Basic characteristics for relating design and base station layout design in land mobile communications are provided through a propagation model for path loss prediction. Owing to the rapid annual increase in traffic data, the number of base stations has increased accordingly. Therefore, propagation models for various scenarios and frequency bands are necessitated. To solve problems optimization and creation methods using the propagation model, a path loss prediction method that merges multiple models in machine learning is proposed herein. The method is discussed based on measurement values from Kitakyushu-shi. In machine learning, the selection of input parameters and suppression of overlearning are important for achieving highly accurate predictions. Therefore, the acquisition of conventional models based on the propagation environment and the use of input parameters of high importance are proposed. The prediction accuracy for Kitakyushu-shi using the proposed method indicates a root mean square error (RMSE) of 3.68dB. In addition, predictions are performed in Narashino-shi to confirm the effectiveness of the method in other urban scenarios. Results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method for the urban scenario in Narashino-shi, and an RMSE of 4.39dB is obtained for the accuracy.

We propose an augmented-reality-based method for arranging furniture using natural markers extracted from the edges of the walls of rooms. The proposed method extracts natural markers and estimates the camera parameters from single images of rooms using deep neural networks. Experimental results show that in all the measurements, the superimposition error of the proposed method was lower than that of general marker-based methods that use practical-sized markers.

This paper proposes two accurate source-number estimation methods for array antennas and multi-input multi-output radar. Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is important in high-speed wireless communication and radar imaging. Most representative DOA estimation methods require the source-number information in advance and often fail to estimate DOAs in severe environments such as those having low signal-to-noise ratio or large transmission-power difference. Received signals are often bandlimited or narrowband signals, so the proposed methods first involves denoising preprocessing by removing undesired components then comparing the original and denoised signal information. The performances of the proposed methods were evaluated through computer simulations.

This paper proposes individual computation processes of the partial demodulation reference signal (DM-RS) sequence in a synchronization signal (SS)/physical broadcast channel (PBCH) block to be used to detect the radio frame timing based on SS/PBCH block index detection for New Radio (NR) initial access. We present the radio frame timing detection probability using the proposed partial DM-RS sequence detection method that is applied subsequent to the physical-layer cell identity (PCID) detection in five tapped delay line (TDL) models in both non-line-of-sight (NLOS) and line-of-sight (LOS) environments. Computer simulation results show that by using the proposed method, the radio frame timing detection probabilities of almost 100% and higher than 90% are achieved for the LOS and NLOS channel models, respectively, at the average received signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) of 0dB with the frequency stability of a local oscillator in a set of user equipment (UE) of 5ppm at the carrier frequency of 4GHz.

Particle filters have been widely used for state estimation problems in nonlinear and non-Gaussian systems. Their performance depends on the given system and measurement models, which need to be designed by the user for each target system. This paper proposes a novel method to design these models for a particle filter. This is a numerical optimization method, where the particle filter design process is interpreted into the framework of reinforcement learning by assigning the randomnesses included in both models of the particle filter to the policy of reinforcement learning. In this method, estimation by the particle filter is repeatedly performed and the parameters that determine both models are gradually updated according to the estimation results. The advantage is that it can optimize various objective functions, such as the estimation accuracy of the particle filter, the variance of the particles, the likelihood of the parameters, and the regularization term of the parameters. We derive the conditions to guarantee that the optimization calculation converges with probability 1. Furthermore, in order to show that the proposed method can be applied to practical-scale problems, we design the particle filter for mobile robot localization, which is an essential technology for autonomous navigation. By numerical simulations, it is demonstrated that the proposed method further improves the localization accuracy compared to the conventional method.

Pairing computations on elliptic curves with odd prime degrees are rarely studied as low efficiency. Recently, Clarisse, Duquesne and Sanders proposed two new curves with odd prime embedding degrees: BW13-P310 and BW19-P286, which are suitable for some special cryptographic schemes. In this paper, we propose efficient methods to compute the optimal ate pairing on this types of curves, instantiated by the BW13-P310 curve. We first extend the technique of lazy reduction into the finite field arithmetic. Then, we present a new method to execute Miller's algorithm. Compared with the standard Miller iteration formulas, the new ones provide a more efficient software implementation of pairing computations. At last, we also give a fast formula to perform the final exponentiation. Our implementation results indicate that it can be computed efficiently, while it is slower than that over the (BLS12-P446) curve at the same security level.

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of wireless signals is demanded in many applications. In addition to classical methods such as MUSIC and ESPRIT, non-linear algorithms such as compressed sensing have become common subjects of study recently. Deep learning or machine learning is also known as a non-linear algorithm and has been applied in various fields. Generally, DOA estimation using deep learning is classified as on-grid estimation. A major problem of on-grid estimation is that the accuracy may be degraded when the DOA is near the boundary. To reduce such estimation errors, we propose a method of combining two DNNs whose grids are offset by one half of the grid size. Simulation results show that our proposal outperforms MUSIC which is a typical off-grid estimation method. Furthermore, it is shown that the DNN specially trained for a close DOA case achieves very high accuracy for that case compared with MUSIC.

Most existing object detection methods and text detection methods are mainly designed to detect either text or objects. In some scenarios where the task is to find the target word pointed-at by an object, results of existing methods are far from satisfying. However, such scenarios happen often in human-computer interaction, when the computer needs to figure out which word the user is pointing at. Comparing with object detection, pointed-at word localization (PAWL) requires higher accuracy, especially in dense text scenarios. Moreover, in printed document, characters are much smaller than those in scene text detection datasets such as ICDAR-2013, ICDAR-2015 and ICPR-2018 etc. To address these problems, the authors propose a novel target word localization network (TWLN) to detect the pointed-at word in printed documents. In this work, a single deep neural network is trained to extract the features of markers and text sequentially. For each image, the location of the marker is predicted firstly, according to the predicted location, a smaller image is cropped from the original image and put into the same network, then the location of pointed-at word is predicted. To train and test the networks, an efficient approach is proposed to generate the dataset from PDF format documents by inserting markers pointing at the words in the documents, which avoids laborious labeling work. Experiments on the proposed dataset demonstrate that TWLN outperforms the compared object detection method and optical character recognition method on every category of targets, especially when the target is a single character that only occupies several pixels in the image. TWLN is also tested with real photographs, and the accuracy shows no significant differences, which proves the validity of the generating method to construct the dataset.

Peer assessment in education has pedagogical benefits and is a promising method for grading a large number of submissions. At the same time, student reliability has been regarded as a problem; consequently, various methods of estimating highly reliable grades from scores given by multiple students have been proposed. Under most of the existing methods, a nonadaptive allocation pattern, which performs allocation in advance, is assumed. In this study, we analyze the effect of student-submission allocation on score estimation in peer assessment under a nonadaptive allocation setting. We examine three types of nonadaptive allocation methods, random allocation, circular allocation and group allocation, which are considered the commonly used approaches among the existing nonadaptive peer assessment methods. Through simulation experiments, we show that circular allocation and group allocation tend to yield lower accuracy than random allocation. Then, we utilize this result to improve the existing adaptive allocation method, which performs allocation and assessment in parallel and tends to make similar allocation result to circular allocation. We propose the method to replace part of the allocation with random allocation, and show that the method is effective through experiments.

Recently, machine learning approaches and user movement history analysis on mobile devices have attracted much attention. Generally, we need to apply text data into the word embedding tool for acquiring word vectors as the preprocessing of machine learning approaches. However, it is difficult for mobile devices to afford the huge cost of high-dimensional vector calculation. Thus, a low-cost user behavior and user movement history analysis approach should be considered. To address this issue, firstly, we convert the zip code and street house number into vectors instead of textual address information to reduce the cost of spatial vector calculation. Secondly, we propose a low-cost high-performance semantic and physical distance (real distance) calculation method that applied zip-code-based vectors. Finally, to verify the validity of our proposed method, we utilize the US zip code data to calculate both semantic and physical distances and compare their results with the previous method. The experimental results showed that our proposed method could significantly improve the performance of distance calculation and effectively control the cost to a low level.

With the rapid increase in the number of CPU cores, software that can utilize these many cores is required. A lock-free algorithm based on compare-and-swap (CAS) operations is one of the concurrency control methods to implement such multi-threading software. A multi-word CAS (MwCAS) operation is an extension of a CAS operation to swap multiple words atomically. However, we noticed that the performance of the existing MwCAS implementation is limited because of garbage collection even if in a low-contention environment. To achieve high performance in low-contention workloads, we propose a new MwCAS algorithm without garbage collection. Experimental results show that our approach is three to five times faster than implementation with garbage collection in low-contention workloads. Moreover, the performance of the proposed method is also superior in a high-contention environment.

This study presents a formulation for generating context-aware natural language by machine from visual representation. Given an image sequence input, the visual storytelling task (VST) aims to generate a coherent, object-focused, and contextualized sentence story. Previous works in this domain faced a problem in modeling an architecture that works in temporal multi-modal data, which led to a low-quality output, such as low lexical diversity, monotonous sentences, and inaccurate context. This study introduces a further improvement, that is, an end-to-end architecture, called cross-modal contextualize attention, optimized to extract visual-temporal features and generate a plausible story. Visual object and non-visual concept features are encoded from the convolutional feature map, and object detection features are joined with language features. Three scenarios are defined in decoding language generation by incorporating weights from a pre-trained language generation model. Extensive experiments are conducted to confirm that the proposed model outperforms other models in terms of automatic metrics and manual human evaluation.

Music is often used for emotion induction because it can change the emotions of people. However, since we subjectively feel different emotions when listening to music, we propose an emotion induction system that generates music that is adapted to each individual. Our system automatically generates suitable music for emotion induction based on the emotions predicted from an electroencephalogram (EEG). We examined three elements for constructing our system: 1) a music generator that creates music that induces emotions that resemble the inputs, 2) emotion prediction using EEG in real-time, and 3) the control of a music generator using the predicted emotions for making music that is suitable for inducing emotions. We constructed our proposed system using these elements and evaluated it. The results showed its effectiveness for inducing emotions and suggest that feedback loops that tailor stimuli to individuals can successfully induce emotions.

The unit commitment problem (UCP) is the problem of deciding up/down and generation-level patterns of energy production units. Due to the expansion of distributed energy resources and the liberalization of energy trading in recent years, solving the distributed UCP (DUCP) is attracting the attention of researchers. Once an up/down pattern is determined, the generation-level pattern can be decided distributively using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). However, ADMM does not guarantee convergence when deciding both up/down and generation-level patterns. In this paper, we propose a method to solve the DUCP using ADMM and constraint optimization programming. Numerical experiments show the efficacy of the proposed method.

In this letter, we propose a deep neural network and semi-supervised learning based dehazing algorithm. The dehazing network uses a pyramidal architecture to recover the haze-free scene from a single hazy image in a coarse-to-fine order. To faithfully restore the objects with different scales, we incorporate cascaded multi-scale convolutional blocks into each level of the pyramid. Feature fusion and transfer in the network are achieved using the paths constructed by interleaved residual connections. For better generalization to the complicated haze in real-world environments, we also devise a discriminator that enables semi-supervised adversarial training. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed work outperforms comparative ones with higher quantitative metrics and more visually pleasant outputs. It can also enhance the robustness of object detection under haze.

Software-defined networking (SDN) decouples the control and forwarding of network devices, providing benefits such as simplified control. However, due to cost constraints and other factors, SDN is difficult to fully deploy. It has been proposed that SDN devices can be incrementally deployed in a traditional IP network, i.e., hybrid SDN, to provide partial SDN benefits. Studies have shown that better traffic engineering performance can be achieved by modifying the coverage and placement of SDN devices in hybrid SDN, because they can influence the behavior of legacy switches through certain strategies. However, it is difficult to develop and execute a traffic engineering strategy in hybrid SDN. This article proposes a routing algorithm to achieve approximate load balancing, which minimizes the maximum link utilization by using the optimal solution of linear programming and merging the minimum split traffic flows. A multipath forwarding mechanism under the same problem is designed to optimize transmission time. Experiments show that our algorithm has certain advantages in link utilization and transmission time compared to traditional distributed routing algorithms like OSPF and some hybrid SDN routing mechanisms. Furthermore, our algorithm can approximate the control effect of full SDN when the deployment rate of SDN devices is 40%.

The haze situation will seriously affect the quality of license plate recognition and reduce the performance of the visual processing algorithm. In order to improve the quality of haze pictures, a license plate recognition algorithm based on haze weather is proposed in this paper. The algorithm in this paper mainly consists of two parts: The first part is MPGAN image dehazing, which uses a generative adversarial network to dehaze the image, and combines multi-scale convolution and perceptual loss. Multi-scale convolution is conducive to better feature extraction. The perceptual loss makes up for the shortcoming that the mean square error (MSE) is greatly affected by outliers; the second part is to recognize the license plate, first we use YOLOv3 to locate the license plate, the STN network corrects the license plate, and finally enters the improved LPRNet network to get license plate information. Experimental results show that the dehazing model proposed in this paper achieves good results, and the evaluation indicators PSNR and SSIM are better than other representative algorithms. After comparing the license plate recognition algorithm with the LPRNet algorithm, the average accuracy rate can reach 93.9%.

This paper presents a design method of a two-hop wireless power transfer (WPT) system for installing on a robot arm. The class-E inverter and the class-D rectifier are used on the transmission and receiving sides, respectively, in the proposed WPT system. Analytical equations for the proposed WPT system are derived as functions of the geometrical and physical parameters of the coils, such as the outer diameter and height of the coils, winding-wire diameter, and number of turns. Using the analytical equations, we can optimize the WPT system to obtain the design values with the theoretically highest power-delivery efficiency under the size limitation of the robot arm. The circuit experiments are in quantitative agreement with the theoretical predictions obtained from the analysis, indicating the validity of the analysis and design method. The experimental prototype achieved 83.6% power-delivery efficiency at 6.78MHz operating frequency and 39.3W output power.

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a promising data-driven matrix decomposition method, and is becoming very active and attractive in machine learning and blind source separation areas. So far NMF algorithm has been widely used in diverse applications, including image processing, anti-collision for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems and audio signal analysis, and so on. However the typical NMF algorithms cannot work well in underdetermined mixture, i.e., the number of observed signals is less than that of source signals. In practical applications, adding suitable constraints fused into NMF algorithm can achieve remarkable decomposition results. As a motivation, this paper proposes to add the minimum volume and minimum correlation constrains (MCV) to the NMF algorithm, which makes the new algorithm named MCV-NMF algorithm suitable for underdetermined scenarios where the source signals satisfy mutual independent assumption. Experimental simulation results validate that the MCV-NMF algorithm has a better performance improvement in solving RFID tag anti-collision problem than that of using the nearest typical NMF method.

Previous studies on anomaly detection in videos have trained detectors in which reconstruction and prediction tasks are performed on normal data so that frames on which their task performance is low will be detected as anomalies during testing. This paper proposes a new approach that involves sorting video clips, by using a generative network structure. Our approach learns spatial contexts from appearances and temporal contexts from the order relationship of the frames. Experiments were conducted on four datasets, and we categorized the anomalous sequences by appearance and motion. Evaluations were conducted not only on each total dataset but also on each of the categories. Our method improved detection performance on both anomalies with different appearance and different motion from normality. Moreover, combining our approach with a prediction method produced improvements in precision at a high recall.