In this letter, we analyze performances of a frequency offset estimation based on the maximum likelihood criterion and provide a theoretical proof that the mean squared error of the estimation grows with increase in the offset. Moreover, we propose a new iterative offset estimation method based on the analysis. By computer simulations, we show that the proposed estimator can achieve the lowest estimation error after a few iterations.

Cooperative caching is a key technique to reduce rapid growing video-on-demand's traffic by aggregating multiple cache storages. Existing strategies periodically calculate a sub-optimal allocation of the content caches in the network. Although such technique could reduce the generated traffic between servers, it comes with the cost of a large computational overhead. This overhead will be the cause of preventing these caches from following the rapid change in the access pattern. In this paper, we propose a light-weight scheme for cooperative caching by grouping contents and servers with color tags. In our proposal, we associate servers and caches through a color tag, with the aim to increase the effective cache capacity by storing different contents among servers. In addition to the color tags, we propose a novel hybrid caching scheme that divides its storage area into colored LFU (Least Frequently Used) and no-color LRU (Least Recently Used) areas. The colored LFU area stores color-matching contents to increase cache hit rate and no-color LRU area follows rapid changes in access patterns by storing popular contents regardless of their tags. On the top of the proposed architecture, we also present a new routing algorithm that takes benefit of the color tags information to reduce the traffic by fetching cached contents from the nearest server. Evaluation results, using a backbone network topology, showed that our color-tag based caching scheme could achieve a performance close to the sub-optimal one obtained with a genetic algorithm calculation, with only a few seconds of computational overhead. Furthermore, the proposed hybrid caching could limit the degradation of hit rate from 13.9% in conventional non-colored LFU, to only 2.3%, which proves the capability of our scheme to follow rapid insertions of new popular contents. Finally, the color-based routing scheme could reduce the traffic by up to 31.9% when compared with the shortest-path routing.

In the advanced digital terrestrial/television multimedia broadcasting (DTMB-A) standard, a preamble based on distance detection (PBDD) is adopted for robust synchronization and signalling transmission. However, traditional signalling detection method will completely fail to work under severe frequency selective channels with ultra-long delay spread 0dB echoes. In this paper, a novel transmission parameter signalling detection method is proposed for the preamble in DTMB-A. Compared with the conventional signalling detection method, the proposed scheme works much better when the maximum channel delay is close to the length of the guard interval (GI). Both theoretical analyses and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of detecting the transmitted signalling.

In this letter, we propose an acoustic distance rendering (ADR) algorithm that can efficiently create the proximity effect in virtual reality (VR) systems. By observing the variation of acoustic cues caused by the movement of the sound source in the near field, we develop a model that can closely approximates the near-field transfer function (NFTF). The developed model is used to efficiently compensate for the near-field effect on the head related transfer function (HRTF). The proposed algorithm is implemented and tested in the form of an audio plugin for a VR platform and the test results confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

The latest deep hashing methods perform hash codes learning and image feature learning simultaneously by using pairwise or triplet labels. However, generating all possible pairwise or triplet labels from the training dataset can quickly become intractable, where the majority of those samples may produce small costs, resulting in slow convergence. In this letter, we propose a novel deep discriminative supervised hashing method, called DDSH, which directly learns hash codes based on a new combined loss function. Compared to previous methods, our method can take full advantages of the annotated data in terms of pairwise similarity and image identities. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method preserves the instance-level similarity and outperforms state-of-the-art deep hashing methods in the image retrieval application. Remarkably, our 16-bits binary representation can surpass the performance of existing 48-bits binary representation, which demonstrates that our method can effectively improve the speed and precision of large scale image retrieval systems.

In statistical approaches such as statistical static timing analysis, the distribution of the maximum of plural distributions is computed by repeating a maximum operation of two distributions. Moreover, since each distribution is represented by a linear combination of several explanatory random variables so as to handle correlations efficiently, sensitivity of the maximum of two distributions to each explanatory random variable, that is, covariance between the maximum and an explanatory random variable, must be calculated in every maximum operation. Since distribution of the maximum of two Gaussian distributions is not a Gaussian, Gaussian mixture model is used for representing a distribution. However, if Gaussian mixture models are used, then it is not always possible to make both variance and covariance of the maximum correct simultaneously. We propose a new algorithm to determine covariance without deteriorating the accuracy of variance of the maximum, and show experimental results to evaluate its performance.

The likelihood-ratio based score level fusion (LR fusion) scheme is known as one of the most promising multibiometric fusion schemes. This scheme verifies a user by computing a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) for each modality, and comparing the total LLR to a threshold. It can happen in practice that genuine LLRs tend to be less than 0 for some modalities (e.g., the user is a “goat”, who is inherently difficult to recognize, for some modalities; the user suffers from temporary physical conditions such as injuries and illness). The LR fusion scheme can handle such cases by allowing the user to select a subset of modalities at the authentication phase and setting LLRs corresponding to missing query samples to 0. A recent study, however, proposed a modality selection attack, in which an impostor inputs only query samples whose LLRs are greater than 0 (i.e., takes an optimal strategy), and proved that this attack degrades the overall accuracy even if the genuine user also takes this optimal strategy. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the modality selection attack in more details. Specifically, we investigate whether the overall accuracy is improved by eliminating “goat” templates, whose LLRs tend to be less than 0 for genuine users, from the database (i.e., restricting modality selection). As an overall performance measure, we use the KL (Kullback-Leibler) divergence between a genuine score distribution and an impostor's one. We first prove the modality restriction hardly increases the KL divergence when a user can select a subset of modalities (i.e., selective LR fusion). We second prove that the modality restriction increases the KL divergence when a user needs to input all biometric samples (i.e., non-selective LR fusion). We conduct experiments using three real datasets (NIST BSSR1 Set1, Biosecure DS2, and CASIA-Iris-Thousand), and discuss directions of multibiometric fusion systems.

Asymptotically good sequences of linear ramp secret sharing schemes have been intensively studied by Cramer et al. in terms of sequences of pairs of nested algebraic geometric codes [4]-[8], [10]. In those works the focus is on full privacy and full reconstruction. In this paper we analyze additional parameters describing the asymptotic behavior of partial information leakage and possibly also partial reconstruction giving a more complete picture of the access structure for sequences of linear ramp secret sharing schemes. Our study involves a detailed treatment of the (relative) generalized Hamming weights of the considered codes.

Accurate stereo matching remains a challenging problem in case of weakly-textured areas, discontinuities and occlusions. In this letter, a novel stereo matching method, consisting of leveraging feature ensemble network to compute matching cost, error detection network to predict outliers and priority-based occlusion disambiguation for refinement, is presented. Experiments on the Middlebury benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method yields competitive results against the state-of-the-art algorithms.

This paper deals with the constrained DAG shortest path problem (CDSP), which finds the shortest path on a given directed acyclic graph (DAG) under any logical constraints posed on taken edges. There exists a previous work that uses binary decision diagrams (BDDs) to represent the logical constraints, and traverses the input DAG and the BDD simultaneously. The time and space complexity of this BDD-based method is derived from BDD size, and tends to be fast only when BDDs are small. However, since it does not prioritize the search order, there is considerable room for improvement, particularly for large BDDs. We combine the well-known A* search with the BDD-based method synergistically, and implement several novel heuristic functions. The key insight here is that the ‘shortest path’ in the BDD is a solution of a relaxed problem, just as the shortest path in the DAG is. Experiments, particularly practical machine learning applications, show that the proposed method decreases search time by up to 2 orders of magnitude, with the specific result that it is 2,000 times faster than a commercial solver. Moreover, the proposed method can reduce the peak memory usage up to 40 times less than the conventional method.

One of the problems associated with voice conversion from a nonparallel corpus is how to find the best match or alignment between the source and the target vector sequences without linguistic information. In a previous study, alignment was achieved by minimizing the distance between the source vector and the transformed vector. This method, however, yielded a sequence of feature vectors that were not well matched with the underlying speaker model. In this letter, the vectors were selected from the candidates by maximizing the overall likelihood of the selected vectors with respect to the target model in the HMM context. Both objective and subjective evaluations were carried out using the CMU ARCTIC database to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time optical flow processor using a single field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. By introducing the modified initial flow generation method, the successive over-relaxation (SOR) method for both layers, the optimization of the reciprocal operation method, and the image division method, it is now possible to both reduce hardware requirements and improve flow accuracy. Additionally, by introducing a pipeline structure to this processor, high-throughput hardware implementation could be achieved. Total logic cell (LC) amounts and processer memory capacity are reduced by about 8% and 16%, respectively, compared to our previous hierarchical optical flow estimation (HOE) processor. The results of our evaluation confirm that this processor can perform 30 fps wide extended graphics array (WXGA) 175.7MHz real-time optical flow processing with a single FPGA.

As technology further scales semiconductor devices, aging-induced device degradation has become one of the major threats to device reliability. In addition, aging mechanisms like the negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) are known to be sensitive to workload (i.e., signal probability) that is hard to be assumed at design phase. In this work, we analyze the workload dependence of NBTI degradation using a processor, and propose a novel technique to estimate the worst-case paths. In our approach, we exploit the fact that the deterministic nature of circuit structure limits the amount of NBTI degradation on different paths, and propose a two-stage path extraction algorithm to identify the invariant critical paths (ICPs) in the processor. Utilizing these paths, we also propose an optimization technique for the replacement of internal node control logic that mitigates the NBTI degradation in the design. Through numerical experiment on two processor designs, we achieved nearly 300x reduction in the sheer number of paths on both designs. Utilizing the extracted ICPs, we achieved 96x-197x speedup without loss in mitigation gain.

A circuit-aging simulation that efficiently calculates temporal change of rare circuit-failure probability is proposed. While conventional methods required a long computational time due to the necessity of conducting separate calculations of failure probability at each device age, the proposed Monte Carlo based method requires to run only a single set of simulation. By applying the augmented reliability and subset simulation framework, the change of failure probability along the lifetime of the device can be evaluated through the analysis of the Monte Carlo samples. Combined with the two-step sample generation technique, the proposed method reduces the computational time to about 1/6 of that of the conventional method while maintaining a sufficient estimation accuracy.

Small delay caused by a resistive open is difficult to test since circuit delay varies depending on various factors such as process variations and crosstalk even in fault-free circuits. We consider the problem of discriminating a resistive open by anomaly detection using delay distributions obtained by the effect of various input signals provided to adjacent lines. We examined the circuit delay in a fault-free circuit and a faulty circuit by applying electromagnetic simulator and circuit simulator for a line structure with adjacent lines under consideration of process variations. The effectiveness of the method that discriminates a resistive open is shown for the results obtained by the simulation.

A Tikhonov regularized RLS algorithm with an exponential weighting factor, i.e., a leaky RLS (LRLS) algorithm was proposed by the author. A quadratic version of the LRLS algorithm also exists in the literature of adaptive filters. In this letter, a cubic version of the LRLS filter which is computationally efficient is proposed when the length of the adaptive filter is short. The proposed LRLS filter includes only a divide per iteration although its multiplications and additions increase in number. Simulation results show that the proposed LRLS filter is faster for its short length than the existing quadratic version of the LRLS filter.

In this paper, we propose a deep learning based model for classifying speech-acts using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The model uses some bigram features including parts-of-speech (POS) tags and dependency-relation bigrams, which represent syntactic structural information in utterances. Previous classification approaches using CNN have commonly exploited word embeddings using morpheme unigrams. However, the proposed model first extracts two different bigram features that well reflect the syntactic structure of utterances and then represents them as a vector representation using a word embedding technique. As a result, the proposed model using bigram embeddings achieves an accuracy of 89.05%. Furthermore, the accuracy of this model is relatively 2.8% higher than that of competitive models in previous studies.

Let $mathbb{F}_q$ be a finite field of q elements, $R=mathbb{F}_q+umathbb{F}_q$ (u2=0) and D2n= be a dihedral group of order n. Left ideals of the group ring R[D2n] are called left dihedral codes over R of length 2n, and abbreviated as left D2n-codes over R. Let n be a positive factor of qe+1 for some positive integer e. In this paper, any left D2n-code over R is uniquely decomposed into a direct sum of concatenated codes with inner codes Ai and outer codes Ci, where Ai is a cyclic code over R of length n and Ci is a linear code of length 2 over a Galois extension ring of R. More precisely, a generator matrix for each outer code Ci is given. Moreover, a formula to count the number of these codes is obtained, the dual code for each left D2n-code is determined and all self-dual left D2n-codes over R are presented, respectively.

An improved beamformer, which uses joint estimation of the reconstructed interference-plus-noise (IPN) covariance matrix and array steering vector (ASV), is proposed. It can mitigate the problem of performance degradation in situations where the desired signal exists in the sample covariance matrix and the steering vector pointing has large errors. In the proposed method, the covariance matrix is reconstructed by weighted sum of the exterior products of the interferences' ASV and their individual power to reject the desired signal component, the coefficients of which can be accurately estimated by the compressed sensing (CS) and total least squares (TLS) techniques. Moreover, according to the theorem of sequential vector space projection, the actual ASV is estimated from an intersection of two subspaces by applying the alternating projection algorithm. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed beamformer, which is clearly better than the existing robust adaptive beamformers.

Wireless sensor networks usually deploy sensor nodes with limited energy resources in unattended environments so that people have difficulty in replacing or recharging the depleted devices. In order to balance the energy dissipation and prolong the network lifetime, this paper proposes a routing spanning tree-based clustering algorithm (RSTCA) which uses routing spanning tree to analyze clustering. In this study, the proposed scheme consists of three phases: setup phase, cluster head (CH) selection phase and steady phase. In the setup phase, several clusters are formed by adopting the K-means algorithm to balance network load on the basis of geographic location, which solves the randomness problem in traditional distributed clustering algorithm. Meanwhile, a conditional inter-cluster data traffic routing strategy is created to simplify the networks into subsystems. For the CH selection phase, a novel CH selection method, where CH is selected by a probability based on the residual energy of each node and its estimated next-time energy consumption as a function of distance, is formulated for optimizing the energy dissipation among the nodes in the same cluster. In the steady phase, an effective modification that counters the boundary node problem by adjusting the data traffic routing is designed. Additionally, by the simulation, the construction procedure of routing spanning tree (RST) and the effect of the three phases are presented. Finally, a comparison is made between the RSTCA and the current distributed clustering protocols such as LEACH and LEACH-DT. The results show that RSTCA outperforms other protocols in terms of network lifetime, energy dissipation and coverage ratio.