In this paper, we propose a virtualization architecture for a multi-core embedded system to provide more system reliability and security while maintaining performance and without introducing additional special hardware supports or implementing a complex protection mechanism in the virtualization layer. Embedded systems, especially consumer electronics, have often used virtualization. Virtualization is not a new technique, as there are various uses for both GPOS (General Purpose Operating System) and RTOS (Real Time Operating System). The surge of the multi-core platforms in embedded systems also helps consolidate the virtualization system for better performance and lower power consumption. Embedded virtualization design usually uses two approaches. The first is to use the traditional VMM, but it is too complicated for use in the embedded environment without additional special hardware support. The other approach uses the microkernel, which imposes a modular design. The guest systems, however, would suffer from considerable modifications in this approach, as the microkernel allows guest systems to run in the user space. For some RTOSes and their applications originally running in the kernel space, this second approach is more difficult to use because those codes use many privileged instructions. To achieve better reliability and keep the virtualization layer design lightweight, this work uses a common hardware component adopted in multi-core embedded processors. In most embedded platforms, vendors provide additional on-chip local memory for each physical core, and these local memory areas are only private to their cores. By taking advantage of this memory architecture, we can mitigate the above-mentioned problems at once. We choose to re-map the virtualization layer's program on the local memory, called SPUMONE, which runs all guest systems in the kernel space. Doing so, it can provide additional reliability and security for the entire system because the SPUMONE design in a multi-core platform has each instance installed on a separate processor core. This design differs from traditional virtualization layer design, and the content of each SPUMONE is inaccessible to the others. We also achieve this goal without adding overhead to the overall performance.

The large data-transfer time among different cores is a big problem in heterogeneous multi-core processors. This paper presents a method to accelerate the data transfers exploiting data-transfer-units together with complex memory allocation. We used block matching, which is very common in image processing, to evaluate our technique. The proposed method reduces the data-transfer time by more than 42% compared to the earlier works that use CPU-based data transfers. Moreover, the total processing time is only 15 ms for a VGA image with 1616 pixel blocks.

This paper proposes a bit-split string matcher architecture for a memory-efficient hardware-based parallel pattern matching engine. In the proposed bit-split string matcher, multiple finite-state machine (FSM) tiles share match vectors to reduce the required number of stored match vectors. By decreasing the memory size for storing match vectors, the total memory requirement can be minimized.

This paper proposes a third-order low-distortion delta-sigma modulator (DSM). The third-order noise shaping is achieved by a single opamp (excluding the quantizer). In the proposed DSM structure, the timing limitation on the quantizer and dynamic element matching (DEM) logic in a conventional low-distortion structure can be relaxed from a non-overlapping interval to half of the clock period. A cyclic analog-to-digital converter with a loading-free technique is utilized as a quantizer, which shares an opamp with the active adder. The signal transfer function (STF) is preserved as unity, which means that the integrators process only the quantization noise component. As a result, the opamp used for the integrators has lower requirements, as low-distortion DSMs, on slew rate, output swing, and power consumption. The proposed third-order DSM with a 4-bit cyclic-type quantizer is implemented in a 90-nm CMOS process. Under a sampling rate of 80 MHz and oversampling ratio of 16, simulation results show that an 81.97-dB signal-to-noise and distortion ratio and an 80-dB dynamic range are achieved with 4.17-mW total power consumption. The resulting figure of merit (FOM) is 81.5 fJ/conversion-step.

Vision based human action recognition has been an active research field in recent years. Exemplar matching is an important and popular methodology in this field, however, most previous works perform exemplar matching on the whole input video clip for recognition. Such a strategy is computationally expensive and limits its practical usage. In this paper, we present a martingale framework for selection of characteristic frames from an input video clip without requiring any prior knowledge. Action recognition is operated on these selected characteristic frames. Experiments on 10 studied actions from WEIZMANN dataset demonstrate a significant improvement in computational efficiency (54% reduction) while achieving the same recognition precision.

In this paper, effects of the parasite elements on an antenna impedance of a UHF RFID tag put on a high impedance surface (HIS) are experimentally studied in detail. It is shown that small parasite elements on a mushroom HIS structure can help to recover a mismatch of the impedance and this impedance recovery is brought by an in-phase frequency shift of the HIS due to a mutual coupling between the HIS and the parasite elements. The technique is applied to a commercial 953 MHz band RFID tag inlet antenna on a 53-cell HIS with the total dimension of 125751.5 mm3 and it is demonstrated that the impedance mismatch is successfully recovered and the tag operates with a reading range of 3 m even on a 2003002 mm3 aluminum plate.

In camera-based object recognition and classification, surface color is one of the most important characteristics. However, apparent object color may differ significantly according to the illumination and surface conditions. Such a variation can be an obstacle in utilizing color features. Geusebroek et al.'s color invariants can be a powerful tool for characterizing the object color regardless of illumination and surface conditions. In this work, we analyze the estimation process of the color invariants from RGB images, and propose a novel invariant feature of color based on the elementary invariants to meet the circular continuity residing in the mapping between colors and their invariants. Experiments show that the use of the proposed invariant in combination with luminance, contributes to improve the retrieval performances of partial object image matching under varying illumination conditions.

In this note, we introduce the integral term of system outputs into an output feedback controller for sampled-data linear systems with unknown disturbances. The proposed method does not use any observer and can prevent the high gain actions in control inputs. Provided the variation of the disturbance in the two consecutive sampling instances is not changed significantly, it is shown that system states and system outputs are finally constrained in small bounded regions, respectively. Simulation results support the theoretical developments.

The mode-matching applications to scattering from circular and annular apertures in a thick perfectly conducting plane are reviewed. The Hankel and Weber transforms are utilized to solve the boundary-value problems of circular and annular apertures. Simple electrostatic problems are presented to illustrate the mode-matching method in terms of the Hankel and Weber transforms. Various types of Weber transform are discussed with boundary-value problems. Electromagnetic radiation and scattering from circular and annular aperture geometries are summarized. The utility of the mode-matching method in circular and annular aperture scattering is emphasized.

It is becoming more and more important to make use of personal or classified information while keeping it confidential. A promising tool for meeting this challenge is secure multi-party computation (MPC). It enables multiple parties, each given a snippet of a secret s, to compute a function f(s) by communicating with each other without revealing s. However, one of the biggest problems with MPC is that it requires a vast amount of communication. Much research has gone into making each protocol (equality testing, interval testing, etc.) more efficient. In this work, we make a set of multiple protocols more efficient by transforming them into their equivalent batch processing form and propose two protocols: “Batch Logical OR” and “Batch Logical AND.” Using proposed protocols recursively, we also propose “Batch Logical OR-AND” and “Batch Logical AND-OR,” and show arbitrary formula consisting of Boolean protocols, OR gates, and AND gates can be batched. Existing logical OR and logical AND protocols consisting of t equality testing invocations have a communication complexity of O(t), where is the bit length of the secrets. Our batched versions of these protocols reduce it to O( + t). For t interval testing invocations, they reduce both communication and round complexity. Thus they can make the queries on a secret shared database more efficient. For example, the use of the proposed protocols reduces the communication complexity for a query consisting of equality testing and interval testing by approximately 70% compared to the use of the corresponding existing protocols. The concept of the proposed protocols is versatile and can be applied to logical formulae consisting of protocols other than equality testing and interval testing, thereby making them more efficient as well.

A new information detection method has been proposed for a very fast and efficient search engine. This method is implemented on hardware system using FPGA. We take advantages of Content Addressable Memory (CAM) which has an ability of matching mode for designing the system. The CAM blocks have been designed using available memory blocks of the FPGA device to save access times of the whole system. The entire memory can return multi-match results concurrently. The system operates based on the CAMs for pattern matching, in a parallel manner, to output multiple addresses of multi-match results. Based on the parallel multi-match operations, the system can be applied for pattern matching with various required constraint conditions without using any search principles. The very fast multi-match results are achieved at 60 ns with the operation frequency 50 MHz. This increases the search performance of the information detection system which uses this method as the core system.

Electromagnetic wave scattering in two open-ended coaxial cables with flanges is presented for adiabatic transmission line applications. Field distributions in the cables are obtained by employing the mode-matching method. A set of simultaneous equations is solved to investigate the transmission and reflection coefficients.

Nowadays, software development societies have given more precedence to Open Source Software (OSS). There is much research aimed at understanding the OSS society to sustain the OSS product. To lead an OSS project to a successful conclusion, researchers study how developers change source codes called patches in project repositories. In existing studies, we found an argument in the conventional patch acceptance detection procedure. It was so simplified that it omitted important cases from the analysis, and would lead researchers to wrong conclusions. In this research, we propose an algorithm to overcome the problem. To prove out our algorithm, we constructed a framework and conducted two case studies. As a result, we came to a new and interesting understanding of patch activities.

High-speed IP address lookup with fast prefix update is essential for designing wire-speed packet forwarding routers. The developments of optical fiber and 100 Gbps interface technologies have placed IP address lookup as the major bottleneck of high performance networks. In this paper, we propose a novel structure named Compressed Multi-way Prefix Tree (CMPT) based on B+ tree to perform dynamic and scalable high-speed IP address lookup. Our contributions are to design a practical structure for high-speed IP address lookup suitable for both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and to develop efficient algorithms for dynamic prefix insertion and deletion. By investigating the relationships among routing prefixes, we arrange independent prefixes as the search indexes on internal nodes of CMPT, and by leveraging a nested prefix compression technique, we encode all the routing prefixes on the leaf nodes. For any IP address, the longest prefix matching can be made at leaf nodes without backtracking. For a forwarding table with u independent prefixes, CMPT requires O(logmu) search time and O(mlogmu) dynamic insert and delete time. Performance evaluations using real life IPv4 forwarding tables show promising gains in lookup and dynamic update speeds compared with the existing B-tree structures.

In this paper, a novel charge coupled device matched filter (CCD-MF) for Electrical code division multiplexing (ECDM) decoder is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Simulation results clarify the influence of low charge transfer efficiency (CTE) and the validity of a parallel CCD-MF we proposed. A 15-channel ECDM system using a 2 Gchip/s, 2-parallel CCD-MF is experimentally demonstrated.

Template matching for image sequences captured with a moving camera is very important for several applications such as Robot Vision, SLAM, ITS, and video surveillance systems. However, it is difficult to realize accurate template matching using only visual feature information such as HSV histograms, edge histograms, HOG histograms, and SIFT features, because it is affected by several phenomena such as illumination change, viewpoint change, size change, and noise. In order to realize robust tracking, structure information such as the relative position of each part of the object should be considered. In this paper, we propose a method that considers both visual feature information and structure information. Experiments show that the proposed method realizes robust tracking and determine the relationships between object parts in the scenes and those in the template.

This letter proposes an efficient local descriptor for wide-baseline dense matching. It improves the existing Daisy descriptor by combining intensity-based Haar wavelet response with a new color-based ratio model. The color ratio model is invariant to changes of viewing direction, object geometry, and the direction, intensity and spectral power distribution of the illumination. The experiments show that our descriptor has high discriminative power and robustness.

This paper proposes a high-precision, high-speed keypoint matching method using two-stage randomized trees (RTs). The keypoint classification uses conventional RTs for high-precision, real-time keypoint matching. However, the wide variety of view transformations for templates expressed by RTs make it diffidult to achieve high-precision classification for all transformations with a single RTs. To solve this problem, the proposed method classifies the template view transformations in the first stage and then, in the second stage, classifies the keypoints using the RTs that corresponds to each of the view transformations classified in the first stage. Testing demonstrated that the proposed method is 88.5% more precise than SIFT, and 63.5% more precise than using conventional RTs for images in which the viewpoint of the object is rotated by 70 degrees. We have also shown that the proposed method supports real-time keypoint matching at 12 fps.

In this paper, we introduce an approach of service adaptation for behavior mismatching services using pushdown model checking. This approach uses pushdown systems as model of adaptors so that capturing non-regular behavior in service interactions is possible. Also, the use of pushdown model checking integrates adaptation and verification. This guarantees that an adaptor generated by our approach not only solves behavior mismatches but also satisfies usual verification properties if specified. Unlike conventional approaches, we do not count on specifications of adaptor contracts but take only information from behavior interfaces of services and perform fully automated adaptor generation. Three requirements relating to behavior mismatches, unbounded messages, and branchings are retrieved from behavior interfaces and used to build LTL properties for pushdown model checking. Properties for unbounded messages, i.e., messages sent and received arbitrary multiple times, are especially addressed since it characterizes non-regular behavior in service composition. This paper also shows some experimental results from a prototype tool and provides directions for building BPEL adaptors from behavior interface of generated adaptor. The results show that our approach does solve behavior mismatches and successfully capture non-regular behavior in service composition under the scale of real service applications.

This paper presents a novel design scheme for a band-switchable multi-band power amplifier (BS-MPA). A key point of the design scheme is configuring multi-section reconfigurable matching networks (MR-MNs) optimally in terms of low loss matching in multiple frequency bands from 0.7 to 2.5 GHz. The MR-MN consists of several matching sections, each of which has a matching block connected to a transmission line via a switch. Power dissipation at an actual on-state switch results in the insertion loss of the MR-MN and depends on how the impedance is transformed by the MR-MN. The proposed design scheme appropriately transforms the impedance of a high power transistor to configure a low loss MR-MN. Numerical analyses show quantitative improvement in the loss using the proposed scheme. A 9-band 3-stage BS-MPA is newly designed following the proposed scheme and fabricated on a multi-layer low temperature co-fired ceramic substrate for compactness. The BS-MPA achieves a gain of over 30 dB, an output power of greater than 33 dBm and a power added efficiency of over 40% at the supply voltage of 4 V in each operating band.