Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) allows several users to multiplex in the power-domain to improve spectral efficiency. To further improve its performance, it is desirable to reduce inter-user interference (IUI). In this paper, we propose a downlink asynchronous NOMA (ANOMA) scheme applicable to frequency-selective channels. The proposed scheme introduces an intentional symbol offset between the multiplexed signals to reduce IUI, and it employs cyclic-prefixed single-carrier transmission with frequency-domain equalization (FDE) to reduce inter-symbol interference. We show that the mean square error for the FDE of the proposed ANOMA scheme is smaller than that of a conventional NOMA scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed ANOMA with appropriate power allocation achieves a better sum rate compared to the conventional NOMA.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems generally adopt hybrid precoding combining digital and analog precoder as an alternative to full digital precoding to reduce RF chains and energy consumption. In order to balance the relationship between spectral efficiency, energy efficiency and hardware complexity, the hybrid-connected system structure should be adopted, and then the solution process of hybrid precoding can be simplified by decomposing the total achievable rate into several sub-rates. However, the singular value decomposition (SVD) incurs high complexity in calculating the optimal unconstrained hybrid precoder for each sub-rate. Therefore, this paper proposes PAST, a low complexity hybrid precoding algorithm based on projection approximate subspace tracking. The optimal unconstrained hybrid precoder of each sub-rate is estimated with the PAST algorithm, which avoids the high complexity process of calculating the left and right singular vectors and singular value matrix by SVD. Simulations demonstrate that PAST matches the spectral efficiency of SVD-based hybrid precoding in full-connected (FC), hybrid-connected (HC) and sub-connected (SC) system structure. Moreover, the superiority of PAST over SVD-based hybrid precoding in terms of complexity and increases with the number of transmitting antennas.

We proposed a new method for evaluating the deterioration of messenger wires by using terahertz waves. We use terahertz time-domain spectroscopy to measure several twisted wire samples with different levels of deterioration. We find that each twisted wire sample had a different distribution of reflection intensity which was due to the wires' twist structure. We show that it is possible to assess the degradation from the straight lines present in the reflection intensity distribution image. Furthermore, it was confirmed that our method can be applied to wire covered with resin.

Geometric partitioning mode (GPM) is a new inter prediction tool adopted in versatile video coding (VVC), which is the latest video coding of international standard developed by joint video expert team in 2020. Different from the regular inter prediction performed on rectangular blocks, GPM separates a coding block into two regions by the pre-defined 64 types of straight lines, generates inter predicted samples for each separated region, and then blends them to obtain the final inter predicted samples. With this feature, GPM improves the prediction accuracy at the boundary between the foreground and background with different motions. However, GPM has room to further improve the prediction accuracy if the final predicted samples can be generated using not only inter prediction but also intra prediction. In this paper, we propose a GPM with inter and intra prediction to achieve further enhanced compression capability beyond VVC. To maximize the coding performance of the proposed method, we also propose the restriction of the applicable intra prediction mode number and the prohibition of applying the intra prediction to both GPM-separated regions. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the coding performance gain by the conventional GPM method of VVC by 1.3 times, and provides an additional coding performance gain of 1% bitrate savings in one of the coding structures for low-latency video transmission where the conventional GPM method cannot be utilized.

Crowdedness of buses is playing an increasingly important role in the disease control of COVID-19. The lack of a practical approach to sensing the crowdedness of buses is a major problem. This paper proposes a bus crowdedness sensing system which exploits deep learning-based object detection to count the numbers of passengers getting on and off a bus and thus estimate the crowdedness of buses in real time. In our prototype system, we combine YOLOv5s object detection model with Kalman Filter object tracking algorithm to implement a sensing algorithm running on a Jetson nano-based vehicular device mounted on a bus. By using the driving recorder video data taken from real bus, we experimentally evaluate the performance of the proposed sensing system to verify that our proposed system system improves counting accuracy and achieves real-time processing at the Jetson Nano platform.

Inter-channel correlation is one of the redundancy which need to be eliminated in video coding. In the latest video coding standard H.266/VVC, the DM (Direct Mode) and CCLM (Cross-component Linear Model) modes have been introduced to reduce the similarity between luminance and chroma. However, inter-channel correlation is still observed. In this paper, a new inter-channel prediction algorithm is proposed, which utilizes coloring principle to predict chroma pixels. From the coloring perspective, for most natural content video frames, the three components Y, U and V always demonstrate similar coloring pattern. Therefore, the U and V components can be predicted using the coloring pattern of the Y component. In the proposed algorithm, correlation coefficients are obtained in a lightweight way to describe the coloring relationship between current pixel and reference pixel in Y component, and used to predict chroma pixels. The optimal position for the reference samples is also designed. Base on the selected position of the reference samples, two new chroma prediction modes are defined. Experiment results show that, compared with VTM 12.1, the proposed algorithm has an average of -0.92% and -0.96% BD-rate improvement for U and V components, for All Intra (AI) configurations. At the same time, the increased encoding time and decoding time can be ignored.

The r-th nonlinearity of Boolean functions is an important cryptographic criterion associated with higher order linearity attacks on stream and block ciphers. In this paper, we tighten the lower bound of the second-order nonlinearity of a class of Boolean function over finite field F2n, fλ(x)=Tr(λxd), where λ∈F*2r, d=22r+2r+1 and n=7r. This bound is much better than the lower bound of Iwata-Kurosawa.

S-box is one of the core components of symmetric cryptographic algorithms, but differential distribution table (DDT) is an important tool to research some properties of S-boxes to resist differential attacks. In this paper, we give a relationship between the sum-of-squares of DDT and the sum-of-squares indicator of (n, m)-functions based on the autocorrelation coefficients. We also get some upper and lower bounds on the sum-of-squares of DDT of balanced (n, m)-functions, and prove that the sum-of-squares of DDT of (n, m)-functions is affine invariant under affine affine equivalent. Furthermore, we obtain a relationship between the sum-of-squares of DDT and the signal-to-noise ratio of (n, m)-functions. In addition, we calculate the distributions of the sum-of-squares of DDT for all 3-bit S-boxes, the 4-bit optimal S-boxes and all 302 balanced S-boxes (up to affine equivalence), data experiments verify our results.

The Graph Coloring Problem (GCP) is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem that has many practical applications. Degree of SATURation (DSATUR) and Recursive Largest First (RLF) are well known as typical solution construction algorithms for GCP. It is necessary to update the vertex degree in the subgraph induced by uncolored vertices when selecting vertices to be colored in both DSATUR and RLF. There is an issue that the higher the edge density of a given graph, the longer the processing time. The purposes of this paper are to propose a degree updating method called Adaptive Degree Updating (ADU for short) that improves the issue, and to evaluate the effectiveness of ADU for DSATUR and RLF on DIMACS benchmark graphs as well as random graphs having a wide range of sizes and densities. Experimental results show that the construction algorithms with ADU are faster than the conventional algorithms for many graphs and that the ADU method yields significant speed-ups relative to the conventional algorithms, especially in the case of large graphs with higher edge density.

A branching program is a well-studied model of computation and a representation for Boolean functions. It is a directed acyclic graph with a unique root node, some accepting nodes, and some rejecting nodes. Except for the accepting and rejecting nodes, each node has a label with a variable and each outgoing edge of the node has a label with a 0/1 assignment of the variable. The satisfiability problem for branching programs is, given a branching program with n variables and m nodes, to determine if there exists some assignment that activates a consistent path from the root to an accepting node. The width of a branching program is the maximum number of nodes at any level. The satisfiability problem for width-2 branching programs is known to be NP-complete. In this paper, we present a satisfiability algorithm for width-2 branching programs with n variables and cn nodes, and show that its running time is poly(n)·2(1-µ(c))n, where µ(c)=1/2O(c log c). Our algorithm consists of two phases. First, we transform a given width-2 branching program to a set of some structured formulas that consist of AND and Exclusive-OR gates. Then, we check the satisfiability of these formulas by a greedy restriction method depending on the frequency of the occurrence of variables.

In a previous study, we proposed a new method based on copula theory to evaluate the detection performance of distributed-processing multistatic radar systems, in which the dependence of local decisions was modeled by a Gaussian copula with linear dependence and no tail dependence. However, we also noted that one main limitation of the study was the lack of investigations on the tail-dependence and nonlinear dependence among local detectors' inputs whose densities have long tails and are often used to model clutter and wanted signals in high-resolution radars. In this work, we attempt to overcome this shortcoming by extending the application of the proposed method to several types of multivariate copula-based dependence models to clarify the effects of tail-dependence and different dependence models on the system detection performance in detail. Our careful analysis provides two interesting and important clarifications: first, the detection performance degrades significantly with tail dependence; and second, this degradation mainly originates from the upper tail dependence, while the lower tail and nonlinear dependence unexpectedly improve the system performance.

Selecting visually overlapping image pairs without any prior information is an essential task of large-scale structure from motion (SfM) pipelines. To address this problem, many state-of-the-art image retrieval systems adopt the idea of bag of visual words (BoVW) for computing image-pair similarity. In this paper, we present a method for improving the image pair selection using BoVW. Our method combines a conventional vector-based approach and a set-based approach. For the set similarity, we introduce a modified version of the Simpson (m-Simpson) coefficient. We show the advantage of this measure over three typical set similarity measures and demonstrate that the combination of vector similarity and the m-Simpson coefficient effectively reduces false positives and increases accuracy. To discuss the choice of vocabulary construction, we prepared both a sampled vocabulary on an evaluation dataset and a basic pre-trained vocabulary on a training dataset. In addition, we tested our method on vocabularies of different sizes. Our experimental results show that the proposed method dramatically improves precision scores especially on the sampled vocabulary and performs better than the state-of-the-art methods that use pre-trained vocabularies. We further introduce a method to determine the k value of top-k relevant searches for each image and show that it obtains higher precision at the same recall.

Graph layouts reveal global or local structures of graph data. However, there are few studies on assisting readers in better reconstructing a graph from a layout. This paper attempts to generate a layout whose edges can be reestablished. We reformulate the graph layout problem as an edge classification problem. The inputs are the vertex pairs, and the outputs are the edge existences. The trainable parameters are the laid-out coordinates of the vertices. We propose a binary classification-based graph layout (BCGL) framework in this paper. This layout aims to preserve the local structure of the graph and does not require the total similarity relationships of the vertices. We implement two concrete algorithms under the BCGL framework, evaluate our approach on a wide variety of datasets, and draw comparisons with several other methods. The evaluations verify the ability of the BCGL in local neighborhood preservation and its visual quality with some classic metrics.

Accurately describing user behaviors with appropriate sensors is always important when developing computing cost-effective systems. This paper employs datasets recorded for fine-grained reading detection using the J!NS MEME, an eye-wear device with electrooculography (EOG), accelerometer, and gyroscope sensors. We generate models for all possible combinations of the three sensors and employ self-supervised learning and supervised learning in order to gain an understanding of optimal sensor settings. The results show that only the EOG sensor performs roughly as well as the best performing combination of other sensors. This gives an insight into selecting the appropriate sensors for fine-grained reading detection, enabling cost-effective computation.

This letter studies a biobjective optimization problem in binary associative memories characterized by ternary connection parameters. First, we introduce a condition of parameters that guarantees storage of any desired memories and suppression of oscillatory behavior. Second, we define a biobjective problem based on two objectives that evaluate uniform stability of desired memories and sparsity of connection parameters. Performing precise numerical analysis for typical examples, we have clarified existence of a trade-off between the two objectives.

This paper presents an improved YOLOv3 network, named MSFF-YOLOv3, for precisely detecting variable surface defects of aluminum profiles in practice. First, we introduce a larger prediction scale to provide detailed information for small defect detection; second, we design an efficient attention-guided block to extract more features of defects with less overhead; third, we design a bottom-up pyramid and integrate it with the existing feature pyramid network to construct a twin-tower structure to improve the circulation and fusion of features of different layers. In addition, we employ the K-median algorithm for anchor clustering to speed up the network reasoning. Experimental results showed that the mean average precision of the proposed network MSFF-YOLOv3 is higher than all conventional networks for surface defect detection of aluminum profiles. Moreover, the number of frames processed per second for our proposed MSFF-YOLOv3 could meet real-time requirements.

A method to predict lightning by machine learning analysis of atmospheric electric fields is proposed for the first time. In this study, we calculated an anomaly score with long short-term memory (LSTM), a recurrent neural network analysis method, using electric field data recorded every second on the ground. The threshold value of the anomaly score was defined, and a lightning alarm at the observation point was issued or canceled. Using this method, it was confirmed that 88.9% of lightning occurred while alarming. These results suggest that a lightning prediction system with an electric field sensor and machine learning can be developed in the future.

To solve the problem of metamerism in the color reproduction process, various spectral reflectance reconstruction methods combined with neural network have been proposed in recent years. However, these methods are generally sensitive to initial values and can easily converge to local optimal solutions, especially on small data sets. In this paper, we propose a spectral reflectance reconstruction algorithm based on the Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) and an improved Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA). In this algorithm, to solve the problem that BPNN is sensitive to initial values, we propose to use SSA to initialize BPNN, and we use the sine chaotic mapping to further improve the stability of the algorithm. In the experiment, we tested the proposed algorithm on the X-Rite ColorChecker Classic Mini Chart which contains 24 colors, the results show that the proposed algorithm has significantly better performance compared to other algorithms and moreover it can meet the needs of spectral reflectance reconstruction on small data sets. Code is avaible at https://github.com/LuraZhang/spectral-reflectance-reconsctuction.

The application of compressed sensing (CS) theory to non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems has been investigated recently. As described in this paper, we propose a quality-of-service (QoS)-aware, low-complexity, CS-based user selection and power allocation scheme with adaptive resource block selection for downlink NOMA systems, where the tolerable interference threshold is designed mathematically to achieve a given QoS requirement by being relaxed to a constrained l1 norm optimization problem. The proposed scheme adopts two adaptive resource block (RB) selection algorithms that assign proper RB to user pairs, i.e. max-min channel assignment and two-step opportunistic channel assignment. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is more effective at improving the user rate than other reference schemes while reducing the required complexity. The QoS requirement is approximately satisfied as long as the required QoS value is feasible.

This paper proposes constant voltage design based on K-inverter for cooperative inductive power transfer (IPT) where a nearby receiver picks up power and simultaneously cooperates in relaying the signal toward another distant receiver. In a cooperative IPT system, wireless power is fundamentally transferred to the nearby receiver via one K-inverter and to the distant receiver via two K-inverters. By adding one more K-inverter to the nearby receiver, our design is among the simplest methods as it delivers constant output voltage to each receiver via two K-inverters only. Experimental results verify that the proposed cooperative IPT system can stabilize two output voltages against the load variations while attaining high RF-RF efficiency of 90%.