In this study, we investigate outdoor propagation measurements performed in an industrial park environment at 28.3GHz band. The propagation characteristics were evaluated with the measurement result regarding the path loss characteristics. Ray tracing simulation was also studied and compared with the measurement data to evaluate the quantitative accuracy of ray tracing in millimeter-wave band wireless propagations. Ray tracing, whose accuracy was evaluated based on a comparison with the measurement results, can aid in the theoretical design of the coverage area and deterministic channel modeling.

The adiabatic quantum-flux-parametron (AQFP) is an energy-efficient superconductor logic element based on the quantum flux parametron. AQFP circuits can operate with energy dissipation near the thermodynamic and quantum limits by maximizing the energy efficiency of adiabatic switching. We have established the design methodology for AQFP logic and developed various energy-efficient systems using AQFP logic, such as a low-power microprocessor, reversible computer, single-photon image sensor, and stochastic electronics. We have thus demonstrated the feasibility of the wide application of AQFP logic in future information and communications technology. In this paper, we present a tutorial review on AQFP logic to provide insights into AQFP circuit technology as an introduction to this research field. We describe the historical background, operating principle, design methodology, and recent progress of AQFP logic.

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.

Platform-mounted small antennas increase dielectric loss and conductive loss and decrease the radiation efficiency. This paper proposes a novel antenna design method to improve radiation efficiency for platform-mounted small antennas by characteristic mode analysis. The proposed method uses mapping of modal weighting coefficient (MWC) and infinitesimal dipole and evaluate the metal casing with 100mm × 55mm × 23mm as a platform excited by an inverted-F antenna. The simulation and measurement results show that the radiation efficiency of 5% is improved with the whole system from 2.5% of the single antenna.

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.

In the state estimation of steady-state power networks, a cyber attack that cannot be detected from the residual (i.e., the estimation error) is called a false data injection (FDI) attack. In this letter, to enforce the security of power networks, we propose a method of detecting an FDI attack. In the proposed method, an FDI attack is detected by randomly choosing sensors used in the state estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is presented by two examples including the IEEE 14-bus system.

Rain attenuation characteristics due to typhoon passage are discussed using the Ku-band BS satellite signal observations conducted by Osaka Electro-Communication University in Neayagawa from 1988 to 2019. The degree of hourly rain attenuation due to rainfall rate is largely enhanced as typhoon passes the east side of the station, while it becomes smaller in the case of west side passage. Compared to hourly ground wind velocities of nearby AMeDAS, the equivalent path lengths of rain attenuation become larger as the wind directions approach the same angle to the satellite, while they become smaller as the wind directions approach the opposite angle to the satellite. The increase and decrease of the equivalent path lengths are confirmed in other Ku-band and Ka-band satellite paths with different azimuth angles, such as CS, SKP, and SBC. Modified equivalent path lengths calculated by a simple propagation path model including horizontal wind speeds along the same direction to the satellite agree well with the equivalent path lengths observed by each satellite. The equivalent path lengths are, for the first time, proved to be largely affected by the direction of typhoon passage and the horizontal wind velocities.

Incremental Learning, a machine learning methodology, trains the continuously arriving input data and extends the model's knowledge. When it comes to unlabeled data streams, incremental learning task becomes more challenging. Our newly proposed incremental learning methodology, Data Augmented Incremental Learning (DAIL), learns the ever-increasing real-time streams with reduced memory resources and time. Initially, the unlabeled batches of data streams are clustered using the proposed clustering algorithm, Clustering based on Autoencoder and Gaussian Model (CLAG). Later, DAIL creates an updated incremental model for the labelled clusters using data augmentation. DAIL avoids the retraining of old samples and retains only the most recently updated incremental model holding all old class information. The use of data augmentation in DAIL combines the similar clusters generated with different data batches. A series of experiments verified the significant performance of CLAG and DAIL, producing scalable and efficient incremental model.

In this paper, we propose a new training framework named the INmfCA algorithm for nonparallel voice conversion (VC) systems. To train conversion models, traditional VC frameworks require parallel corpora, in which source and target speakers utter the same linguistic contents. Although the frameworks have achieved high-quality VC, they are not applicable in situations where parallel corpora are unavailable. To acquire conversion models without parallel corpora, nonparallel methods are widely studied. Although the frameworks achieve VC under nonparallel conditions, they tend to require huge background knowledge or many training utterances. This is because of difficulty in disentangling linguistic and speaker information without a large amount of data. In this work, we tackle this problem by exploiting NMF, which can factorize acoustic features into time-variant and time-invariant components in an unsupervised manner. The method acquires alignment between the acoustic features of a source speaker's utterances and a target dictionary and uses the obtained alignment as activation of NMF to train the source speaker's dictionary without parallel corpora. The acquisition method is based on the INCA algorithm, which obtains the alignment of nonparallel corpora. In contrast to the INCA algorithm, the alignment is not restricted to observed samples, and thus the proposed method can efficiently utilize small nonparallel corpora. The results of subjective experiments show that the combination of the proposed algorithm and the INCA algorithm outperformed not only an INCA-based nonparallel framework but also CycleGAN-VC, which performs nonparallel VC without any additional training data. The results also indicate that a one-shot VC framework, which does not need to train source speakers, can be constructed on the basis of the proposed method.

In this paper, we study the number of failed components in a consecutive-k-out-of-n:G system. The distributions and expected values of the number of failed components when system is failed or working at a particular time t are evaluated. We also apply them to the optimization problems concerned with the optimal number of components and the optimal replacement time. Finally, we present the illustrative examples for the expected number of failed components and give the numerical results for the optimization problems.

This paper presents improvement of port-to-port isolation characteristics of a linearly dual-polarized dual-band and wideband multi-ring microstrip antenna (MR-MSA) fed by two L-probes. The linearly dual-polarized dual-band and wideband MR-MSA consists of two circular ring patches and two L-probes arranged in a multi-layered dielectric substrate. By using a thick substrate for the L-probe and arranging two ring patches as radiation elements, the proposed antenna operates wideband and dual-band characteristics. Furthermore, by arranging two L-probes at the orthogonal positions, the proposed antenna can radiate dual linear polarizations. In this paper, for improving port-to-port isolation characteristics of the linearly dual-polarized dual-band and wideband MR-MSA fed by two L-probes, a via connected to the ground plane at the center of the radiation elements is arranged. The fractional bandwidths below -10dB reflection obtained by the simulation of the MR-MSA with the via were 17.0% and 14.4%. Furthermore, the simulated isolation characteristics were more than 21.0dB and 17.0dB in the two bands. Improvement of the isolation characteristics between two ports as well as the dual-band and wideband performance of the proposed MR-MSA with the via were confirmed by the simulation and the measurement.

Salient ship detection plays an important role in ensuring the safety of maritime transportation and navigation. However, due to the influence of waves, special weather, and illumination on the sea, existing saliency methods are still unable to achieve effective ship detection in a complex marine environment. To solve the problem, this paper proposed a novel saliency method based on an attention nested U-Structure (AU2Net). First, to make up for the shortcomings of the U-shaped structure, the pyramid pooling module (PPM) and global guidance paths (GGPs) are designed to guide the restoration of feature information. Then, the attention modules are added to the nested U-shaped structure to further refine the target characteristics. Ultimately, multi-level features and global context features are integrated through the feature aggregation module (FAM) to improve the ability to locate targets. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method could have at most 36.75% improvement in F-measure (Favg) compared to the other state-of-the-art methods.

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.

The non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) approach has been developed in the fifth-generation mobile communication systems (5G) and beyond, to improve the spectrum efficiency and accommodate a large number of IoT devices. Although power domain NOMA is a promising candidate, it is vulnerable to the nonlinearity of RF circuits and cannot achieve high-throughput transmission using high-level modulations in nonlinear environments. This study proposes a novel post-reception nonlinear compensation scheme consisting of two blind nonlinear compensators (BNLCs) and a frequency-domain equalizer (FDE) to reduce the effect of nonlinear distortion. The improvement possible with the proposed scheme is evaluated by using the error vector magnitude (EVM) of the received signal, which is obtained through computer simulations. The simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme can effectively improve the quality of the received downlink power-domain NOMA signal and enable high-throughput transmission under the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) nonlinearities via a frequency-selective fading channel.

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%.

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.

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has made extraordinary progress in image classification tasks. However, it is less effective to use CNN directly to detect image manipulation. To address this problem, we propose an image filtering layer and a multi-scale feature fusion module which can guide the model more accurately and effectively to perform image manipulation detection. Through a series of experiments, it is shown that our model achieves improvements on image manipulation detection compared with the previous researches.

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.

This letter proposes a post-processing method to improve the smoothness and safety of the path for an autonomous vehicle navigating in an urban environment. The proposed method transforms the initial path given by local path planning algorithms using a stochastic approach to improve its smoothness and safety. Using the proposed method, the initial path is efficiently transformed by iteratively updating the position of each waypoint within it. The proposed method also guarantees the feasibility of the transformed path. Experimental results verify that the proposed method can improve the smoothness and safety of the initial path and ensure the feasibility of the transformed path.