In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient face representation feature that adopts the eigenfaces of Local Binary Pattern (LBP) space, referred to as the LBP eigenfaces, for robust face recognition. In the proposed method, LBP eigenfaces are generated by first mapping the original image space to the LBP space and then projecting the LBP space to the LBP eigenface subspace by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Therefore, LBP eigenfaces capture both the local and global structures of face images. In the experiments, the proposed LBP eigenfaces are integrated into two types of classification methods, Nearest Neighbor (NN) and Collaborative Representation-based Classification (CRC). Experimental results indicate that the classification with the LBP eigenfaces outperforms that with the original eigenfaces and LBP histogram.

A number of well-known learning-based face detectors can achieve extraordinary performance in controlled environments. But face detection under varying illumination is still challenging. Possible solutions to this illumination problem could be creating illumination invariant features or utilizing skin color information. However, the features and skin colors are not sufficiently reliable under difficult lighting conditions. Another possible solution is to do illumination normalization (e.g., Histogram Equalization (HE)) prior to executing face detectors. However, applications of normalization to face detection have not been widely studied in the literature. This paper applies and evaluates various existing normalization methods under the framework of combining the illumination normalization and two learning-based face detectors (Haar-like face detector and LBP face detector). These methods were initially proposed for different purposes (face recognition or image quality enhancement), but some of them significantly improve the original face detectors and lead to better performance than HE according to the results of the comparative experiments on two databases. Meanwhile, we propose a new normalization method called segmentation-based half histogram stretching and truncation (SH) for face detection under varying illumination. It first employs Otsu method to segment the histogram (intensities) of the input image into several spans and then does the redistribution on the segmented spans. In this way, the non-uniform illumination can be efficiently compensated and local facial structures can be appropriately enhanced. Our method obtains good performance according to the experiments.

This letter investigates the relationship between antenna position and data communication performance in a magnetic resonance wireless power transfer (MRWPT) system. In MRWPT information such as the types of equipments, the required amount of electrical power, or the timing of power transfer should be exchanged. It is assumed here that power transfer coils in the MRWPT system are employed as antennas for data communication. The frequency characteristics of the antennas change due to coil displacements. The power transfer coils are modeled as a band pass filter (BPF) and the frequency characteristics of the filter are presented in this letter. The characteristics of the filter are derived through circuit simulation and resulting data communication performance is evaluated. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the bit error late (BER) performance can be improved by controlling the center frequency of the communication link.

In this paper, a simple yet efficient texture representation is proposed for texture classification by exploring the joint statistics of local quantized patterns (jsLQP). In order to combine information of different domains, the Gaussian derivative filters are first employed to obtain the multi-scale gradient responses. Then, three feature maps are generated by encoding the local quantized binary and ternary patterns in the image space and the gradient space. Finally, these feature maps are hybridly encoded, and their joint histogram is used as the final texture representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art LBP based and even learning based methods for texture classification.

Spatially coupled (SC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are defined by bipartite graphs that are obtained by assembling prototype graphs. The combination and connection of prototype graphs are designated by specifying some parameters, and Kudekar et al. showed that BP threshold of the ensemble of SC LDPC codes agrees with MAP threshold of the ensemble of regular LDPC codes when those parameters are grown up so that the code length tends to infinity. When we design SC LDPC codes with practical code length, however, it is not clear how to set those parameters to enhance the performance of SC LDPC codes. In this paper, we provide the result of numerical experiments that suggest the dependence of error performance of SC LDPC codes over BEC on their design parameters.

In terms of the transmission-line theory, a general synthesis of a new class of optimum Chebyshev-type ultra-wideband bandpass (UWB) filter prototype composed of multistage stepped-impedance resonators (SIRs) and two short-circuited shunt stubs positioned at input- and output- ports is presented. By the comparison of the real and theoretical transfer functions, the design/characteristic equations are obtained for the design of the proposed filter prototype rather than the traditional design tables. The explicit expressions of one-stage and two-stage filters are then derived and reported. Accordingly, bandpass filters with an arbitrary FBW (Fractional Bandwidth) and passband ripple can be easily designed by solving the design equations. As an example, a 10-degree Chebyshev distributed filter (two-stage filter) with an FBW of 110% is synthesized to meet FCC's outdoor mask. The synthesized circuit model are confirmed by a commercial circuit simulator and then optimized by an EM simulator, fabricated in microstrip line and characterized by the network analyzer. The good agreements between the measured and predicted frequency responses validate the effectiveness of newly proposed filter prototype and the corresponding synthesis technique. In addition, the designed filter exhibits good characteristics of comparatively low insertion loss, quite sharp skirt, very flat group delay and good stopband (especially in lower one) as well. It should be also highlighted that, compared with the conventional filters composed merely of parallel-coupled SIRs or shunt short-circuit-stubs, the new prototype can reduce the overall length of the filter by more than 3/4λg. Moreover, in terms of the presented design technique, the proposed filter prototype can be also used to easily realize the UWB filters with an FBW even greater than 110%.

Recent interest in wireless power transfer research has been attracting a great deal of attention. To transfer power efficiently and safely in wireless power transfer system, information, such as frequency, required power and element values, need to be transmitted reliably. However, the bandwidth, which is used for exchanging information, is affected by the change of load at the receiver when it is charging. This paper investigates the effect of load fluctuation in data communication using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation in resonant-type wireless power transfer systems. The equivalent circuit used in the transmitting and receiving antennas is a band pass filter (BPF) and its bandwidth is evaluated through circuit simulations. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the bit error rate (BER) performance is affected by the load fluctuation and the efficiency of power transfer.

Existing large-scale systems suffer from various hardware/software failures, motivating the research of fault-tolerance techniques. Checkpoint-restart techniques are widely applied fault-tolerance approaches, especially in scientific computing systems. However, the overhead of checkpoint largely influences the overall system performance. Recently, the emerging byte-addressable, persistent memory technologies, such as phase change memory (PCM), make it possible to implement checkpointing in arbitrary data granularity. However, the impact of data granularity on the checkpointing cost has not been fully addressed. In this paper, we investigate how data granularity influences the performance of a checkpoint system. Further, we design and implement a high-performance checkpoint system named AG-ckpt. AG-ckpt is a hybrid-granularity incremental checkpointing scheme through: (1) low-cost modified-memory detection and (2) fine-grained memory duplication. Moreover, we also formulize the performance-granularity relationship of checkpointing systems through a mathematical model, and further obtain the optimum solutions. We conduct the experiments through several typical benchmarks to verify the performance gain of our design. Compared to conventional incremental checkpoint, our results show that AG-ckpt can reduce checkpoint data amount up to 50% and provide a speedup of 1.2x-1.3x on checkpoint efficiency.

A LNA, an RF front-end and a 6th–order complex BPF for reconfigurable low-IF receivers are demonstrated in this work. Due to the noise cancellation, the two-stage LNA presents a low NF of 2.8 to 3.3 dB from 0.8 to 6 GHz. Moreover, the LNA delivers two kinds of gain curves with IIP3 of -2.6 dBm by employing the capacitive degeneration and the resistive gain-curve shaping in the second stage. The flicker noise corner frequency of the down-converter has been considered and the measured fC of the RF front-end is 200 kHz. The RF front-end also provides two kinds of gain curves. For the low-frequency mode, the conversion gain is 28.831.1 dB from 800 MHz to 2.4 GHz. For the high-frequency mode, the conversion gain is 26.827.4 dB from 3 to 5 GHz. The complex BPF is realized with gm-C LPFs by shifting the low-pass frequency response. With variable transconductances and capacitors, a fixed ratio of the centre frequency to the bandwidth (2) is achieved by varying the bandwidth and the centre frequency of the LPF simultaneously. The complex BPF has a variable bandwidth from 200 kHz to 6.4 MHz while achieving an image rejection of 44 dB.

Wireless power transfer research has been receiving a great deal of attention in recent years. In resonant-type wireless power transfer, energy is transferred via LC resonant circuits. However, system performance is dependent on the circuit components. To transfer power efficiently and safely, information, such as frequency, required power and element values, need to be transmitted reliably in the system. This paper investigates data communication using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation in resonant-type wireless power transfer systems. The equivalent circuit used in the transmitting and receiving antennas is a band pass filter (BPF) and its bandwidth is evaluated through circuit simulations and experimental measurements. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the bit error rate (BER) performance is affected by the splitting resonant frequency.

We present MIMO-OFDM based broadband power line communication (BPLC) that uses antenna and fading diversity. We evaluate the proposed MIMO-OFDM over BPLC channels, with or without cross-talk between antenna paths. The proposed scheme employs maximum ratio combining (MRC) that effectively combines both multiple antenna diversity gain and multipath fading diversity gain over 3-phase (22 MIMO, outdoor) or 1-phase (SISO, indoor) power line channels. Simulation results prove the performance advantage of the proposed scheme, whether or not cross-talk exists, over existing schemes.

Kudekar et al. proved an interesting result in low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes: The belief-propagation (BP) threshold is boosted to the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) threshold by spatial coupling. Furthermore, the authors showed that the BP threshold for code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems is improved up to the optimal one via spatial coupling. In this letter, a phenomenological model for elucidating the essence of these phenomenon, called threshold improvement, is proposed. The main result implies that threshold improvement occurs for spatially-coupled general graphical models.

This paper presents an ultra-wideband (UWB) bandpass filter (BPF) with sharp attenuation slope characteristics. The circuit structure consists of an inter-digital finger resonator, parallel-coupled lines and phase matching line. The design of the bandwidth was described by using the even and odd mode characteristic impedances in the resonator structure. The parallel-coupled lines were also designed in the same manner. The parameters of the resonator and two parallel-coupled lines in combination as the BPF were then optimized by the simulation with HFSS. The designed BPF was experimentally fabricated and its measured performances showed the bandwidth from 3.6 to 10 GHz with the 20 dB outband rejection. For the U.S. UWB band design, the matching line was inserted between the two parallel-coupled lines. The matching at both band edges was then qualitatively analyzed on the smithchart. The HFSS simulation results of the structure realized the bandwidth from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz with sharp attenuation slope characteristics for SWR < 2.0. The measurement results agree well with the simulation results.

IEEE 802.15.3c has been standardized for wireless personal area networks (WPANs) to realize high-speed wireless communications with 1 Gbps throughput. In this paper we introduce a 802.15.3c WPAN prototype. The introduced 802.15.3c WPAN prototype applies the enhanced MAC functions of data separation on hybrid multiple access, long frame size, aggregation, block acknowledgment, and timing operation, which can realize Gbps throughput in IEEE 802.15.3c. Moreover, the experiment performance studies on the prototype show that around 1.6 Gbps throughput can be successfully achieved and video streaming applications can be accommodated. Also, our studies provide the useful information of MAC capacity for developing the 802.15.3c devices.

This work extends the optimum Neymann-Pearson methodology to detection of a subspace signal in the correlated additive Gaussian noise when the noise power may be different under the null (H0) and alternative (H1) hypotheses. Moreover, it is assumed that the noise covariance structure and power under the null hypothesis are known but under the alternative hypothesis the noise power can be unknown. This situation occurs when the presence of a small point (subpixel) target decreases the noise power. The conventional matched subspace detector (MSD) neglects this phenomenon and causes a consistent loss in the detection performance. We derive the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) for such a detection problem comparing it against the conventional MSD. The designed detector is theoretically justified and numerically evaluated. Both the theoretical and computer simulation results have shown that the proposed detector outperforms the conventional MSD. As to the detection performance, it has been shown that the detectivity of the proposed detector depends on the additional adaptive corrective term in the threshold. This corrective term decreases the value of presumed threshold automatically and, therefore, increases the probability of detection. The influence of this corrective term on the detector performance has been evaluated for an example scenario.

In this letter, the reliabilty of the generalized normal-Laplace (GNL) distribution used for modeling the multiple access interference (MAI) plus noise in time-hopping (TH) binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) ultra-wideband (UWB) systems is evaluated in terms of the probability density function and the BER. The multiple access performance of TH-BPSK UWB systems based on GNL model is analyzed. The average BER performance obtained by using GNL approximation well matches with the exact BER results of TH-BPSK UWB systems. The parameter estimates of GNL distribution based on the moments estimation method is also presented.

This paper proposes a new method that reduces the computational cost of the phase-only correlation (POC)-based methods for displacement estimation in old film sequences. Conventional POC-based methods calculate all the points of the POC and only use the highest peak of the POC and its neighboring points to estimate the displacement with subpixel accuracy. Our proposed method reduces the computational cost by calculating the POC in a small region, instead of all the points of the POC. The proposed method combines a displacement pre-estimation with a modified inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT). The displacement pre-estimation uses the 1-D POCs of frame projections to pre-estimate the displacement with pixel accuracy and chooses a small region in the POC including the desired points for displacement estimation. The modified IDFT is then used to calculate the points in this small region for displacement estimation. Experimental results show that use of the proposed method can effectively reduce the computational cost of the POC-based methods without compromising the accuracy.

We develop an effective algorithm, based on the filtered backprojection (FBP) approach, for the imaging of vegetation. Under the FBP scheme, the reconstruction amounts at a non-trivial Fourier inversion, since the data are Fourier samples arranged on a non-Cartesian grid. The computational issue is efficiently tackled by Non-Uniform Fast Fourier Transforms (NUFFTs), whose complexity grows asymptotically as that of a standard FFT. Furthermore, significant speed-ups, as compared to fast CPU implementations, are obtained by a parallel versions of the NUFFT algorithm, purposely designed to be run on Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) by using the CUDA language. The performance of the parallel algorithm has been assessed in comparison to a CPU-multicore accelerated, Matlab implementation of the same routine, to other CPU-multicore accelerated implementations based on standard FFT and employing linear, cubic, spline and sinc interpolations and to a different, parallel algorithm exploiting a parallel linear interpolation stage. The proposed approach has resulted the most computationally convenient. Furthermore, an indoor, polarimetric experimental setup is developed, capable to isolate and introduce, one at a time, different non-idealities of a real acquisition, as the sources (wind, rain) of temporal decorrelation. Experimental far-field polarimetric measurements on a thuja plicata (western redcedar) tree point out the performance of the set up algorithm, its robustness against data truncation and temporal decorrelation as well as the possibility of discriminating scatterers with different features within the investigated scene.

A differential BPSK transmitter for ultra-wideband impulse-radio communication has been presented in this paper. The transmitter, developed in a 65 nm CMOS process,is simple in design and occupies a core area of 0.0017 mm2. The differential Gaussian monocycle pulses (GMP) are generated using some logic blocks and delay elements. The generated GMP, having a center frequency above 5 GHz, meets the FCC regulations. Measured results show that the transmitter consumes 1.8 pJ/bit to transmit BPSK modulated GMP at a data rate of 2 Gb/s. The interface circuitries eliminate the need for external networks for chip to antenna matching. Using an off-chip differential bow-tie antenna, data can easily be transmitted up to a distance of 10 cm which made it suitable for low power far field non-coherent applications.

A fifth-order switched-capacitor (SC) complex filter was implemented in 0.2-µm CMOS technology. A novel SC integrator was developed to reduce the die size and current consumption of the filter. The filter is centered at 24.730.15 kHz (3δ) and has a bandwidth of 20.260.3 kHz (3δ). The image channel is attenuated by more than 42.6 dB. The in-band third-order harmonic input intercept point (IIP3) is 17.3 dBm, and the input referred RMS noise is 34.3 µVrms. The complex filter consumes 350 µA with a 2.0-V power supply. The die size is 0.578 mm2. Owing to the new SC integrator, the filter achieves a 27% reduction in die size without any degradation in its characteristics, including its noise performance, compared with the conventional equivalent.