This work proposes a design methodology that saves the power dissipation under voltage over-scaling (VOS) operation. The key idea of the proposed design methodology is to combine critical path isolation (CPI) and bit-width scaling (BWS) under the constraint of computational quality, e.g., Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) in the image processing domain. Conventional CPI inherently cannot reduce the delay of intrinsic critical paths (CPs), which may significantly restrict the power saving effect. On the other hand, the proposed methodology tries to reduce both intrinsic and non-intrinsic CPs. Therefore, our design dramatically reduces the supply voltage and power dissipation while satisfying the quality constraint. Moreover, for reducing co-design exploration space, the proposed methodology utilizes the exclusiveness of the paths targeted by CPI and BWS, where CPI aims at reducing the minimum supply voltage of non-intrinsic CP, and BWS focuses on intrinsic CPs in arithmetic units. From this key exclusiveness, the proposed design splits the simultaneous optimization problem into three sub-problems; (1) the determination of bit-width reduction, (2) the timing optimization for non-intrinsic CPs, and (3) investigating the minimum supply voltage of the BWS and CPI-applied circuit under quality constraint, for reducing power dissipation. Thanks to the problem splitting, the proposed methodology can efficiently find quality-constrained minimum-power design. Evaluation results show that CPI and BWS are highly compatible, and they significantly enhance the efficacy of VOS. In a case study of a GPGPU processor, the proposed design saves the power dissipation by 42.7% with an image processing workload and by 51.2% with a neural network inference workload.

Visual script languages with a node-based interface have commonly been used in the video game industry. We examined the bug database obtained in the development of FINAL FANTASY XV (FFXV), and noticed that several types of bugs were caused by simple mis-descriptions of visual scripts and could therefore be mechanically detected. We propose a method for the automatic verification of visual scripts in order to improve productivity of video game development. Our method can automatically detect those bugs by using symbolic model checking. We show a translation algorithm which can automatically convert a visual script to an input model for NuSMV that is an implementation of symbolic model checking. For a preliminary evaluation, we applied our method to visual scripts used in the production for FFXV. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method can detect bugs of scripts and works well in a reasonable time.

The solution of the ordinary kernel ridge regression, based on the squared loss function and the squared norm-based regularizer, can be easily interpreted as a stochastic linear estimator by considering the autocorrelation prior for an unknown true function. As is well known, a stochastic affine estimator is one of the simplest extensions of the stochastic linear estimator. However, its corresponding kernel regression problem is not revealed so far. In this paper, we give a formulation of the kernel regression problem, whose solution is reduced to a stochastic affine estimator, and also give interpretations of the formulation.

Unsupervised Feature selection is an important dimensionality reduction technique to cope with high-dimensional data. It does not require prior label information, and has recently attracted much attention. However, it cannot fully utilize the discriminative information of samples, which may affect the feature selection performance. To tackle this problem, in this letter, we propose a novel discriminative virtual label regression method (DVLR) for unsupervised feature selection. In DVLR, we develop a virtual label regression function to guide the subspace learning based feature selection, which can select more discriminative features. Moreover, a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) term is used to make the model be more discriminative. To further make the model be more robust and select more representative features, we impose the ℓ2,1-norm on the regression and feature selection terms. Finally, extensive experiments are carried out on several public datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed DVLR achieves better performance than several state-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection methods.

It has become common practice for software projects to adopt third-party dependencies. Developers are encouraged to update any outdated dependency to remain safe from potential threats of vulnerabilities. In this study, we present an approach to aid developers show whether or not a vulnerable code is reachable for JavaScript projects. Our prototype, SōjiTantei, is evaluated in two ways (i) the accuracy when compared to a manual approach and (ii) a larger-scale analysis of 780 clients from 78 security vulnerability cases. The first evaluation shows that SōjiTantei has a high accuracy of 83.3%, with a speed of less than a second analysis per client. The second evaluation reveals that 68 out of the studied 78 vulnerabilities reported having at least one clean client. The study proves that automation is promising with the potential for further improvement.

Permutation polynomials over finite fields have been widely studied due to their important applications in mathematics and cryptography. In recent years, 2-to-1 mappings over finite fields were proposed to build almost perfect nonlinear functions, bent functions, and the semi-bent functions. In this paper, we generalize the 2-to-1 mappings to m-to-1 mappings, including their construction methods. Some applications of m-to-1 mappings are also discussed.

A properly designed stopping criterion for iterative decoding algorithms can save a number of iterations and lead to a considerable reduction of system latency. The symbol flipping decoding algorithms based on prediction (SFDP) have been proposed recently for efficient decoding of non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. To detect the decoding frames with slow convergence or even non-convergence, we track the number of oscillations on the value of objective function during the iterations. Based on this tracking number, we design a simple stopping criterion for the SFDP algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed stopping criterion can significantly reduce the number of iterations at low signal-to-noise ratio regions with slight error performance degradation.

A nonvolatile field-programmable gate array (NV-FPGA), where the circuit-configuration information still remains without power supply, offers a powerful solution against the standby power issue. In this paper, an NV-FPGA is proposed where the programmable logic and interconnect function blocks are described in a hardware description language and are pushed through a standard-cell-based design flow with nonvolatile flip-flops. The use of the standard-cell-based design flow makes it possible to migrate any arbitrary process technology and to perform architecture-level simulation with physical information. As a typical example, the proposed NV-FPGA is designed under 55nm CMOS/100nm magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) technologies, and the performance of the proposed NV-FPGA is evaluated in comparison with that of a CMOS-only volatile FPGA.

Shape matching with local descriptors is an underlying scheme in shape analysis. We can visually confirm the matching results and also assess them for shape classification. Generally, shape matching is implemented by determining the correspondence between shapes that are represented by their respective sets of sampled points. Some matching methods have already been proposed; the main difference between them lies in their choice of matching cost function. This function measures the dissimilarity between the local distribution of sampled points around a focusing point of one shape and the local distribution of sampled points around a referring point of another shape. A local descriptor is used to describe the distribution of sampled points around the point of the shape. In this paper, we propose an extended scheme for shape matching that can compensate for errors in existing local descriptors. It is convenient for local descriptors to adopt our scheme because it does not require the local descriptors to be modified. The main idea of our scheme is to consider the correspondence of neighboring sampled points to a focusing point when determining the correspondence of the focusing point. This is useful because it increases the chance of finding a suitable correspondence. However, considering the correspondence of neighboring points causes a problem regarding computational feasibility, because there is a substantial increase in the number of possible correspondences that need to be considered in shape matching. We solve this problem using a branch-and-bound algorithm, for efficient approximation. Using several shape datasets, we demonstrate that our scheme yields a more suitable matching than the conventional scheme that does not consider the correspondence of neighboring sampled points, even though our scheme requires only a small increase in execution time.

The traditional RANSAC samples uniformly in the dataset which is not efficient in the task with rich prior information. This letter proposes GUISAC (Guided Sample Consensus), which samples with the guidance of various prior information. In image matching, GUISAC extracts seed points sets evenly on images based on various prior factors at first, then it incorporates seed points sets into the sampling subset with a growth function, and a new termination criterion is used to decide whether the current best hypothesis is good enough. Finally, experimental results show that the new method GUISAC has a great advantage in time-consuming than other similar RANSAC methods, and without loss of accuracy.

Two structural coverage criteria, toggle coverage and modified condition/decision coverage, for FBD (Function Block Diagram) simulation are proposed in the previous study. This paper empirically evaluates how effective the coverage criteria are to detect faults in an FBD program using the mutation analysis.

This paper reports our new communication components and downlink tests for realizing 2.65Gbps by utilizing two circular polarizations. We have developed an on-board X-band transmitter, an on-board dual circularly polarized-wave antenna, and a ground station. In the on-board transmitter, we optimized the bias conditions of GaN High Power Amplifier (HPA) to linearize AM-AM performance. We have also designed and fabricated a dual circularly polarized-wave antenna for low-crosstalk polarization multiplexing. The antenna is composed of a corrugated horn antenna and a septum-type polarizer. The antenna achieves Cross Polarization Discrimination (XPD) of 37-43dB in the target X-band. We also modify an existing 10m ground station antenna by replacing its primary radiator and adding a polarizer. We put the polarizer and Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) in a cryogenic chamber to reduce thermal noise. Total system noise temperature of the antenna is 58K (maximum) for 18K physical temperature when the angle of elevation is 90° on a fine winter day. The dual circularly polarized-wave ground station antenna has 39.0dB/K of Gain - system-noise Temperature ratio (G/T) and an XPD higher than 37dB. The downlinked signals are stored in a data recorder at the antenna site. Afterwards, we decoded the signals by using our non-real-time software demodulator. Our system has high frequency efficiency with a roll-off factor α=0.05 and polarization multiplexing of 64APSK. The communication bits per hertz corresponds to 8.41bit/Hz (2.65Gbit/315MHz). The system is demonstrated in orbit on board the RAPid Innovative payload demonstration Satellite (RAPIS-1). RAPIS-1 was launched from Uchinoura Space Center on January 19th, 2019. We decoded 1010 bits of downlinked R- and L-channel signals and found that the downlinked binary data was error free. Consequently, we have achieved 2.65Gbps communication speed in the X-band for earth observation satellites at 300 Mega symbols per second (Msps) and polarization multiplexing of 64APSK (coding rate: 4/5) for right- and left-hand circular polarizations.

The nearest neighbor method is a simple and flexible scheme for the classification of data points in a vector space. It predicts a class label of an unseen data point using a majority rule for the labels of known data points inside a neighborhood of the unseen data point. Because it sometimes achieves good performance even for complicated problems, several derivatives of it have been studied. Among them, the discriminant adaptive nearest neighbor method is particularly worth revisiting to demonstrate its application. The main idea of this method is to adjust the neighbor metric of an unseen data point to the set of known data points before label prediction. It often improves the prediction, provided the neighbor metric is adjusted well. For statistical shape analysis, shape classification attracts attention because it is a vital topic in shape analysis. However, because a shape is generally expressed as a matrix, it is non-trivial to apply the discriminant adaptive nearest neighbor method to shape classification. Thus, in this study, we develop the discriminant adaptive nearest neighbor method to make it slightly more useful in shape classification. To achieve this development, a mixture model and optimization algorithm for shape clustering are incorporated into the method. Furthermore, we describe several helpful techniques for the initial guess of the model parameters in the optimization algorithm. Using several shape datasets, we demonstrated that our method is successful for shape classification.

Cross-project defect prediction (CPDP) is a feasible solution to build an accurate prediction model without enough historical data. Although existing methods for CPDP that use only labeled data to build the prediction model achieve great results, there are much room left to further improve on prediction performance. In this paper we propose a Semi-Supervised Discriminative Feature Learning (SSDFL) approach for CPDP. SSDFL first transfers knowledge of source and target data into the common space by using a fully-connected neural network to mine potential similarities of source and target data. Next, we reduce the differences of both marginal distributions and conditional distributions between mapped source and target data. We also introduce the discriminative feature learning to make full use of label information, which is that the instances from the same class are close to each other and the instances from different classes are distant from each other. Extensive experiments are conducted on 10 projects from AEEEM and NASA datasets, and the experimental results indicate that our approach obtains better prediction performance than baselines.

Finding the correspondence between two images of the same object or scene is an active research field in computer vision. This paper develops a rapid and effective Content-based Superpixel Image matching and Stitching (CSIS) scheme, which utilizes the content of superpixel through multi-features fusion technique. Unlike popular keypoint-based matching method, our approach proposes a superpixel internal feature-based scheme to implement image matching. In the beginning, we make use of a novel superpixel generation algorithm based on content-based feature representation, named Content-based Superpixel Segmentation (CSS) algorithm. Superpixels are generated in terms of a new distance metric using color, spatial, and gradient feature information. It is developed to balance the compactness and the boundary adherence of resulted superpixels. Then, we calculate the entropy of each superpixel for separating some superpixels with significant characteristics. Next, for each selected superpixel, its multi-features descriptor is generated by extracting and fusing local features of the selected superpixel itself. Finally, we compare the matching features of candidate superpixels and their own neighborhoods to estimate the correspondence between two images. We evaluated superpixel matching and image stitching on complex and deformable surfaces using our superpixel region descriptors, and the results show that new method is effective in matching accuracy and execution speed.

Metric learning aims to generate similarity-preserved low dimensional feature vectors from input images. Most existing supervised deep metric learning methods usually define a carefully-designed loss function to make a constraint on relative position between samples in projected lower dimensional space. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called Naive Similarity Discriminator (NSD) to learn the distribution of easy samples and predict their probability of being similar. Our purpose lies on encouraging generator network to generate vectors in fitting positions whose similarity can be distinguished by our discriminator. Adequate comparison experiments was performed to demonstrate the ability of our proposed model on retrieval and clustering tasks, with precision within specific radius, normalized mutual information and F1 score as evaluation metrics.

We measured eye movements at gaze points while subjects performed calculation tasks and examined the relationship between the eye movements and fatigue and/or internal state of a subject by tasks. It was suggested that fatigue and/or internal state of a subject affected eye movements at gaze points and that we could measure them using eye movements at gaze points in real time.

In small cell deployments, the combined usage of user association and inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) is inevitable. This paper investigates the joint optimization of user association and ICIC in the downlink. We first formulate the joint optimization problem as a utility maximization problem. We then employ the logarithmic utility function known as the proportional fair criteria. The optimum user association and the ICIC are derived by solving a convex optimization problem based on the average spectral efficiencies of all users. We propose an iterative algorithm to obtain the optimum solution to this problem. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm for the small cell deployments and shows that the proposed algorithm works well. We also compare the performance of the proposed algorithm based on utility maximization user association with the CRE, and show the superiority of the utility maximization. Furthermore, we show that intra-tier ICIC and inter-tier ICIC can effectively improve the throughput performance according to the conditions. It is also shown that the combined usage of inter-tier ICIC and intra-tier ICIC enhances the throughput performance compared to schemes employing either the inter- or intra-tier ICIC scheme.

In this work, we present one novel rust detection method based upon one-class classification and L2 sparse representation (SR) with decision fusion. Firstly, a new color contrast descriptor is proposed for extracting the rust features of steel structure images. Considering that the patterns of rust features are more simplified than those of non-rust ones, one-class support vector machine (SVM) classifier and L2 SR classifier are designed with these rust image features, respectively. After that, a multiplicative fusion rule is advocated for combining the one-class SVM and L2 SR modules, thereby achieving more accurate rust detecting results. In the experiments, we conduct numerous experiments, and when compared with other developed rust detectors, the presented method can offer better rust detecting performances.

Two frequency sharing criteria for BSS (Broadcasting-Satellite Service) are enacted in Sect.1 of Annex 1 to Appendix 30 to Radio Regulations. These two criteria are pfd (power flux-density) and EPM (Equivalent Protection Margin) values. In this paper, the two criteria are compared and studied from the view point of applicability to the sharing cases between BSS and BSS. In particular, it is shown that in some cases, the EPM criterion contributes to alleviate the problem of “sensitive satellite network”, i.e., one that has relatively low transmission power and is very weak against interference and blocks the new satellite to enter. Disclaimer The views and positions expressed by the authors are strictly personal and do not constitute, nor can be interpreted as, the position of the International Telecommunication Union on the topics addressed in this paper.