The topic of retrieving videos containing a desired person from a dataset just using the content of faces without any help of textual information has many interesting applications like video surveillance, social network, video mining, etc. However, traditional face matching against a huge number of detected faces leads to an unacceptable response time and may also reduce the accuracy due to the large variations in facial expressions, poses, lighting, etc. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel method to generate discriminative “signatures” for efficiently retrieving the videos containing the same person with a query. In this research, the signature is defined as a compact, discriminative and reduced dimensionality representation, which is generated from a set of high-dimensional feature vectors of an individual. The desired videos are retrieved based on the similarities between the signature of the query and those of individuals in the database. In particular, we make the following contributions. Firstly, we give an algorithm of two directional linear discriminant analysis with maximum correntropy criterion (2DLDA-MCC) as an extension to our recently proposed maximum correntropy criterion based linear discriminant analysis (LDA-MCC). Both algorithms are robust to outliers and noise. Secondly, we present an approach for transferring a set of exemplars to a fixed-length signature using LDA-MCC and 2DLDA-MCC, resulting in two kinds of signatures that are called 1D signature and 2D signature. Finally, a novel video retrieval scheme is given based on the signatures, which has low storage requirement and can achieve a fast search. Evaluations on a large dataset of videos show reliable measurement of similarities by using the proposed signatures to represent the identities generated from videos. Experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed video retrieval scheme has the potential to substantially reduce the response time and slightly increase the mean average precision of retrieval.

Managing the configurations of complex systems consisting of various components requires the combined efforts by multiple domain experts. These experts have extensive knowledge about different components in the system they need to manage but little understanding of the issues outside their individual areas of expertise. As a result, the configuration constraints, changes, and procedures specified by those involved in the management of a complex system are often interrelated with one another without being noticed, and their integration into a coherent procedure for configuration represents a major challenge. The method of synthesizing the configuration procedure introduced in this paper addresses this challenge using a combination of formal specification and model finding techniques. We express the knowledge on system management with this method, which is provided by domain experts as first-order logic formulas in the Alloy specification language, and combine it with system-configuration information and the resulting specification. We then employ the Alloy Analyzer to find a system model that satisfies all the formulas in this specification. The model obtained corresponds to a procedure for system configurations that satisfies all expert-specified constraints. In order to reduce the resources needed in the procedure synthesis, we reduce the length of procedures to be synthesized by defining and using intermediate goal states to divide operation procedures into shorter steps. Finally, we evaluate our method through a case study on a procedure to consolidate virtual machines.

A procedural terrain generation method is presented in this paper. It uses a user-drawn sketch map, which is a raster image with lines and polygons painted by different colors to represent sketches of different terrain features, as input to control the placement of terrain features. Some simple parameters which can be easily understood and adjusted by users are used to control the generation process. To further automatically generate terrains, a mechanism that automatically generates sketches is also put forward. The method is implemented in a PC, and experiments show that terrains are generated efficiently. This method provides users a controllable way to generate terrains.

In this paper, we propose an efficient channel estimation scheme in bi-directional wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) relay systems applying analog network coding (ANC). In the relay systems applying ANC, channel separation is needed to estimate each of the bi-directional channels simultaneously from the combined received signal. In the conventional channel estimation schemes, relatively higher-ratio pilots are needed to obtain accurate channels. In contrast, we propose a channel estimation scheme with sparse pilots, while maintaining high accuracy for channel estimation. In the proposed scheme, Walsh codes are inserted as the pilot symbols at both end nodes, and the individual channels are obtained by correlation processing from the combined signals. The improved bit error rate (BER) and throughput performances of the proposed scheme are shown through computer simulations.

In classical routing protocols, geographical distances/locations are typically used as the metric to select the best route, under the assumption that shorter distances exhibit lower energy consumption and nodes within the communication range of the sender can receive packets with a certain success probability. However, in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), sound propagation in the ocean medium is more complex than that in the air due to many factors, including sound speed variations and the interaction of sound waves with the sea surface and floor, causing the sound rays to bend. Therefore, propagation of sound is anisotropic in water, and may cause a phenomenon called shadow zone where nodes in the communication range of the sender cannot hear any signal. This renders conventional routing protocols no longer energy-efficient. In this paper, we make use of the ray-model to account for the environment-dependent behavior of the underwater channel, re-define nodes' one-hop neighbors based on signal attenuation rather than geographical distance, and design a distributed energy-efficient routing protocol for UASNs. Results show that our ray-model-based routing policy consistently outperforms the shortest path policy, and performs very close to the optimal one in several scenarios.

Reprogramming for wireless sensor networks is essential to upload new code or to alter the functionality of existing code. To overcome the weakness of the centralized approach of the traditional solutions, He et al. proposed the notion of distributed reprogramming where multiple authorized network users are able to reprogram sensor nodes without involving the base station. They also gave a novel distributed reprogramming protocol called SDRP by using identity-based signature, and provided a comprehensive security analysis for their protocol. In this letter, unfortunately, we demonstrate that SDRP is insecure as the protocol fails to satisfy the property of authenticity and integrity of code images, the most important security requirement of a secure reprogramming protocol.

One of the largest challenges for coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) is how to efficiently map applications. The key issues for mapping are (1) how to reduce the memory bandwidth, (2) how to exploit parallelism in algorithms and (3) how to achieve load balancing and take full advantage of the hardware potential. In this paper, we propose a novel parallelism scheme, called ‘Hybrid partitioning’, for mapping a H.264 high definition (HD) decoder onto REMUS-II, a CGRA system-on-chip (SoC). Combining good features of data partitioning and task partitioning, our methodology mainly consists of three levels from top to bottom: (1) hybrid task pipeline based on slice and macroblock (MB) level; (2) MB row-level data parallelism; (3) sub-MB level parallelism method. Further, on the sub-MB level, we propose a few mapping strategies such as hybrid variable block size motion compensation (Hybrid VBSMC) for MC, 2D-wave for intra 44, parallel processing order for deblocking. With our mapping strategies, we improved the algorithm's performance on REMUS-II. For example, with a luma 1616 MB, the Hybrid VBSMC achieves 4 times greater performance than VBSMC and 2.2 times greater performance than fixed 44 partition approach. Finally, we achieve 1080p@33fps H.264 high-profile (HiP)@level 4.1 decoding when the working frequency of REMUS-II is 200 MHz. Compared with typical hardware platforms, we can achieve better performance, area, and flexibility. For example, our performance achieves approximately 175% improvement than that of a commercial CGRA processor XPP-III while only using 70% of its area.

Segmenting indicated objects from natural color images remains a challenging problem for researches of image processing. In this paper, a novel level set approach is presented, to address this issue. In this segmentation algorithm, a contour that lies inside a particular region of the concerned object is first initialized by a user. The level set model is then applied, to extract the object of arbitrary shape and size containing this initial region. Constrained on the position of the initial contour, our proposed framework combines two particular energy terms, namely local and global energy, in its energy functional, to control movement of the contour toward object boundaries. These energy terms are mainly based on graph partitioning active contour models and Bhattacharyya flow, respectively. Its flow describes dissimilarities, measuring correlative relationships between the region of interest and surroundings. The experimental results obtained from our image collection show that the suggested method yields accurate and good performance, or better than a number of segmentation algorithms, when applied to various natural images.

Small delay defects can cause serious issues such as very short lifetime in the recent VLSI devices. Delay measurement is useful to detect small delay defects in manufacturing testing. This paper presents a design for delay measurement to detect small delay defects on global routing resources, such as double, hex and long lines, in a Xilinx Virtex 4 based FPGA. This paper also shows a measurement method using the proposed design. The proposed measurement method is based on an existing one for SoC using delay value measurement circuit (DVMC). The proposed measurement modifies the construction of configurable logic blocks (CLBs) and utilizes an on-chip DVMC newly added. The number of configurations required by the proposed measurement is 60, which is comparable to that required by stuck-at fault testing for global routing resources in FPGAs. The area overhead is low for general FPGAs, in which the area of routing resources is much larger than that of the other elements such as CLBs. The area of every modified CLB is 7% larger than an original CLB, and the area of the on-chip DVMC is 22% as large as that of an original CLB. For recent FPGAs, we can estimate that the area overhead is approximately 2% or less of the FPGAs.

Semantic concept in an utterance is obtained by a fuzzy matching methods to solve problems such as words' variation induced by automatic speech recognition (ASR), or missing field of key information by users in the process of spoken language understanding (SLU). A two-stage method is proposed: first, we adopt conditional random field (CRF) for building probabilistic models to segment and label entity names from an input sentence. Second, fuzzy matching based on similarity function is conducted between the named entities labeled by a CRF model and the reference characters of a dictionary. The experiments compare the performances in terms of accuracy and processing speed. Dice similarity and cosine similarity based on TF score can achieve better accuracy performance among four similarity measures, which equal to and greater than 93% in F1-measure. Especially the latter one improved by 8.8% and 9% respectively compared to q-gram and improved edit-distance, which are two conventional methods for string fuzzy matching.

To provide robust wireless data transmission over fading channels, various schemes which involve the use of relays have been proposed. In some of those schemes, the relay chooses not to forward the received message if its reliability is deemed as too low. Some researchers refer to such schemes as selective decode-and-forward. Our work in this paper falls into such a category. More specifically speaking, the relay in our system is a censorial relay (a relay that performs censorial task). It evaluates the reliability, in terms of log likelihood ratio (LLR), of a received data bit (from the source). If its LLR magnitude is below some preset threshold, then it is censored (i.e. not sent to the destination). When the channel is Rayleigh faded, closed-form bit error rate (BER) expressions for the proposed system are derived for several scenarios. Those scenarios are differentiated by the availability of an energy detector (ED) and the various degrees of knowledge regarding the channel state information (CSI). Aided by those closed-form BER expressions, the system parameters can be efficiently optimized to achieve the minimum BER. Simulation results are observed to closely match theoretical values, as computed by the afore-mentioned closed-form BER expressions. As compared to some existing relay-assisted systems in which censoring is incorporated, the performance of our system is better in terms of BER when the same amount of CSI is exploited.

Amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) constellation with Gray mapping was proposed recently. Inspired by the simplified soft demapping for regular Gray-QAM, a simplified soft demapping algorithm for Gray-APSK is proposed in this paper. Compared with conventional soft demapping schemes, its complexity is greatly reduced with only a little SNR loss, which is validated by the complexity analysis and FPGA compilation results.

Single-packet attack can be tracked with logging-based IP traceback approaches, whereas DDoS attack can be tracked with marking-based approaches. However, both approaches have their limits. Logging-based approaches incur heavy overhead for packet-digest storage as well as time overhead for both path recording and recovery. Marking-based approaches incur little traceback overhead but are unable to track single packets. Simply deploying both approaches in the same network to deal with single-packet and DDoS attacks is not an efficient solution due to the heavy traceback overhead. Recent studies suggest that hybrid approaches are more efficient as they consume less router memory to store packet digests and require fewer attack packets to recover attack paths. Thus, the hybrid single packet traceback approach is more promising in efficiently tracking both single-packet and DDoS attacks. The major challenge lies in reducing storage and time overhead while maintaining single-packet traceback capability. We present in this paper a new hybrid approach to efficiently track single-packet attacks by designing a novel path fragment encoding scheme using the orthogonality of Walsh matrix and the degree distribution characteristic of router-level topologies. Compared to HIT (Hybrid IP Traceback), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the most efficient hybrid approach for single-packet traceback, our approach has three advantages. First, it reduces the overhead by 2/3 in both storage and time for recording packet paths. Second, the time overhead for recovering packet paths is also reduced by a calculatable amount. Finally, our approach generates no more than 2/3 of the false-positive paths generated by HIT.

It is believed that the wavelength switched optical network (WSON) technology is moving towards being adopted by large-scale networks. Wavelength conversion and signal regeneration through reamplifying, reshaping, and retiming (3R) are beneficial to support the expansion of WSON. In many cases, these two functions can be technically integrated into a single shared physical component, namely the wavelength convertible 3R regenerator (WC3R). However, fully deploying such devices is infeasible due to their excessive cost. Thus, this topic serves as a motivation behind the investigation of the sparse placement issue of WC3Rs presented in this paper. A series of strategies are proposed based on knowledge of the network. Moreover, a novel adaptive routing and joint resource assignment algorithm is presented to provision the lightpaths in WSON with sparsely placed WC3Rs. Extensive simulation trials are conducted under even and uneven distribution of WC3R resource. Each strategic feature is examined for its efficiency in lowering the blocking probability. The results reveal that carefully designed sparse placement of WC3Rs can achieve performance comparable to that of full WC3R placement scenario. Furthermore, the expenditure of WC3R deployment also depends on the type of used WC3Rs characterized by the wavelength convertibility, i.e., fixed WC3R or tunable WC3R. This paper also investigates WSON from the perspective of cost and benefit by employing different types of WC3Rs in order to find the possibility of more efficient WC3R investment.

We have investigated the operational performance of an optical serial-to-parallel conversion scheme using a phase-shifted preamble handling optical packets formatted by differential phase shift keying (DPSK) for integrated optical serial-to-parallel converter (OSPC). The same architecture for on-off keyed signals, based on a transmitter-side preamble at the top of the packet and phase-shifted by π/2, which is then -π/2 phase-biased with a Mach-Zehnder delay interferometer (MZDI), is available for binary and differential PSK signals. The delay length of these signals is determined by the relative timing positions of the gated bit and a balanced receiver-side photodetector. We simulated the operational performance of this scheme and its tolerance against the degree of modulation and optical chirp, with our results showing that a phase shift of more than 0.94π is required in order to attain a suppression ratio in the OSPC output consistent with a bit error rate of less than 10-9 (based on the ratio of intensity of the extracted bit to the maximum peak intensity of the cancelled bits using a single-arm phase modulator). However, by using a Mach-Zehnder phase modulator, the modulation angle can be relaxed to about 0.36π. Experimental investigation of the OSPC showed that its functional tolerance with respect to the modulation angle agreed well with the simulated values. Finally, we performed optical label processing using the OSPC in conjunction with an address table, and our results confirmed the potential of the OSPC for use in label recognition.

Link prediction in social networks, such as friendship networks and coauthorship networks, has recently attracted a great deal of attention. There have been numerous attempts to address the problem of link prediction through diverse approaches. In the present paper, we focused on predicting links in social networks using information flow via active links. The information flow heavily depends on link activeness. The links become active if the interactions happen frequently and recently with respect to the current time. The time stamps of the interactions or links provide vital information for determining the activeness of the links. In the present paper, we introduced a new algorithm, referred to as T_Flow, that captures the important aspects of information flow via active links in social networks. We tested T_Flow with two social network data sets, namely, a data set extracted from Facebook friendship network and a coauthorship network data set extracted from ePrint archives. We compare the link prediction performances of T_Flow with the previous method PropFlow. The results of T_Flow method revealed a notable improvement in link prediction for facebook data and significant improvement in link prediction for coauthorship data.

Large-scale introduction of renewable energy such as photovoltaic energy and wind is a big motivation for renovating conventional grid systems. To be independent from existing power grids and to use renewable energy as much as possible, a decentralized energy network is proposed as a new grid system. The decentralized energy network is placed among houses to connect them with each other, and each house has a PV panel and a battery. A contribution of this paper is a network topology and battery size exploration for the decentralized energy network in order to make effective use of renewable energy. The proposed method for exploring the decentralized energy network design is inspired by the design methodology of VLSI systems, especially design space exploration in system-level design. The proposed method is based on mixed integer programming (MIP) base power flow optimization, and it was evaluated for all design instances. Experimental results show that the decentralized energy network has the following features. 1) The energy loss and energy purchased due to power shortage were not affected by each battery size but largely affected by the sum of all battery sizes in the network, and 2) the network topology did not largely affect the energy loss and the purchased energy. These results will become a useful guide to designing an optimal decentralized energy network for each region.

In this paper, we proposed that an area- and speed-effective fixed-point pipelined divider be used for reducing the bit-width of a division unit to fit a mobile rendering processor. To decide the bit-width of a division unit, error analysis has been carried out in various ways. As a result, when the original bit-width was 31-bit, the proposed method reduced the bit-width to 24-bit and reduced the area by 42% with a maximum error of 0.00001%.

This paper investigates the transmission capacity of open-loop spatial multiplexing with zero-forcing receivers in overlaid ad hoc networks. We first derive asymptotic closed-form expressions for the transmission capacity of two coexisting networks (a primary network vs. a secondary network). We then address a special case with equal numbers of transmit and receive antennas through exact analysis. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our expressions. Our findings show that the overall transmission capacity of coexisting networks will improve significantly over that of a single network if the primary network can tolerate a slight outage probability increase. This improvement can be further boosted if more streams are configured in the spatial multiplexing scheme; less improvement is achieved by placing more antennas at the receive side than the transmit side. However, when the stream number exceeds a certain limit, spatial multiplexing will produce negative effect for the overlaid network.

Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTN) can provide an underlying base to support mobility environments. DTN is equipped with advanced features such as custody transfer and hop by hop routing which can tackle the frequent disconnections of mobile devices by buffering bundles and dynamically making hop-by-hop routing decisions under intermittent connectivity environment. In this paper, we have proposed a DTN routing protocol HALF (Handoff-based And Limited Flooding) which can manage and improve performance of disrupted and challenging communication between mobile nodes in the presence of an infrastructure network consisting of fixed interconnected nodes (routers). HALF makes use of the general handoff mechanisms intended for the IP network, in a DTN way and also integrates a limited flooding technique to it. Simulation results show that HALF attains better performance than other existing DTN routing protocols under diverse network conditions. As the traffic intensity changes from low to high, delivery ratio of other DTN routing protocols decreased by 50% to 75% whereas in HALF such ratio is reduced by less than 5%. HALF can deliver about 3 times more messages than the other protocols when the disrupted network has to deal with larger size of messages. If we calculate the overhead ratio in terms of 'how many extra (successful) transfer' is needed for each delivery, HALF gives less than 20% overhead ratio while providing a good delivery ratio.