The existing methods to estimate satellite attitude by using radar cross section (RCS) sequence suffer from problems such as low precision, computation complexity, etc. To overcome these problems, a novel model of satellite attitude estimation by the local maximum points of the RCS sequence is established and can reduce the computational time by downscaling the dimension of the feature vector. Moreover, a particle swarm optimization method is adopted to improve efficiency of computation. Numerical simulations show that the proposed method is robust and efficient.

In this letter, a novel on-orbit estimation and calibration method of GPS antenna geometry offsets for attitude determination of LEO satellites is proposed. Both baseline vectors in the NED coordinate system are achieved epoch-by-epoch firstly. Then multiple epochs' baseline vectors are united to compute all the offsets via an UKF for a certain long time. After on-orbit estimation and calibration, instantaneous and accurate attitude can be achieved. Numerical results show that the proposed method can obtain the offsets of each baseline in all directions with high accuracy estimation and small STDs, and effective attitudes can be achieved after antenna geometry calibration using the estimated offsets. The high accuracy give the proposed scheme a strong practical-oriented ability.

In this paper, we treat (k, L, n) ramp secret sharing schemes (SSSs) that can detect impersonation attacks and/or substitution attacks. First, we derive lower bounds on the sizes of the shares and random number used in encoding for given correlation levels, which are measured by the mutual information of shares. We also derive lower bounds on the success probabilities of attacks for given correlation levels and given sizes of shares. Next we propose a strong (k, L, n) ramp SSS against substitution attacks. As far as we know, the proposed scheme is the first strong (k, L, n) ramp SSSs that can detect substitution attacks of at most k-1 shares. Our scheme can be applied to a secret SL uniformly distributed over GF(pm)L, where p is a prime number with p≥L+2. We show that for a certain type of correlation levels, the proposed scheme can achieve the lower bounds on the sizes of the shares and random number, and can reduce the success probability of substitution attacks within nearly L times the lower bound when the number of forged shares is less than k. We also evaluate the success probability of impersonation attack for our schemes. In addition, we give some examples of insecure ramp SSSs to clarify why each component of our scheme is essential to realize the required security.

Establishing local visual correspondences between images taken under different conditions is an important and challenging task in computer vision. A common solution for this task is detecting keypoints in images and then matching the keypoints with a feature descriptor. This paper proposes a robust and low-dimensional local feature descriptor named Adaptively Integrated Gradient and Intensity Feature (AIGIF). The proposed AIGIF descriptor partitions the support region surrounding each keypoint into sub-regions, and classifies the sub-regions into two categories: edge-dominated ones and smoothness-dominated ones. For edge-dominated sub-regions, gradient magnitude and orientation features are extracted; for smoothness-dominated sub-regions, intensity feature is extracted. The gradient and intensity features are integrated to generate the descriptor. Experiments on image matching were conducted to evaluate performances of the proposed AIGIF. Compared with SIFT, the proposed AIGIF achieves 75% reduction of feature dimension (from 128 bytes to 32 bytes); compared with SURF, the proposed AIGIF achieves 87.5% reduction of feature dimension (from 256 bytes to 32 bytes); compared with the state-of-the-art ORB descriptor which has the same feature dimension with AIGIF, AIGIF achieves higher accuracy and robustness. In summary, the AIGIF combines the advantages of gradient feature and intensity feature, and achieves relatively high accuracy and robustness with low feature dimension.

Authors previously studied the degradation of electrical contacts under the condition of various external micro-oscillations. They also developed a micro-sliding mechanism (MSM2), which causes micro-sliding and is driven by a piezoelectric actuator and elastic hinges. Using the mechanism, experimental results were obtained on the minimal sliding amplitude (MSA) required to make the electrical resistance fluctuate under various conditions. In this paper, to develop a more realistic model of input waveform than the previous one, Ts/2 is set as the rising or falling time, Tc as the flat time, and τ/2 as the duration in a sliding period T (0.25 s) of the input waveform. Using the Duhamel's integral method and an optimization method, the physical parameters of natural angular frequency ω0 (12000 s-1), damping ratio ζ (0.05), and rising and falling time Ts (1.3 or 1.2 ms) are obtained. Using the parameters and the MSA, the total acceleration of the input TA (=f(t)) and the displacement of the output x(t) are also obtained using the Fourier series expansion method. The waveforms x(t) and the experimental results are similar to each other. If the effective mass m, which is defined as that of the movable parts in the MSM2, is 0.1 kg, each total force TF (=2mTA) is estimated from TA and m. By the TF, the cases for 0.3 N/pin as frictional force or in impulsive as input waveform are more serious than the others. It is essential for the safety and the confidence of electrical contacts to evaluate the input waveform and the frictional force. The ringing waveforms of the output displacements x(t) are calculated at smaller values of Ts (1.0, 0.5, and 0.0 ms) than the above values (1.3 or 1.2 ms). When Ts is slightly changed from 1.3 or 1.2 ms to 1.0 ms, the ringing amplitude is doubled. For the degradation of electrical contacts, it is essential that Ts is reduced in a rectangular and impulsive input. Finally, a very simple wear model comprising three stages (I, II, and III) is introduced in this paper. Because Ts is much shorter in a rectangular or impulsive input than in a sinusoidal input, it is considered that the former more easily causes wear than the latter owing to a larger frictional force. Taking the adhesive wear in Stages I and III into consideration, the wear is expected to be more severe in the case of small damped oscillations owing to the ringing phenomenon.

Conventional feature-rich parsers based on manually tuned features have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, these parsers are not good at handling long-term dependencies using only the clues captured by a prepared feature template. On the other hand, recurrent neural network (RNN)-based parsers can encode unbounded history information effectively, but they perform not well for small tree structures, especially when low-frequency words are involved, and they cannot use prior linguistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective framework to combine the merits of feature-rich transition-based parsers and RNNs. Specifically, the proposed framework incorporates RNN-based scores into the feature template used by a feature-rich parser. On English WSJ treebank and SPMRL 2014 German treebank, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance (91.56 F-score for English and 83.06 F-score for German), without requiring any additional unlabeled data.

This paper provides a new method to correct annotation errors in a treebank. The previous error correction method constructs a pseudo parallel corpus where incorrect partial parse trees are paired with correct ones, and extracts error correction rules from the parallel corpus. By applying these rules to a treebank, the method corrects errors. However, this method does not achieve wide coverage of error correction. To achieve wide coverage, our method adopts a different approach. In our method, we consider that if an infrequent pattern can be transformed to a frequent one, then it is an annotation error pattern. Based on a tree mining technique, our method seeks such infrequent tree patterns, and constructs error correction rules each of which consists of an infrequent pattern and a corresponding frequent pattern. We conducted an experiment using the Penn Treebank. We obtained 1,987 rules which are not constructed by the previous method, and the rules achieved good precision.

Rapid process scaling and the introduction of the multilevel cell (MLC) concept have lowered costs of NAND Flash memories, but also degraded reliability. For this reason, the memories are depending on strong error correcting codes (ECCs), and this has enabled the memories to be used in wide range of storage applications, including solid-state drives (SSDs). Meanwhile, too strong error correcting capability requires excessive decoding complexity and check bits. In NAND Flash memories, cell errors to neighborhood voltage levels are more probable than those to distant levels. Several ECCs reflecting this characteristics, including limited-magnitude ECCs which correct only errors with a certain limited magnitude and low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, have been proposed. However, as most of these ECCs need the multiple bits in a cell for encoding, they cannot be used with multipage programing, a high speed programming method currently employed in the memories. Also, binary ECCs with Gray codes are no longer optimal when multilevel voltage shifts (MVSs) occur. In this paper, an error correction method reflecting the error characteristic is presented. This method detects errors by a binary ECC as a conventional manner, but a nonbinary value or whole the bits in a cell, are subjected to error correction, so as to be corrected into the most probable neighborhood value. The amount of bit error rate (BER) improvement is depending on the probability of the each error magnitude. In case of 2bit/cell, if only errors of magnitude 1 and 2 can occur and the latter occupies 5% of cell errors, acceptable BER is improved by 4%. This is corresponding to extending 2.4% of endurance. This method needs about 15% longer average latency, 19% longer maximum latency, and 15% lower throughput. However, with using the conventional method until the memories' lifetime number of program/erase cycling, and the proposed method after that, BER improvement can be utilized for extending endurance without latency and throughput degradation until the switch of the methods.

In order to prevent the synonym substitution breaking the balance among frequencies of synonyms and improve the statistical undetectability, this paper proposed a novel linguistic steganography based on synonym run-length encoding. Firstly, taking the relative word frequency into account, the synonyms appeared in the text are digitized into binary values and expressed in the form of runs. Then, message are embedded into the parities of runs' lengths by self-adaptively making a positive or negative synonym transformation on boundary elements of two adjacent runs, while preserving the number of relative high and low frequency synonyms to reduce the embedding distortion. Experimental results have shown that the proposed synonym run-length encoding based linguistic steganographic algorithm makes fewer changes on the statistical characteristics of cover texts than other algorithms, and enhances the capability of anti-steganalysis.

Massive MIMO transmission, whose number of antennas is much larger than the number of user terminals, has been attracted much attention as one of key technologies in next-generation mobile communication system because it enables improvement in service area and interference mitigation by simple signal processing. Multi-beam massive MIMO has proposed that utilizes the beam selection with high power in analog part and blind algorithm such as constant modulus algorithm (CMA) which does not need channel state information (CSI) is applied in digital part. Proposed configuration obtains high transmission efficiency. We have evaluated QPSK signals because the CMA basically focuses on the constant amplitude modulation. In this paper, in order to achieve the further higher transmission rate, the amplitude and phase compensation scheme is proposed when using the CMA with amplitude and phase modulation scheme such as QAM. The effectiveness of proposed method is verified by the computer simulation.

This paper presents a wide-input-voltage-range and high-efficiency boost converter that is assisted by a transformer-based oscillator. The oscillator can provide a sufficient amount of power to drive a following switched-inductor boost converter at low voltages. Moreover, it adopts a novel amplitude-regulation circuit (ARC) without using high power-consuming protective devices to suppress the expansion of the oscillation amplitude at high input voltages. Therefore, it can avoid over-voltage problems without sacrificing the power efficiency. Additionally, a power-down circuit (PDC) is implemented to turn off the oscillator, when the boost converter can be driven by its own output power, thus, eliminating the power consumption by the oscillator and improving the power efficiency. We implemented the ARC and the PDC with discrete components rather than one-chip integration for the proof of concept. The experimental results showed that the proposed circuit became possible to operate from an input voltage of 60mV to 3V while maintaining high peak efficiency up to 92%. To the best of our knowledge, this converter provides a wider input range in comparison with the previously-published converters. We are convinced that the proposed approach by inserting an appropriate start-up circuit in a commercial converter will be effective for rapid design proposals in order to respond promptly to customer needs as Internet of things (IoT) devices with energy harvester.

Diabetes mellitus is a group of metabolic diseases that cause high blood sugar due to functional problems with the pancreas or metabolism. Diabetic patients have few subjective symptoms and may experience decreased sensation without being aware of it. The commonly performed tests for sensory disorders are qualitative in nature. The authors pay attention to the decline of the sensitivity of tactile sensations, and develop a non-invasive method to detect the level of tactile sensation using a novel micro-vibration actuator that employs shape-memory alloy wires. Previously, we performed a pilot study that applied the device to 15 diabetic patients and confirmed a significant reduction in the tactile sensation in diabetic patients when compared to healthy subjects. In this study, we focus on the asymptomatic development of decreased sensation associated with diabetes mellitus. The objectives are to examine diabetic patients who are unaware of abnormal or decreased sensation using the quantitative tactile sensation measurement device and to determine whether tactile sensation is decreased in patients compared to healthy controls. The finger method is used to measure the Tactile Sensation Threshold (TST) score of the index and middle fingers using the new device and the following three procedures: TST-1, TST-4, and TST-8. TST scores ranged from 1 to 30 were compared between the two groups. The TST scores were significantly higher for the diabetic patients (P<0.05). The TST scores for the left fingers of diabetic patients and healthy controls were 5.9±6.2 and 2.7±2.9 for TST-1, 15.3±7.0 and 8.7±6.4 for TST-4, and 19.3±7.8 and 12.7±9.1 for TST-8. Our data suggest that the use of the new quantitative tactile sensation measurement device enables the detection of decreased tactile sensation in diabetic patients who are unaware of abnormal or decreased sensation compared to controls.

Authors have studied degradation phenomenon on electrical contacts under the influences of an external micro-oscillation. A new micro-sliding mechanism 2 (MSM2) has developed, which provides micro-sliding driven by a piezo-electric actuator and elastic hinges. The experimental results are obtained on “minimal sliding amplitudes” to make resistances fluctuate on electrical contacts under some conditions which are three types of inputwaveform (sinusoidal, rectangular, and impulsive) and three levels of frictional force (1.6, 1.0, and 0.3 N/pin) by using the MSM2. The dynamical characteristics are discussed under the conditions. The simple theoretical model on the input signal and the output of the mechanism is built and the theoretical expressions from the model are obtained. A natural angular frequency (ω0=12600[s-1]) and a damping ratio (ζ=0.03[-]) are evaluated using experimental dynamical responses. The waveforms of inputs and outputs are obtained and the characteristics between inputs and outputs are also obtained on the theoretical model using the above. The maximal gain between the input and the output in rectangular or impulsive (24.4) is much larger than that (0.0) in sinusoidal. The difference on the output-accelerations between in sinusoidal and in rectangular (impulsive) is discussed. It is shown that it is possible to cause the degradation phenomenon in sinusoidal only when the output displacement are enlarged. It is also shown that it is possible to cause the phenomenon in rectangular or in impulsive, in addition to the above, when the external force has sharper rising and falling waveforms even if the displacement and the frequency of the force is small. The difference on the output-amplitudes between in rectangular and in impulsive is discussed. It is not clear that there is the difference between the effect in rectangular and that in impulsive. It is indicated that it is necessary to discuss the other causes, for instance, another dynamical, thermal, and chemical process.

This paper describes a blind frequency offset estimator (FOE) with wide frequency range for coherent quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) receivers. The FOE combines a spectrum-based frequency offset estimation algorithm as a coarse estimator with a frequency offset estimation algorithm using the periodogram as a fine estimator. To establish our design methodology, each block of the FOE is rigorously analyzed by using formulas and the minimum fast Fourier transform (FFT) size that generates a frequency spectrum for both the coarse and fine estimators is determined. The coarse estimator's main feature is that all estimation processes are carried out in the frequency domain, which yields convergence more than five times faster than that of conventional estimators. The estimation frequency range of the entire FOE is more than 1.8 times wider than that of conventional FOEs. Experiments on coherent optical 64-ary QAM (64-QAM) reveal that frequency offset estimation can be achieved under a frequency offset value greater than the highest value of the conventional estimation range.

This paper focuses on the bandwidth allocation methods based on real user experience for web browsing applications. Because the Internet and its services are rapidly increasing, the bandwidth allocation problem has become one of the typical challenges for Internet service providers (ISPs) and network planning with respect to providing high service quality. The quality of experience (QoE) plays an important role in the success of services, and the guarantee of QoE accordingly represents an important goal in network resource control schemes. To cope with this issue, this paper proposes two user-centric bandwidth resource allocation methods for web browsing applications. The first method dynamically allocates bandwidth by considering the same user's satisfaction in terms of QoE with respect to all users in the system, whereas the second method introduces an efficient trade-off between the QoE of each user group and the average QoE of all users. The purpose of these proposals is to provide a flexible solution to reasonably allocate limited network resources to users. By considering service quality from real users' perception viewpoint, the proposed allocation methods enable us to understand actual users' experiences. Compared to previous works, the numerical results show that the proposed bandwidth allocation methods achieve the following contributions: improving the QoE level for dissatisfied users and providing a fair distribution, as well as retaining a reasonable average QoE.

In the field of education such as elementary and middle schools, teachers want to take care of schoolchildren during physical trainings and after-school club activities. On the other hand, in the field of sports such as professional and national-level sports, physical or technical trainers want to manage the health, physical and physiological conditions of athletes during exercise trainings in the grounds. In this way, it is required to monitor vital signs for persons during exercises, however, there are several technical problems to be solved in its realization. In this paper, we present the importance and necessity of vital monitoring for persons during exercises, and to make it possible periodically, reliably and in real-time, we present the solutions which we have so far worked out and point out remaining technical challenges in terms of vital/physical sensing, wireless transmission and human interface.

This letter proposes a situation-adaptive detection algorithm for the improved efficiency of the detection performance and complexity in the MIMO-OFDM system. The proposed algorithm adaptively uses the QRD-M, DFE, and iterative detection scheme in according to the detection environment. Especially, the proposed algorithm effectively reduces the occurrence probability of error in the successive interference cancellation procedure by the unit of the spatial stream. The simulations demonstrate that the adaptive detection method using the proposed algorithm provides a better trade-off between detection performance and complexity in the MIMO-OFDM system.

In these days, recognizing a user personality is an important issue in order to support various personalized services. Besides the conventional phone usage such as call logs, SMS logs and application usages, smart phones can gather the behavior of users by polling various embedded sensors such as GPS sensors. In this paper, we focus on how to predict user attitude based on GPS log data by applying location clustering techniques and extracting features from the location clusters. Through the evaluation with one month-long GPS log data, it is observed that the location-based features, such as number of clusters and coverage of clusters, are correlated with user attitude to some extent. Especially, when SVM is used as a classifier for predicting the dichotomy of user attitudes of MBTI, over 90% F-measure is achieved.

The Earth's ionosphere can hinder radio propagation with two serious problems: group delay and phase advance. Ionospheric irregularities are significantly troublesome since they make the amplitude and phase of the radio signals fluctuate rapidly, which is known as ionospheric scintillation. Severe ionospheric scintillation could cause loss of phase lock, which would degrade the positioning accuracy and affect the performance of navigation systems. Based on the phase screen model, this paper presents a novel power spectrum model of phase scintillation and a model of amplitude scintillation. Preliminary results show that, when scintillation intensity increases, the random phase and amplitude fluctuations become stronger, coinciding with the observations. Simulations of the scintillation effects on the acquisition of Beidou signals predict acquisition probability. In addition, acquisition probabilities of GPS and Beidou signals under different scintillation intensities are presented. And by the same SNR the acquisition probability decreases when the scintillation intensity increases. The simulation result shows that scintillation could cause the loss of the acquisition performance of Beidou navigation system. According to the comparison of Beidou and GPS simulations, the code length and code rate of satellite signals have an effect on the acquisition performance of navigation system.

Terahertz (THz) band is an attractive candidate for future broadband (> 10 Gb/s) wireless backhaul and fronthaul. THz transmitter employing optical frequency comb can provide high quality THz carrier, and is useful to the future broadband THz communication systems based on coherent transmission technique. To realize coherent transmission, high quality carrier generation is essential and it is important to evaluate the signal quality of a THz transmitter. In this paper, we derive error vector magnitude (EVM) including optical impairments (optical amplifier noise, laser phase noise, optical crosstalk and IQ imbalance of optical modulator) of the optical frequency comb based transmitter. The calculated EVM is in good agreement with simulated one, and practical requirements for optical impairment are indicated. The analysis will be useful in the design of THz transmission systems employing an optical frequency comb.