The diffusion model has achieved success in generating and editing high-quality images because of its ability to produce fine details. Its superior generation ability has the potential to facilitate more detailed segmentation. This study presents a novel approach to segmentation tasks using an inverse heat dissipation model, a kind of diffusion-based models. The proposed method involves generating a mask that gradually shrinks to fit the shape of the desired segmentation region. We comprehensively evaluated the proposed method using multiple datasets under varying conditions. The results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods and provides a more detailed segmentation.

This letter presents a global feature-based method for evaluating the no reference quality of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) contrast-distorted images. Based on the characteristics of SEM images and the human visual system, the global features of SEM images are extracted as the score for evaluating image quality. In this letter, the texture information of SEM images is first extracted using a low-pass filter with orientation, and the amount of information in the texture part is calculated based on the entropy reflecting the complexity of the texture. The singular values with four scales of the original image are then calculated, and the amount of structural change between different scales is calculated and averaged. Finally, the amounts of texture information and structural change are pooled to generate the final quality score of the SEM image. Experimental results show that the method can effectively evaluate the quality of SEM contrast-distorted images.

This paper mainly proposes a line segment detection method based on pseudo peak suppression and local Hough transform, which has good noise resistance and can solve the problems of short line segment missing detection, false detection, and oversegmentation. In addition, in response to the phenomenon of uneven development in nuclear emulsion tomographic images, this paper proposes an image preprocessing process that uses the “Difference of Gaussian” method to reduce noise and then uses the standard deviation of the gray value of each pixel to bundle and unify the gray value of each pixel, which can robustly obtain the linear features in these images. The tests on the actual dataset of nuclear emulsion tomographic images and the public YorkUrban dataset show that the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy of convolutional neural network or vision in transformer-based event classification for alpha-decay events in nuclear emulsion. In particular, the line segment detection method in the proposed method achieves optimal results in both accuracy and processing speed, which also has strong generalization ability in high quality natural images.

Bandpass filters (BPFs) are very important to extract target signals and eliminate noise from the received signals. A BPF of which frequency characteristics is a sum of Gaussian functions is called the Gaussian mixture BPF (GMBPF). In this research, we propose to implement the GMBPF approximately by the sum of several frequency components of the sliding Fourier transform (SFT) or the attenuated SFT (ASFT). Because a component of the SFT/ASFT can be approximately realized using the finite impulse response (FIR) recursive filters, its calculation complexity does not depend on the length of the impulse response. The property makes GMBPF ideal for narrow bandpass filtering applications. We conducted experiments to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed GMBPF over FIR filters designed by a MATLAB function with regard to the computational complexity.

This paper proposes an accurate and efficient method to calculate probability distributions of pulse-shaped complex signals. We show that the distribution over the in-phase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) complex plane is obtained by a recursive probability mass function of the accumulator for a pulse-shaping filter. In contrast to existing analytical methods, the proposed method provides complex-plane distributions in addition to instantaneous power distributions. Since digital signal processing generally deals with complex amplitude rather than power, the complex-plane distributions are more useful when considering digital signal processing. In addition, our approach is free from the derivation of signal-dependent functions. This fact results in its easy application to arbitrary constellations and pulse-shaping filters like Monte Carlo simulations. Since the proposed method works without numerical integrals and calculations of transcendental functions, the accuracy degradation caused by floating-point arithmetic is inherently reduced. Even though our method is faster than Monte Carlo simulations, the obtained distributions are more accurate. These features of the proposed method realize a novel framework for evaluating the characteristics of pulse-shaped signals, leading to new modulation, predistortion and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction schemes.

The configurable Ring oscillator Physical unclonable function (CRO PUF) is the newly proposed strong PUF based on classic RO PUF, which can generate exponential Challenge-Response Pairs (CRPs) and has good uniqueness and reliability. However, existing proposals have low hardware utilization and vulnerability to modeling attacks. In this paper, we propose a Novel Configurable Dual State (CDS) PUF with lower overhead and higher resistance to modeling attacks. This structure can be flexibly transformed into RO PUF and TERO PUF in the same topology according to the parity of the Hamming Weight (HW) of the challenge, which can achieve 100% utilization of the inverters and improve the efficiency of hardware utilization. A feedback obfuscation mechanism (FOM) is also proposed, which uses the stable count value of the ring oscillator in the PUF as the updated mask to confuse and hide the original challenge, significantly improving the effect of resisting modeling attacks. The proposed FOM-CDS PUF is analyzed by building a mathematical model and finally implemented on Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, the test results show that the FOM-CDS PUF can effectively resist several popular modeling attack methods and the prediction accuracy is below 60%. Meanwhile it shows that the FOM-CDS PUF has good performance with uniformity, Bit Error Rate at different temperatures, Bit Error Rate at different voltages and uniqueness of 53.68%, 7.91%, 5.64% and 50.33% respectively.

At a flash memory, each stored data frame is protected by error correction codes (ECC) such as Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes from random errors. Exclusive-OR (XOR) based erasure codes like RAID-5 have also been employed at the flash memory to protect from memory block defects. Conventionally, the ECC and erasure codes are used separately since their target errors are different. Due to recent aggressive technology scaling, additional error correction capability for random errors is required without adding redundancy. We propose an algorithm to improve error correction capability by using XOR parity with a simple counter that counts the number of unreliable bits in the XOR stripe. We also propose to apply Chase decoding to the proposed algorithm. The counter makes it possible to reduce the false correction and execute the efficient Chase decoding. We show that combining the proposed algorithm with Chase decoding can significantly improve the decoding performance.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is very sensitive to the carrier frequency offset (CFO). The CFO estimation precision heavily makes impacts on the OFDM performance. In this paper, a new Bayesian learning-assisted joint CFO tracking and channel impulse response estimation is proposed. The proposed algorithm is modified from a Bayesian learning-assisted estimation (BLAE) algorithm in the literature. The BLAE is expectation-maximization (EM)-based and displays the estimator mean square error (MSE) lower than the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) when the CFO value is near zero. However, its MSE value may increase quickly as the CFO value goes away from zero. Hence, the CFO estimator of the BLAE is replaced to solve the problem. Originally, the design criterion of the single-time-sample (STS) CFO estimator in the literature is maximum likelihood (ML)-based. Its MSE performance can reach the CRB. Also, its CFO estimation range can reach the widest range required for a CFO tracking estimator. For a CFO normalized by the sub-carrier spacing, the widest tracking range required is from -0.5 to +0.5. Here, we apply the STS CFO estimator design method to the EM-based Bayesian learning framework. The resultant Bayesian learning-assisted STS algorithm displays the MSE performance lower than the CRB, and its CFO estimation range is between ±0.5. With such a Bayesian learning design criterion, the additional channel noise power and power delay profile must be estimated, as compared with the ML-based design criterion. With the additional channel statistical information, the derived algorithm presents the MSE performance better than the CRB. Two frequency-selective channels are adopted for computer simulations. One has fixed tap weights, and the other is Rayleigh fading. Comparisons with the most related algorithms are also been provided.

As an efficient classical machine learning classifier, the Softmax regression uses cross-entropy as the loss function. Therefore, it has high accuracy in classification. However, when there is inconsistency between the distribution of training samples and test samples, the performance of traditional Softmax regression models will degrade. A transfer discriminant Softmax regression model called Transfer Discriminant Softmax Regression with Weighted MMD (TDS-WMMD) is proposed in this paper. With this method, the Weighted Maximum Mean Divergence (WMMD) is introduced into the objective function to reduce the marginal distribution and conditional distribution between domains both locally and globally, realizing the cross domain transfer of knowledge. In addition, to further improve the classification performance of the model, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is added to the label iteration refinement process to improve the class separability of the designed method by keeping the same kind of samples together and the different kinds of samples repeling each other. Finally, after conducting classification experiments on several commonly used public transfer learning datasets, the results verify that the designed method can enhance the knowledge transfer ability of the Softmax regression model, and deliver higher classification performance compared with other current transfer learning classifiers.

The existing literature focuses on the applications of fast filter bank due to its excellent frequency responses with low complexity. However, the topic is not addressed related to the general transfer function expressions of the corresponding subfilters for a specific channel. To do this, in this paper, general closed-form transfer function expressions for fast filter bank are derived. Firstly, the cascaded structure of fast filter bank is modelled by a binary tree, with which the index of the subfilter at each stage within the channel can be determined. Then the transfer functions for the two outputs of a subfilter are expressed in a unified form. Finally, the general closed-form transfer functions for the channel and its corresponding subfilters are obtained by variables replacement if the prototype lowpass filters for the stages are given. Analytical results and simulations verify the general expressions. With such closed-form expressions lend themselves easily to analysis and direct computation of the transfer functions and the frequency responses without the structure graph.

The ionospheric clutter in High Frequency Surface Wave Radar (HFSWR) is the reflection of electromagnetic waves from the ionosphere back to the receiver, which should be suppressed as much as possible for the primary purpose of target detection in HFSWR. However, ionospheric clutter contains vast quantities of ionospheric state information. By studying ionospheric clutter, some of the relevant ionospheric parameters can be inferred, especially during the period of typhoons, when the ionospheric state changes drastically affected by typhoon-excited gravity waves, and utilizing the time-frequency characteristics of ionospheric clutter at typhoon time, information such as the trend of electron concentration changes in the ionosphere and the direction of the typhoon can be obtained. The results of the processing of the radar data showed the effectiveness of this method.

The low-hit-zone (LHZ) frequency hopping sequence (FHS) sets are widely applicable in quasi-synchronous frequency hopping multiple-access (QS-FHMA) systems. In order to reduce mutual interference (MI) in the zone around the signal origin between different users, we recommend the LHZ FHS set instead of the conventional FHS set. In this letter, we propose a design of LHZ FHS sets via interleaving techniques. The obtained sequences can be confirmed that they are near-optimal in relation to the Peng-Fan-Lee bound.

Mission-critical monitoring services, such as finding criminals with a monitoring camera, require rapid detection of newly updated data, where suppressing delay is desirable. Taking this direction, this paper proposes a network design scheme to minimize this delay for monitoring services that consist of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices located at terminal endpoints (TEs), databases (DB), and applications (APLs). The proposed scheme determines the allocation of DB and APLs and the selection of the server to which TE belongs. DB and APL are allocated on an optimal server from multiple servers in the network. We formulate the proposed network design scheme as an integer linear programming problem. The delay reduction effect of the proposed scheme is evaluated under two network topologies and a monitoring camera system network. In the two network topologies, the delays of the proposed scheme are 78 and 80 percent, compared to that of the conventional scheme. In the monitoring camera system network, the delay of the proposed scheme is 77 percent compared to that of the conventional scheme. These results indicate that the proposed scheme reduces the delay compared to the conventional scheme where APLs are located near TEs. The computation time of the proposed scheme is acceptable for the design phase before the service is launched. The proposed scheme can contribute to a network design that detects newly added objects quickly in the monitoring services.

The performance of a fully wireless-power-transfer (WPT) node network, in which each node transfers (and receives) energy through a wireless channel when it has sufficient (and insufficient) energy in its battery, was theoretically analyzed. The lost job ratio (LJR), namely, is the ratio of (i) the amount of jobs that cannot be done due to battery of a node running out to (ii) the amount of jobs that should be done, is used as a performance metric. It describes the effect of the battery of each node running out and how much additional energy is needed. Although it is known that WPT can reduce the probability of the battery running out among a few nodes within a small area, the performance of a fully WPT network has not been clarified. By using stochastic geometry and first-passage-time analysis for a diffusion process, the expected LJR was theoretically derived. Numerical examples demonstrate that the key parameters determining the performance of the network are node density, threshold switching of statuses between “transferring energy” and “receiving energy,” and the parameters of power conversion. They also demonstrate the followings: (1) The mean energy stored in the node battery decreases in the networks because of the loss caused by WPT, and a fully WPT network cannot decrease the probability of the battery running out under the current WPT efficiency. (2) When the saturation value of power conversion increases, a fully WPT network can decrease the probability of the battery running out although the mean energy stored in the node battery still decreases in the networks. This result is explained by the fact that the variance of stored energy in each node battery becomes smaller due to transfer of energy from nodes of sufficient energy to nodes of insufficient energy.

In this article, a new Beamforming Network (BFN) realized in Broadside Coupled Stripline (BCS) is proposed to feed 1×4 and 2×2 arrays antenna at 28 GHZ-Band. The new BFN is composed only of couplers and phase shifters. It doesn't require any crossover compared to the conventional Butler Matrix (BM) which requires two crossovers. The tight coupling and low loss characteristics of the BCS allow a design of a compact and wideband BFN. The new BFN produces the phase differences of (±90°) and (±45°, ±135°) respectively in x- and y-directions. Its integration with a 1×4 linear array antenna reduces the array area by 70% with an improvement of the gain performance compared with the conventional array. The integration with a 2×2 array allows the realization of a full 2-D beam scanning. The proposed concept has been verified experimentally by measuring the fabricated prototypes of the BFN, the 1-D and 2-D patch arrays antennas. The measured 11.5 dBi and 11.3 dBi maximum gains are realized in θ0 = 14° and (θ0, φ0) = (45°,345°) directions respectively for the 1-D and 2-D patch arrays. The physical area of the fabricated BFN is only (0.37λ0×0.3λ0×0.08λ0), while the 1-D array and 2-D array antennas areas without feeding transmission lines are respectively (0.5λ0×2.15λ0×0.08λ0) and (0.9λ0×0.8λ0×0.08λ0).

Thanks to the development of the 6th generation mobile network that makes it possible for us to move towards an intelligent ubiquitous information society, among which some novel technologies represented by cell-free network has also attracted widespread academic attention. Cell-free network has brought distinguished gains to the network capacity with its strong ability against inter-cell interference. Unfortunately, further improvement demands more base stations (BSs) to be settled, which incurs steep cost increase. To address this issue, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) with low cost and power consumption is introduced in this paper to replace some of the trivial BSs in the system, then, a RIS-aided cell-free network paradigm is formulated. Our objective is to solve the weighted sum-rate (WSR) maximization problem by jointly optimizing the beamforming design at BSs and the phase shift of RISs. Due to the non-convexity of the formulated problem, this paper investigates a joint optimizing scheme based on block coordinate descent (BCD) method. Subsequently, on account of the majority of the precious work reposed perfect channel state information (CSI) setup for the ultimate performance, this paper also extends the proposed algorithm to the case wherein CSI is imperfect by utilizing successive convex approximation (SCA). Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme shows great performance and robustness in perfect CSI scenario as well as the imperfect ones.

This paper proposes a novel quad-band branched monopole antenna with a filter. The proposed antenna has a simple configuration in which branch-elements are added to a basic configuration consisting of a mast and dielectric wires. The antenna is characterized by performances such as wideband impedance matching, gain stabilization, and gain enhancement. Wideband impedance characteristics satisfying the voltage standing ratio of less than 2 are obtained by exciting a parallel resonance at the lowest band and multi-resonance at high bands. The filter suppressing higher order modes is used for gain stabilization, so that averaged gains above 5dBi are obtained at the quad-band. The antenna has a high gain of 11.1dBi because the branch-elements work as an end-fire array antenna at the highest band. Furthermore, it is clarified that an operating frequency is switched by using a variable bandpass filter at the lowest band. Last, a scale model of the antenna is fabricated and measured, then the effectiveness of the proposed antenna is demonstrated.

In this study, aiming at clarifying the characteristics of air-to-ground radio wave propagation in mountainous areas, a transmission experiment was performed between a drone equipped with a transmitter and three receivers set up on the ground using a 920MHz band wireless system at Uchigatani forest, which is located in Yamato-cho, Gujo-shi, Gifu Prefecture. In the experiment, we simultaneously measured the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and the drone's latitude, longitude, and height from the ground. Then, we verified whether the measured data has the line-of-sight between the transmitter and receivers using a geographic information system and analyzed characteristics of the RSSI, packet loss rate, and fading concerning the height from the ground and distance between the transmitter and receivers. The results showed that increasing the drone's altitude to 90m or more makes the link more stable and that the fading distribution in mountainous terrains is different from in other terrains.

Today's electronic devices must meet many requirements, such as those related to performance, limits to the radiated electromagnetic field, size, etc. For such a design, the requirement is to have a solution that simultaneously meets multiple objectives that sometimes include conflicting requirements. In addition, it is also necessary to consider uncertain parameters. This paper proposes a new combination of statistical analysis using the Polynomial Chaos (PC) method for dealing with the random and multi-objective satisfactory design using the Preference Set-based Design (PSD) method. The application in this paper is an Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) filter for a practical case, which includes plural element parameters and uncertain parameters, which are resistors at the source and load, and the performances of the attenuation characteristics. The PC method generates simulation data with high enough accuracy and good computational efficiency, and these data are used as initial data for the meta-modeling of the PSD method. The design parameters of the EMI filter, which satisfy required performances, are obtained in a range by the PSD method. The authors demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. The results show that applying a multi-objective design method using PSD with a statistical method using PC to handle the uncertain problem can be applied to electromagnetic designs to reduce the time and cost of product development.

In the cellular system, the Worst Case User (WCU), whose distances to three nearest BSs are the similar, usually achieves the lowest performance. Improving user performance, especially the WCU, is a big problem for both network designers and operators. This paper works on the WCU in terms of coverage probability analysis by the stochastic geometry tool and data rate optimization with the transmission power constraint by the reinforcement learning technique under the Stretched Pathloss Model (SPLM). In analysis, only fast fading from the WCU to the serving Base Stations (BSs) is taken into the analysis to derive the lower bound coverage probability. Furthermore, the paper assumes that the Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) technique is only employed for the WCU to enhance its downlink signal and avoid the explosion of Intercell Interference (ICI). Through the analysis and simulation, the paper states that to improve the WCU performance under bad wireless environments, an increase in transmission power can be a possible solution. However, in good environments, the deployment of advanced techniques such as Joint Transmission (JT), Joint Scheduling (JS), and reinforcement learning is an suitable solution.