While online communities are important platforms for various social activities, many online communities fail to survive, which motivates researchers to investigate factors affecting the growth and survival of online communities. We comprehensively examine the effects of a wide variety of social network features on the growth and survival of communities in Reddit. We show that several social network features, including clique ratio, density, clustering coefficient, reciprocity and centralization, have significant effects on the survival of communities. In contrast, we also show that social network features examined in this paper only have weak effects on the growth of communities. Moreover, we conducted experiments predicting future growth and survival of online communities utilizing social network features as well as contents and activity features in the communities. The results show that prediction models utilizing social network features as well as contents and activity features achieve approximately 30% higher F1 measure, which evaluates the prediction accuracy, than the models only using contents and activity features. In contrast, it is also shown that social network features are not effective for predicting the growth of communities.

We propose online feedback path modeling with a pre-inverse type active noise control (PIANC) system to track the fluctuation stably in the feedback path. The conventional active noise control (ANC) system with online feedback path modeling (FBPM) filter bases filtered-x least mean square (FxLMS) algorithm. In the FxLMS algorithm, the error of FBPM influences a control filter, which generates an anti-noise, and secondary path modeling (SPM) filter. The control filter diverges when the error is too large. Therefore, it is difficult for the FxLMS algorithm to track the feedback path without divergence. On the other hand, the proposed approach converges stably because the FBPM filter's error does not influence a control filter on the PIANC system. Thus, the proposed method can reduce noise while tracking the feedback path. This paper verified the effectiveness of the proposed method by convergence analysis, computer simulation, and implementation of a digital signal processor.

A novel direction of arrival (DOA) estimation method for the coherent signal is presented in this paper. The proposed method applies the eigenvector associated with max eigenvalue, which contains the DOAs of all signals, to form a Toeplitz matrix, yielding an unconstrained optimization problem. Then, the DOA is obtained by peak searching of the pseudo power spectrum without the knowledge of signal number. It is illustrated that the method has a great performance and low computation complexity for the coherent signal. Simulation results verify the usefulness of the method.

Traffic categorization aims to classify network traffic into major service types. A modern deep neural network based on temporal sequence modeling is proposed for encrypted traffic categorization. The contemporary techniques such as dilated convolution and residual connection are adopted as the basic building block. The raw traffic files are pre-processed to generate 1-dimensional flow byte sequences and are feed into our specially-devised network. The proposed approach outperforms other existing methods greatly on a public traffic dataset.

This paper describes a novel 4K 120fps (frames per second) real-time HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) encoder for high-frame-rate video encoding and transmission. Motion portrayal problems such as motion blur and jerkiness may occur in video scenes containing fast-moving objects or quick camera panning. A high-frame-rate solves such problems and provides a more immersive viewing experience that can express even the fast-moving scenes without discomfort. It can also be used in remote operation for scenes with high motion, such as VAR (Video Assistant Referee) systems in sports. Real-time encoding of high-frame-rate videos with low latency and temporal scalability is required for providing such high-frame-rate video services. The proposed encoder achieves full 4K/120fps real-time encoding, which is twice the current 4K service frame rate of 60fps, by multichip configuration with two encoder LSI. Exchange of reference picture data near a spatially divided slice boundary provides cross-chip motion estimation, and maintains the coding efficiency. The encoder supports temporal-scalable coding mode, in which it output stream with temporal scalability transmitted over one or two transmission paths. The encoder also supports the other mode, low-delay coding mode, in which it achieves 21.8msec low-latency processing through motion vector restriction. Evaluation of the proposed encoder's multichip configuration shows that the BD-bitrate (the average rate of bitrate increase), compared to simple slice division without inter-chip transfer, is -2.86% at minimum and -2.41% on average in temporal-scalable coding mode. The proposed encoder system will open the door to the next generation of high-frame-rate UHDTV (ultra-high-definition television) services.

On the Internet, there are lots of unused domain names that are not used for any actual services. Domain parking is a monetization mechanism for displaying online advertisements in such unused domain names. Some domain names used in cyber attacks are known to leverage domain parking services after the attack. However, the temporal relationships between domain parking services and malicious domain names have not been studied well. In this study, we investigated how malicious domain names using domain parking services change over time. We conducted a large-scale measurement study of more than 66.8 million domain names that have used domain parking services in the past 19 months. We reveal the existence of 3,964 domain names that have been malicious after using domain parking. We further identify what types of malicious activities (e.g., phishing and malware) such malicious domain names tend to be used for. We also reveal the existence of 3.02 million domain names that utilized multiple parking services simultaneously or while switching between them. Our study can contribute to the efficient analysis of malicious domain names using domain parking services.

With the development and spread of Internet of Things technologies, various types of data for IoT applications can be generated anywhere and at any time. Among such data, there are data that depend heavily on generation time and location. We define these data as spatio-temporal data (STD). In previous studies, we proposed a STD retention system using vehicular networks to achieve the “Local production and consumption of STD” paradigm. The system can quickly provide STD for users within a specific location by retaining the STD within the area. However, this system does not take into account that each type of STD has different requirements for STD retention. In particular, the lifetime of STD and the diffusion time to the entire area directly influence the performance of STD retention. Therefore, we propose an efficient diffusion and elimination control method for retention based on the requirements of STD. The results of simulation evaluation demonstrated that the proposed method can satisfy the requirements of STD, while maintaining a high coverage rate in the area.

In network function virtualization (NFV) environments, service chaining is an emerging technology that enables network operators to provide network service dynamically and flexibly by using virtual network function (VNF). In the service chaining, a service chain is expected to be constructed based on VNF performances such as dependences among VNFs and traffic changing effects in VNFs. For achieving optimal data transmission services in NFV environments, we focus on the optimal service chain construction based on VNF performances so that both the maximum amount of traffic on links and the total number of VNF instances are decreased. In this paper, at first, an optimization problem is formulated for determining placements of VNFs and a route for each service chain. The service chains can be constructed by solving this optimization problem with an optimization software or meta-heuristic algorithm. Then, for the optimization problem, we propose a heuristic service chain construction algorithm. By using our proposed algorithm, the service chains can be constructed appropriately more quickly. We evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristic algorithm with simulation, and we investigate the effectiveness of the heuristic algorithm from the performance comparison. From some numerical examples, we show that the proposed heuristic algorithm is effective to decrease the amount of traffic and the number of VNF instances. Moreover, it is shown that our proposed heuristic algorithm can construct service chains quickly.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are often designed on IEEE 802.11 standards and are being widely studied due to their adaptability in practical network scenarios, where the overall performance has been improved by the use of the Multi-Radio and Multi-Channel (MRMC) configuration. However, because of the limitation on the number of available orthogonal channels and radios on each router, the network still suffers from low throughput due to packet collisions. Many studies have demonstrated that the optimized channel assignment to radio interfaces so as to avoid interference among wireless links is an effective solution. However, no existing channel assignment scheme can achieve hidden-terminal-free transmission and thus avoid communication performance degradation given the limited number of orthogonal channels. In this paper, we propose a new static channel assignment scheme CASCA (CSMA-aware Static Channel Assignment) based on a Partial MAX-SAT formulation of the channel assignment problem that incorporates a CSMA-aware interference model. The evaluation results show that CASCA achieves hidden-terminal-freedom in both grid and random topology networks with 3-4 orthogonal channels with preservation of network connectivity. In addition, the network simulation results show that CASCA presents good communication performance with low MAC-layer collision rate.

Distributed detection techniques of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) spatially multiplexed signals are studied in this paper. This system considered employs multiple mobile stations (MSs) to receive signals from a base station, and then share their received signal waveforms with collaborating MSs. In order to reduce the amount of traffic over the collaborating wireless links, distributed detection techniques are proposed, in which multiple MSs are in charge of detection by making use of both the shared signal waveforms and its own received waveform. Selection combining schemes of detected bit sequences are studied to finalize the decisions. Residual error coefficients in iterative MIMO equalization and detection are utilized in this selection. The error-ratio performance is elucidated not only by computer simulations, but also by offline processing using experimental signals recorded in a measurement campaign.

Advanced information-processing services such as computer vision require a high-performance digital circuit to perform high-load processing at high speed. To achieve high-speed processing, several image-processing applications use an approximate computing technique to reduce idle time of the circuit. However, it is difficult to design the high-speed image-processing circuit while controlling the error rate so as not to degrade service quality, and this technique is used for only a few applications. In this paper, we propose a method that achieves high-speed processing effectively in which processing time for each task is changed by roughly detecting its completion. Using this method, a high-speed processing circuit with a low error rate can be designed. The error rate is controllable, and a circuit design method to minimize the error rate is also presented in this paper. To confirm the effectiveness of our proposal, a ripple-carry adder (RCA), 2-dimensional discrete cosine transform (2D-DCT) circuit, and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) feature calculation circuit are evaluated. Effective clock periods of these circuits obtained by our method with around 1% error rate are improved about 64%, 6%, and 12%, respectively, compared with circuits without error. Furthermore, the impact of the miscalculation on a video monitoring service using an object detection application is investigated. As a result, more than 99% of detection points required to be obtained are detected, and it is confirmed the miscalculation hardly degrades the service quality.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have dominated a range of applications, from advanced manufacturing to autonomous cars. For energy cost-efficiency, developing low-power hardware for CNNs is a research trend. Due to the large input size, the first few convolutional layers generally consume most latency and hardware resources on hardware design. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an innovative architecture named SLIT to extract feature maps and reconstruct the first few layers on CNNs. In this reconstruction approach, total multiply-accumulate operations are eliminated on the first layers. We evaluate new topology with MNIST, CIFAR, SVHN, and ImageNet datasets on image classification application. Latency and hardware resources of the inference step are evaluated on the chip ZC7Z020-1CLG484C FPGA with Lenet-5 and VGG schemes. On the Lenet-5 scheme, our architecture reduces 39% of latency and 70% of hardware resources with a 0.456 W power consumption compared to previous works. Even though the VGG models perform with a 10% reduction in hardware resources and latency, we hope our overall results will potentially give a new impetus for future studies to reach a higher optimization on hardware design. Notably, the SLIT architecture efficiently merges with most popular CNNs at a slightly sacrificing accuracy of a factor of 0.27% on MNIST, ranging from 0.5% to 1.5% on CIFAR, approximately 2.2% on ImageNet, and remaining the same on SVHN databases.

We investigate an online problem of a robot exploring the outer boundary of an unknown simple polygon P. The robot starts from a specified vertex s and walks an exploration tour outside P. It has to see all points of the polygon's outer boundary and to return to the start. We provide lower and upper bounds on the ratio of the distance traveled by the robot in comparison to the length of the shortest path. We consider P in two scenarios: convex polygon and concave polygon. For the first scenario, we prove a lower bound of 5 and propose a 23.78-competitive strategy. For the second scenario, we prove a lower bound of 5.03 and propose a 26.5-competitive strategy.

During the detection of maritime targets, the jitter of the shipborne camera usually causes the video instability and the false or missed detection of targets. Aimed at tackling this problem, a novel algorithm for maritime target detection based on the electronic image stabilization technology is proposed in this study. The algorithm mainly includes three models, namely the points line model (PLM), the points classification model (PCM), and the image classification model (ICM). The feature points (FPs) are firstly classified by the PLM, and stable videos as well as target contours are obtained by the PCM. Then the smallest bounding rectangles of the target contours generated as the candidate bounding boxes (bboxes) are sent to the ICM for classification. In the experiments, the ICM, which is constructed based on the convolutional neural network (CNN), is trained and its effectiveness is verified. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperformed the benchmark models in all the common metrics including the mean square error (MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and mean average precision (mAP) by at least -47.87%, 8.66%, 6.94%, and 5.75%, respectively. The proposed algorithm is superior to the state-of-the-art techniques in both the image stabilization and target ship detection, which provides reliable technical support for the visual development of unmanned ships.

Image dehazing is of great significance in computer vision and other fields. The performance of dehazing mainly relies on the precise computation of transmission map. However, the computation of the existing transmission map still does not work well in the sky area and is easily influenced by noise. Hence, the dark channel prior (DCP) and luminance model are used to estimate the coarse transmission in this work, which can deal with the problem of transmission estimation in the sky area. Then a novel weighted variational regularization model is proposed to refine the transmission. Specifically, the proposed model can simultaneously refine the transmittance and restore clear images, yielding a haze-free image. More importantly, the proposed model can preserve the important image details and suppress image noise in the dehazing process. In addition, a new Gaussian Adaptive Weighted function is defined to smooth the contextual areas while preserving the depth discontinuity edges. Experiments on real-world and synthetic images illustrate that our method has a rival advantage with the state-of-art algorithms in different hazy environments.

This paper proposes two high-fidelity and computationally efficient neural voice conversion (VC) methods based on a direct waveform modification using spectral differentials. The conventional spectral-differential VC method with a minimum-phase filter achieves high-quality conversion for narrow-band (16 kHz-sampled) VC but requires heavy computational cost in filtering. This is because the minimum phase obtained using a fixed lifter of the Hilbert transform often results in a long-tap filter. Furthermore, when we extend the method to full-band (48 kHz-sampled) VC, the computational cost is heavy due to increased sampling points, and the converted-speech quality degrades due to large fluctuations in the high-frequency band. To construct a short-tap filter, we propose a lifter-training method for data-driven phase reconstruction that trains a lifter of the Hilbert transform by taking into account filter truncation. We also propose a frequency-band-wise modeling method based on sub-band multi-rate signal processing (sub-band modeling method) for full-band VC. It enhances the computational efficiency by reducing sampling points of signals converted with filtering and improves converted-speech quality by modeling only the low-frequency band. We conducted several objective and subjective evaluations to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed methods through implementation of the real-time, online, full-band VC system we developed, which is based on the proposed methods. The results indicate that 1) the proposed lifter-training method for narrow-band VC can shorten the tap length to 1/16 without degrading the converted-speech quality, and 2) the proposed sub-band modeling method for full-band VC can improve the converted-speech quality while reducing the computational cost, and 3) our real-time, online, full-band VC system can convert 48 kHz-sampled speech in real time attaining the converted speech with a 3.6 out of 5.0 mean opinion score of naturalness.

At present, the generative adversarial network (GAN) plays an important role in learning tasks. The basic idea of a GAN is to train the discriminator and generator simultaneously. A GAN-based inverse tone mapping method can generate high dynamic range (HDR) images corresponding to a scene according to multiple image sequences of a scene with different exposures. However, subsequent tone mapping algorithm processing is needed to display it on a general device. This paper proposes an end-to-end multi-exposure image fusion algorithm based on a relative GAN (called RaGAN-EF), which can fuse multiple image sequences with different exposures directly to generate a high-quality image that can be displayed on a general device without further processing. The RaGAN is used to design the loss function, which can retain more details in the source images. In addition, the number of input image sequences of multi-exposure image fusion algorithms is often uncertain, which limits the application of many existing GANs. This paper proposes a convolutional layer with weights shared between channels, which can solve the problem of variable input length. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better in terms of both objective evaluation and visual quality.

In this paper, a deep learning-based secret key generation scheme is proposed for FDD multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We built an encoder-decoder based convolutional neural network to characterize the wireless environment to learn the mapping relationship between the uplink and downlink channel. The designed neural network can accurately predict the downlink channel state information based on the estimated uplink channel state information without any information feedback. Random secret keys can be generated from downlink channel responses predicted by the neural network. Simulation results show that deep learning based SKG scheme can achieve significant performance improvement in terms of the key agreement ratio and achievable secret key rate.

The reconnaissance mode with the cooperation of two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with airborne visual tracking platforms is a common practice for localizing a target. Apart from the random noises from sensors, the localization performance is much dependent on their cooperative trajectories. In our previous work, we have proposed a cooperative trajectory generating method that proves better than EKF based method. In this letter, an improved online trajectory generating method is proposed to enhance the previous one. First, the least square estimation method has been replaced with a geometric-optimization based estimation method, which can obtain a better estimation performance than the least square method proposed in our previous work; second, in the trajectory optimization phase, the position error caused by estimation method is also considered, which can further improve the optimization performance of the next way points of the two UAVs. The improved method can well be applied to the two-UAV trajectory planning for corporative target localization, and the simulation results confirm that the improved method achieves an obviously better localization performance than our previous method and the EKF-based method.

Locally repairable codes (LRCs) with availability have received considerable attention in recent years since they are able to solve many problems in distributed storage systems such as repairing multiple node failures and managing hot data. Constructing LRCs with locality r and availability t (also called (r, t)-LRCs) with new parameters becomes an interesting research subject in coding theory. The objective of this paper is to propose two generic constructions of cyclic (r, t)-LRCs via linearized polynomials over finite fields. These two constructions include two earlier ones of cyclic LRCs from trace functions and truncated trace functions as special cases and lead to LRCs with new parameters that can not be produced by earlier ones.