in the FrFD and the correlation between the LFM signal and observation matrix yields a maximal value at the edge of the spectrum (see Sect.3.3 for details), the edge spectrum information can be extracted by OMP. Finally, the estimations of initial frequency and final frequency are obtained through multiplying the edge information by the sampling frequency resolution. The proposed method avoids reconstruction and the traditional peak-searching procedure, and the iterations are needed only twice. Thus, the computational complexity is much lower than that of the existing methods. Meanwhile, Since the vectors at the initial frequency and final frequency points both have larger modulus, so that the estimations are closer to the actual values, better normalized root mean squared error (NRMSE) performance can be achieved. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm bears a relatively low complexity and its estimation precision is higher than search-based and reconstruction-based algorithms.

A multi-camera setup for a surveillance system enables a larger coverage area, especially when a single camera has limited monitoring capability due to certain obstacles. Therefore, for large-scale coverage, multiple cameras are the best option. In this paper, we present a method for detecting multiple objects using several cameras with large overlapping views as this allows synchronization of object identification from a number of views. The proposed method uses a graph structure that is robust enough to represent any detected moving objects by defining their vertices and edges to determine their relationships. By evaluating these object features, represented as a set of attributes in a graph, we can perform lightweight multiple object detection using several cameras, as well as performing object tracking within each camera's field of view and between two cameras. By evaluating each vertex hierarchically as a subgraph, we can further observe the features of the detected object and perform automatic separation of occluding objects. Experimental results show that the proposed method would improve the accuracy of object tracking by reducing the occurrences of incorrect identification compared to individual camera-based tracking.

Many quality metrics have been proposed for the compliance perception to assess haptic device performance and perceived results. Perceived compliance may be influenced by factors such as object properties, experimental conditions and human perceptual habits. In this paper, analysis of softness perception was conducted to find out relevant quality metrics dominating in the compliance perception system and their correlation with perception results, by expressing these metrics by basic physical parameters that characterizing these factors. Based on three psychophysical experiments, just noticeable differences (JNDs) for perceived softness of combination of different stiffness coefficients and damping levels rendered by haptic devices were analyzed. Interaction data during the interaction process were recorded and analyzed. Preliminary experimental results show that the discrimination ability of softness perception changes with the ratio of damping to stiffness when subjects exploring at their habitual speed. Analysis results indicate that quality metrics of Rate-hardness, Extended Rate-hardness and ratio of damping to stiffness have high correlation for perceived results. Further analysis results show that parameters that reflecting object properties (stiffness, damping), experimental conditions (force bandwidth) and human perceptual habits (initial speed, maximum force change rate) lead to the change of these quality metrics, which then bring different perceptual feeling and finally result in the change of discrimination ability. Findings in this paper may provide a better understanding of softness perception and useful guidance in improvement of haptic and teleoperation devices.

This paper studies the problem of real-time routing in a multi-autonomous robot enhanced network at uncertain and vulnerable tactical edge. Recent network protocols, such as opportunistic mobile network routing protocols, engaged social network in communication network that can increase the interoperability by using social mobility and opportunistic carry and forward routing algorithms. However, in practical harsh environment such as a battlefield, the uncertainty of social mobility and complexity of vulnerable environment due to unpredictable physical and cyber-attacks from enemy, would seriously affect the effectiveness and practicality of these emerging network protocols. This paper presents a GT-SaRE-MANET (Game Theoretic Situation-aware Robot Enhanced Mobile Ad-hoc Network) routing protocol that adopt the online reinforcement learning technique to supervise the mobility of multi-robots as well as handle the uncertainty and potential physical and cyber attack at tactical edge. Firstly, a set of game theoretic mission oriented metrics has been introduced to describe the interrelation among network quality, multi-robot mobility as well as potential attacking activities. Then, a distributed multi-agent game theoretic reinforcement learning algorithm has been developed. It will not only optimize GT-SaRE-MANET routing protocol and the mobility of multi-robots online, but also effectively avoid the physical and/or cyber-attacks from enemy by using the game theoretic mission oriented metrics. The effectiveness of proposed design has been demonstrated through computer aided simulations and hardware experiments.

In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol for named data networking applied to ad hoc networks. We suppose a type of ad hoc networks that advertise versatile information in public spaces such as shopping mall and museum. In this kind of networks, information providers prepare fixed nodes, and users are equipped with mobile terminals. So, we adopt a hybrid approach where a proactive routing is used in the producer side network and a reactive routing is used in the consumer side network. Another feature of the proposed protocol is that only the name prefix advertisement is focused on in the proactive routing. The result of performance evaluation focusing on the communication overhead shows that our proposal has a moderate overhead both for routing control messages and Interest packets compared with some of conventional NDN based ad hoc routing mechanisms proposed so far.

This paper investigates data uploading in cellular networks with the consideration of device-to-device (D2D) communications. A generalized data uploading scheme is proposed by leveraging D2D cooperation among the devices to reduce the data uploading time. In this scheme, we extend the conventional schemes on cooperative D2D data uploading for cellular networks to a more general case, which considers D2D cooperation among both the devices with or without uploading data. To motivate D2D cooperation among all available devices, we organize the devices within communication range by offering them rewards to construct multi-hop D2D chains for data uploading. Specifically, we formulate the problem of chain formation among the devices for data uploading as a coalitional game. Based on merge-and-split rules, we develop a coalition formation algorithm to obtain the solution for the formulated coalitional game with convergence on a stable coalitional structure. Finally, extensive numerical results show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme in reducing the average data uploading time.

In the obnoxious facility game, we design mechanisms that output a location of an undesirable facility based on the locations of players reported by themselves. The benefit of a player is defined to be the distance between her location and the facility. A player may try to manipulate the output of the mechanism by strategically misreporting her location. We wish to design a λ-group strategy-proof mechanism i.e., for every group of players, at least one player in the group cannot gain strictly more than λ times her primary benefit by having the entire group change their reports simultaneously. In this paper, we design a k-candidate λ-group strategy-proof mechanism for the obnoxious facility game in the metric defined by k half lines with a common endpoint such that each candidate is a point in each of the half-lines at the same distance to the common endpoint as other candidates. Then, we show that the benefit ratio of the mechanism is at most 1+2/(k-1)λ. Finally, we prove that the bound is nearly tight.