Machine vision-based automatic anti-bird thorn failure inspection, instead of manual identification, remains a great challenge. In this paper, we proposed a novel Object Position Embedding Network (OPENnet), which can improve the precision of anti-bird thorn localization. OPENnet can simultaneously predict the location boxes of the support device and anti-bird thorn by using the proposed double-head network. And then, OPENnet is optimized using the proposed symbiotic loss function (SymLoss), which embeds the object position into the network. The comprehensive experiments are conducted on the real railway video dataset. OPENnet yields competitive performance on anti-bird thorn localization. Specifically, the localization performance gains +3.65 AP, +2.10 AP50, and +1.22 AP75.

Danmaku commenting has become popular for co-viewing on video-sharing platforms, such as Nicovideo. However, many irrelevant comments usually contaminate the quality of the information provided by videos. Such an information pollutant problem can be solved by a comment classifier trained with an abstention option, which detects comments whose video categories are unclear. To improve the performance of this classification task, this paper presents Nicovideo-specific language representations. Specifically, we used sentences from Nicopedia, a Japanese online encyclopedia of entities that possibly appear in Nicovideo contents, to pre-train a bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT) model. The resulting model named Nicopedia BERT is then fine-tuned such that it could determine whether a given comment falls into any of predefined categories. The experiments conducted on Nicovideo comment data demonstrated the effectiveness of Nicopedia BERT compared with existing BERT models pre-trained using Wikipedia or tweets. We also evaluated the performance of each model in an additional sentiment classification task, and the obtained results implied the applicability of Nicopedia BERT as a feature extractor of other social media text.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become popular in medical image segmentation. The widely used deep CNNs are customized to extract multiple representative features for two-dimensional (2D) data, generally called 2D networks. However, 2D networks are inefficient in extracting three-dimensional (3D) spatial features from volumetric images. Although most 2D segmentation networks can be extended to 3D networks, the naively extended 3D methods are resource-intensive. In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate network for fully automatic 3D segmentation. Specifically, we designed a 3D multiple-contextual extractor to capture rich global contextual dependencies from different feature levels. Then we leveraged an ROI-estimation strategy to crop the ROI bounding box. Meanwhile, we used a 3D ROI-attention module to improve the accuracy of in-region segmentation in the decoder path. Moreover, we used a hybrid Dice loss function to address the issues of class imbalance and blurry contour in medical images. By incorporating the above strategies, we realized a practical end-to-end 3D medical image segmentation with high efficiency and accuracy. To validate the 3D segmentation performance of our proposed method, we conducted extensive experiments on two datasets and demonstrated favorable results over the state-of-the-art methods.

In recent years, concerns about location privacy are increasing with the spread of location-based services (LBSs). Many methods to protect location privacy have been proposed in the past decades. Especially, perturbation methods based on Geo-Indistinguishability (GeoI), which randomly perturb a true location to a pseudolocation, are getting attention due to its strong privacy guarantee inherited from differential privacy. However, GeoI is based on the Euclidean plane even though many LBSs are based on road networks (e.g. ride-sharing services). This causes unnecessary noise and thus an insufficient tradeoff between utility and privacy for LBSs on road networks. To address this issue, we propose a new privacy notion, Geo-Graph-Indistinguishability (GeoGI), for locations on a road network to achieve a better tradeoff. We propose Graph-Exponential Mechanism (GEM), which satisfies GeoGI. Moreover, we formalize the optimization problem to find the optimal GEM in terms of the tradeoff. However, the computational complexity of a naive method to find the optimal solution is prohibitive, so we propose a greedy algorithm to find an approximate solution in an acceptable amount of time. Finally, our experiments show that our proposed mechanism outperforms GeoI mechanisms, including optimal GeoI mechanism, with respect to the tradeoff.

Microservice architecture has been widely adopted for large-scale applications because of its benefits of scalability, flexibility, and reliability. However, microservice architecture also proposes new challenges in diagnosing root causes of performance degradation. Existing methods rely on labeled data and suffer a high computation burden. This paper proposes MicroState, an unsupervised and lightweight method to pinpoint the root cause with detailed descriptions. We decompose root cause diagnosis into element location and detailed reason identification. To mitigate the impact of element heterogeneity and dynamic invocations, MicroState generates elements' invoked states, quantifies elements' abnormality by warping-based state comparison, and infers the anomalous group. MicroState locates the root cause element with the consideration of anomaly frequency and persistency. To locate the anomalous metric from diverse metrics, MicroState extracts metrics' trend features and evaluates metrics' abnormality based on their trend feature variation, which reduces the reliance on anomaly detectors. Our experimental evaluation based on public data of the Artificial intelligence for IT Operations Challenge (AIOps Challenge 2020) shows that MicroState locates root cause elements with 87% precision and diagnoses anomaly reasons accurately.

There are demands for high-speed and stable ground-to-train optical communication as a network environment for trains. The existing ground-to-train optical communication system developed by the authors uses a camera and a QPD (Quadrant photo diode) to capture beacon light. The problem with the existing system is that it is impossible to identify the ground station. In the system proposed in this paper, a beacon light modulated with the ID of the ground station is transmitted, and the ground station is identified by demodulating the image from the dual-port camera on the opposite side. In this paper, we developed an actual system and conducted experiments using a car on the road. The results showed that only one packet was lost with the ping command every 1 ms near handover. Although the communication device itself has a bandwidth of 100 Mbps, the throughput before and after the handover was about 94 Mbps, and only dropped to about 89.4 Mbps during the handover.

For many fields in real life, time series forecasting is essential. Recent studies have shown that Transformer has certain advantages when dealing with such problems, especially when dealing with long sequence time input and long sequence time forecasting problems. In order to improve the efficiency and local stability of Transformer, these studies combine Transformer and CNN with different structures. However, previous time series forecasting network models based on Transformer cannot make full use of CNN, and they have not been used in a better combination of both. In response to this problem in time series forecasting, we propose the time series forecasting algorithm based on convolution Transformer. (1) ES attention mechanism: Combine external attention with traditional self-attention mechanism through the two-branch network, the computational cost of self-attention mechanism is reduced, and the higher forecasting accuracy is obtained. (2) Frequency enhanced block: A Frequency Enhanced Block is added in front of the ESAttention module, which can capture important structures in time series through frequency domain mapping. (3) Causal dilated convolution: The self-attention mechanism module is connected by replacing the traditional standard convolution layer with a causal dilated convolution layer, so that it obtains the receptive field of exponentially growth without increasing the calculation consumption. (4) Multi-layer feature fusion: The outputs of different self-attention mechanism modules are extracted, and the convolutional layers are used to adjust the size of the feature map for the fusion. The more fine-grained feature information is obtained at negligible computational cost. Experiments on real world datasets show that the time series network forecasting model structure proposed in this paper can greatly improve the real-time forecasting performance of the current state-of-the-art Transformer model, and the calculation and memory costs are significantly lower. Compared with previous algorithms, the proposed algorithm has achieved a greater performance improvement in both effectiveness and forecasting accuracy.

The high-precision indoor positioning technology has gradually become one of the research hotspots in indoor mobile robots. Relax and Recover (RAR) is an indoor positioning algorithm using distance observations. The algorithm restores the robot's trajectory through curve fitting and does not require time synchronization of observations. The positioning can be successful with few observations. However, the algorithm has the disadvantages of poor resistance to gross errors and cannot be used for real-time positioning. In this paper, while retaining the advantages of the original algorithm, the RAR algorithm is improved with the adaptive Kalman filter (AKF) based on the innovation sequence to improve the anti-gross error performance of the original algorithm. The improved algorithm can be used for real-time navigation and positioning. The experimental validation found that the improved algorithm has a significant improvement in accuracy when compared to the original RAR. When comparing to the extended Kalman filter (EKF), the accuracy is also increased by 12.5%, which can be used for high-precision positioning of indoor mobile robots.

This study explores significant eye-gaze features that can be used to estimate subjective difficulty while reading educational comics. Educational comics have grown rapidly as a promising way to teach difficult topics using illustrations and texts. However, comics include a variety of information on one page, so automatically detecting learners' states such as subjective difficulty is difficult with approaches such as system log-based detection, which is common in the Learning Analytics field. In order to solve this problem, this study focused on 28 eye-gaze features, including the proposal of three new features called “Variance in Gaze Convergence,” “Movement between Panels,” and “Movement between Tiles” to estimate two degrees of subjective difficulty. We then ran an experiment in a simulated environment using Virtual Reality (VR) to accurately collect gaze information. We extracted features in two unit levels, page- and panel-units, and evaluated the accuracy with each pattern in user-dependent and user-independent settings, respectively. Our proposed features achieved an average F1 classification-score of 0.721 and 0.742 in user-dependent and user-independent models at panel unit levels, respectively, trained by a Support Vector Machine (SVM).

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently demonstrated outstanding performance in image retrieval tasks. Local convolutional features extracted by CNNs, in particular, show exceptional capability in discrimination. Recent research in this field has concentrated on pooling methods that incorporate local features into global features and assess the global similarity of two images. However, the pooling methods sacrifice the image's local region information and spatial relationships, which are precisely known as the keys to the robustness against occlusion and viewpoint changes. In this paper, instead of pooling methods, we propose an alternative method based on local similarity, determined by directly using local convolutional features. Specifically, we first define three forms of local similarity tensors (LSTs), which take into account information about local regions as well as spatial relationships between them. We then construct a similarity CNN model (SCNN) based on LSTs to assess the similarity between the query and gallery images. The ideal configuration of our method is sought through thorough experiments from three perspectives: local region size, local region content, and spatial relationships between local regions. The experimental results on a modified open dataset (where query images are limited to occluded ones) confirm that the proposed method outperforms the pooling methods because of robustness enhancement. Furthermore, testing on three public retrieval datasets shows that combining LSTs with conventional pooling methods achieves the best results.

Pose estimation is a research hot spot in computer vision tasks and the key to computer perception of human activities. The core concept of human pose estimation involves describing the motion of the human body through major joint points. Large receptive fields and rich spatial information facilitate the keypoint localization task, and how to capture features on a larger scale and reintegrate them into the feature space is a challenge for pose estimation. To address this problem, we propose a multi-scale convergence network (MSCNet) with a large receptive field and rich spatial information. The structure of the MSCNet is based on an hourglass network that captures information at different scales to present a consistent understanding of the whole body. The multi-scale receptive field (MSRF) units provide a large receptive field to obtain rich contextual information, which is then selectively enhanced or suppressed by the Squeeze-Excitation (SE) attention mechanism to flexibly perform the pose estimation task. Experimental results show that MSCNet scores 73.1% AP on the COCO dataset, an 8.8% improvement compared to the mainstream CMUPose method. Compared to the advanced CPN, the MSCNet has 68.2% of the computational complexity and only 55.4% of the number of parameters.

The finger-vein-based deep neural network authentication system has been applied widely in real scenarios, such as countries' banking and entrance guard systems. However, to ensure performance, the deep neural network should train many parameters, which needs lots of time and computing resources. This paper proposes a method that introduces artificial features with prior knowledge into the convolution layer. First, it designs a multi-direction pattern base on the traditional local binary pattern, which extracts general spatial information and also reduces the spatial dimension. Then, establishes a sample effective deep convolutional neural network via combination with convolution, with the ability to extract deeper finger vein features. Finally, trains the model with a composite loss function to increase the inter-class distance and reduce the intra-class distance. Experiments show that the proposed methods achieve a good performance of higher stability and accuracy of finger vein recognition.

In this letter, we consider the problem of joint selection of transmitters and receivers in a distributed multi-input multi-output radar network for localization. Different from previous works, we consider a more mathematically challenging but generalized situation that the transmitting signals are not perfectly orthogonal. Taking Cramér Rao lower bound as performance metric, we propose a scheme of joint selection of transmitters and receivers (JSTR) aiming at optimizing the localization performance under limited number of nodes. We propose a bi-convex relaxation to replace the resultant NP hard non-convex problem. Using the bi-convexity, the surrogate problem can be efficiently resolved by nonlinear alternating direction method of multipliers. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm has very close performance compared with the computationally intensive but global optimal exhaustive search method.

As the active safety of vehicles has become essential, vehicular communication has been gaining attention. The IETF IPWAVE working group has proposed the shared prefix model-based vehicular link model. In the shared prefix model, a prefix is shared among RSUs to prevent changes in IPv6 addresses of a vehicle within a shared prefix domain. However, vehicle movement must be tracked to deliver packets to the serving RSU of the vehicle within a shared prefix domain. The Identifier/Locator Separation Protocol (ILSP) is one of the techniques used to handle vehicle movement. It has several drawbacks such as the inability to communicate with a standard IPv6 module without special components and the requirement to pass signaling messages between end hosts. Such drawbacks severely limit the service availability for a vehicle in the Internet. We propose an ILSP for a shared prefix model over IEEE WAVE IPv6 networks. The proposed protocol supports IPv6 communication between a standard IPv6 node in the Internet and a vehicle supporting the proposed protocol. In addition, the protocol hides vehicle movement within a shared prefix domain to peer hosts, eliminating the signaling between end hosts. The proposed protocol introduces a special NDP module based on IETF IPWAVE vehicular NDP to support vehicular mobility management within a shared prefix domain and minimize link-level multicast in WAVE networks.

A drone swarm is a robotic architecture having multiple drones cooperate to accomplish a mission. Nowadays, heterogeneous drone swarms, in which a small number of gateway drones (GWs) act as protocol translators to enable the mixing of multiple swarms that use independent wireless protocols, have attracted much attention from many researchers. Our previous work proposed Path Optimizer — a method to minimize the number of end-to-end path-hops in a remote video monitoring system using heterogeneous drone swarms by autonomously relocating GWs to create a shortcut in the network for each communication request. However, Path Optimizer has limitations in improving communication quality when more video sessions than the number of GWs are requested simultaneously. Path Coordinator, which we propose in this paper, achieves a uniform reduction in end-to-end hops and maximizes the allowable hop satisfaction rate regardless of the number of sessions by introducing the cooperative and synchronous relocation of all GWs. Path Coordinator consists of two phases: first, physical optimization is performed by geographically relocating all GWs (relocation phase), and then logical optimization is achieved by modifying the relaying GWs of each video flow (rerouting phase). Computer simulations reveal that Path Coordinator adapts to various environments and performs as well as we expected. Furthermore, its performance is comparable to the upper limits possible with brute-force search.

In recent years, physical layer security (PLS), which is based on information theory and whose strength does not depend on the eavesdropper's computing capability, has attracted much attention. We have proposed a chaos modulation method as one PLS method that offers channel coding gain. One alternative is based on polar codes. They are robust error-correcting codes, have a nested structure in the encoder, and the application of this mechanism to PLS encryption (PLS-polar) has been actively studied. However, most conventional studies assume the application of conventional linear modulation such as BPSK, do not use encryption modulation, and the channel coding gain in the modulation is not achieved. In this paper, we propose a PLS-polar method that can realize high-quality transmission and encryption of a modulated signal by applying chaos modulation to a polar-coding system. Numerical results show that the proposed method improves the performance compared to the conventional PLS-polar method by 0.7dB at a block error rate of 10-5. In addition, we show that the proposed method is superior to conventional chaos modulation concatenated with low-density parity-check codes, indicating that the polar code is more suitable for chaos modulation. Finally, it is demonstrated that the proposed method is secure in terms of information theoretical and computational security.

In this paper, we propose an interpretation method on amplitude intensities for response waveforms of backward transient scattered field components for both E- and H-polarizations by a 2-D coated metal cylinder. A time-domain (TD) asymptotic solution, which is referred to as a TD Fourier transform method (TD-FTM), is derived by applying the FTM to a backward transient scattered field expressed by an integral form. The TD-FTM is represented by a combination of a direct geometric optical ray (DGO) and a reflected GO (RGO) series. We use the TD-FTM to derive amplitude intensity ratios (AIRs) between adjacent backward transient scattered field components. By comparing the numerical values of the AIRs with those of the influence factors that compose the AIRs, major factor(s) can be identified, thereby allowing detailed interpretation method on the amplitude intensities for the response waveforms of backward transient scattered field components. The accuracy and practicality of the TD-FTM are evaluated by comparing it with three reference solutions. The effectiveness of an interpretation method on the amplitude intensities for response waveforms of backward transient scattered field components is revealed by identifying major factor(s) affecting the amplitude intensities.

In this study, we discuss a structure that realizes a wideband polarization splitter comprising fiber 1 with a single core and fiber 2 with circular pits, which touch the top and bottom of a single core. The refractive index profile of the W type was adopted in the core of fiber 1 to realize the wideband. We compared the maximum bandwidth of BW-15 (bandwidth at an extinction ratio of -15dB) for the W type obtained in this study with those (our previous results) of BW-15 for the step and graded types with cores and pits at the same location; this comparison clarified that the maximum bandwidth of BW-15 for the W type is 5.22 and 4.96 times wider than those of step and graded types, respectively. Furthermore, the device length at the maximum bandwidth improved, becoming slightly shorter. The main results of the FPS in this study are all obtained by numerical analysis based on our proposed MM-DM (a method that combines the multipole method and the difference method for the inhomogeneous region). Our MM-DM is a quite reliable method for high accuracy analysis of the FPS composed of inhomogeneous circular regions.

An approach to dedicated computers is discussed in this study as a possibility for portable, low-cost, and low-power consumption high-performance computing technologies. Particularly, dataflow architecture dedicated computer of the finite integration technique (FIT) for 2D magnetostatic field simulation is considered for use in industrial applications. The dataflow architecture circuit of the BiCG-Stab matrix solver of the FIT matrix calculation is designed by the very high-speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL). The operation of the dedicated computer's designed circuit is considered by VHDL logic circuit simulation.

This article presents a 28GHz high-accuracy phase and amplitude detection circuit for dual-polarized phased-array calibration. With dual-polarized calibration scheme, external LO signal is not required for calibration. The proposed detection circuit detects phase and amplitude independently, using PDC and ADC. By utilizing a 28GHz-to-140kHz downconversion scheme, the phase and amplitude are detected more accurately. In addition, reference signal for PDC and ADC is generated from 28GHz LO signal with divide-by-6 dual-step-mixing injection locked frequency divider (ILFD). This ILFD achieves 24.5-32.5GHz (28%) locking range with only 3.0mW power consumption and 0.01mm2 area. In the measurement, the detection circuit achieves phase and amplitude detections with RMS errors of 0.17degree and 0.12dB, respectively. The total power consumption of the proposed circuit is 59mW with 1-V supply voltage.