Recently, stochastic computing based on stochastic numbers attracts attention as an effective computation method, which realizes arithmetic operations by simple logic circuits with a tolerance of bit errors. When we input two or more identical values to a stochastic circuit, we require to duplicate a stochastic number. However, if bit streams of duplicated stochastic numbers are dependent on each other, their arithmetic operation results can be inaccurate. In this paper, we propose two stochastic number duplicators, called FSR and RRR. The stochastic numbers duplicated by the FSR and RRR duplicators have the equivalent values but have independent bit streams, effectively utilizing bit re-arrangement using randomized bit streams. Experimental evaluation results demonstrate that the RRR duplicator, in particular, obtains more accurate results even if a circuit has re-convergence paths, reducing the mean square errors by 20%-89% compared to a conventional stochastic number duplicator.

We present a modular way of implementing adaptive decisions in performing scientific simulations. The proposed method employs modern software engineering mechanisms to allow for better software management in scientific computing, where software adaptation has often been implemented manually by the programmer or by using in-house tools, which complicates software management over time. By applying the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) paradigm, we consider software adaptation as a separate concern and, using popular AOP constructs, implement adaptive decision separately from the original code base, thereby improving software management. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with applications to stochastic simulation software.

Computing autocorrelation coefficient can effectively reduce the influence of additive white noise, thus estimation precision will be improved. In this paper, an autocorrelation-like function, different from the ordinary one, is defined, and is proven to own better linear predictive performance. Two algorithms for signal model are developed to achieve frequency estimates. We analyze the theoretical properties of the algorithms in the additive white Gaussian noise. The simulation results match with the theoretical values well in the sense of mean square error. The proposed algorithms compare with existing estimators, are closer to the Cramer-Rao bound (CRLB). In addition, computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms provide high accuracy and good anti-noise capability.

The spectrum sculpting precoder (SSP) is a precoding scheme for sidelobe suppression of frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. It can form deep spectral notches at chosen frequencies and is suitable for cognitive radio systems. However, the SSP degrades the error rate as the number of notched frequencies increases. Orthogonal precoding that improves the SSP can achieve both spectrum notching and the ideal error rate, but its computational complexity is very high since the precoder matrix is large in size. This paper proposes an effective and equivalent decomposition of the precoder matrix by QR-decomposition in order to reduce the computational complexity of orthogonal precoding. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can drastically reduce the computational complexity with no performance degradation.

Virtual Machine Placement (VMP) plays an important role in ensuring efficient resource provisioning of physical machines (PMs) and energy efficiency in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) data centers. Efficient server consolidation assisted by virtual machine (VM) migration can promote the utilization level of the servers and switch the idle PMs to sleep mode to save energy. The trade-off between energy and performance is difficult, because consolidation may cause performance degradation, even service level agreement (SLA) violations. A novel residual available capacity (RAC) resource model is proposed to resolve the VM selection and allocation problem from the cloud service provider (CSP) perspective. Furthermore, a novel heuristic VM selection policy for server consolidation, named Minimized Square Root available Resource (MISR) is proposed. Meanwhile, an efficient VM allocation policy, named Balanced Selection (BS) based on RAC is proposed. The effectiveness validation of the BS-MISR combination is conducted on CloudSim with real workloads from the CoMon project. Evaluation results of experiments show that the proposed combinationBS-MISR can significantly reduce the energy consumption, with an average of 36.35% compared to the Local Regression and Minimum Migration Time (LR-MMT) combination policy. Moreover, the BS-MISR ensures a reasonable level of SLAs compared to the benchmarks.

A lot of vision systems have been embedded in devices around us, like mobile phones, vehicles and UAVs. Many of them still need interactive operations of human users. However, specifying accurate object information could be a challenging task due to video jitters caused by camera shakes and target motions. In this paper, we first collect practical hand drawn bounding boxes on real-life videos which are captured by hand-held cameras and UAV-based cameras. We give a deep look into human-computer interactive operations on unstable images. The collected data shows that human input suffers heavy deviations which are harmful to interaction accuracy. To achieve robust interactions on unstable platforms, we propose a target-focused video stabilization method which utilizes a proposal-based object detector and a tracking-based motion estimation component. This method starts with a single manual click and outputs stabilized video stream in which the specified target stays almost stationary. Our method removes not only camera jitters but also target motions simultaneously, therefore offering an comfortable environment for users to do further interactive operations. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method effectively eliminates image vibrations and significantly increases human input accuracy.

Approximate computing is a promising solution for future energy-efficient designs because it can provide great improvements in performance, area and/or energy consumption over traditional exact-computing designs for non-critical error-tolerant applications. However, the most challenging issue in designing approximate circuits is how to guarantee the pre-specified computation accuracy while achieving energy reduction and performance improvement. To address this problem, this paper starts from the state-of-the-art general approximate adder model (GeAr) and extends it for more possible approximate design candidates by relaxing the design restrictions. And then a maximum-error-distance-based performance/accuracy formulation, which can be used to select the performance/energy-accuracy optimal design from the extended design space, is proposed. Our evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of area overhead, performance, energy consumption, and computation accuracy.

Response property is a kind of liveness property. Response property problem is defined as follows: Given two activities α and β, whenever α is executed, is β always executed after that? In this paper, we tackled the problem in terms of Workflow Petri nets (WF-nets for short). Our results are (i) the response property problem for acyclic WF-nets is decidable, (ii) the problem is intractable for acyclic asymmetric choice (AC) WF-nets, and (iii) the problem for acyclic bridge-less well-structured WF-nets is solvable in polynomial time. We illustrated the usefulness of the procedure with an application example.

There is a strong demand for super-resolution time of arrival (TOA) estimation techniques for radar applications that can that can exceed the theoretical limits on range resolution set by frequency bandwidth. One of the most promising solutions is the use of compressed sensing (CS) algorithms, which assume only the sparseness of the target distribution but can achieve super-resolution. To preserve the reconstruction accuracy of CS under highly correlated and noisy conditions, we introduce a random resampling approach to process the received signal and thus reduce the coherent index, where the frequency-domain-based CS algorithm is used as noise reduction preprocessing. Numerical simulations demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve super-resolution TOA estimation performance not possible with conventional CS methods.

This paper proposes a novel access technique that enables uplink multiuser multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) access with small overhead in distributed wireless networks. The proposed access technique introduces a probe packet that is sent to all terminals to judge whether they have the right to transmit their signals or not. The probe packet guarantees high quality MU-MIMO signal transmission when a minimum mean square error (MMSE) filter is applied at the access point, which results in high frequency utilization efficiency. Computer simulation reveals that the proposed access achieves more than twice of the capacity obtained by the traditional carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) with a single user MIMO, when the access point with 5 antennas is surrounded by the terminals with 2 antennas.

By interleaving known Z-periodic complementary (ZPC) sequence set, a new ZPC sequence set is constructed with multiple ZPC sequence subsets based on an orthogonal matrix in this work. For this novel ZPC sequence set, which refer to as asymmetric ZPC (AZPC) sequence set, its inter-subset zero cross-correlation zone (ZCCZ) is larger than intra-subset zero correlation zone (ZCZ). In particular, if select a periodic perfect complementary (PC) sequence or PC sequence set and a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) matrix, the resultant sequence set is an inter-group complementary (IGC) sequence set. When a suitable shift sequence is chosen, the obtained IGC sequence set will be optimal in terms of the corresponding theoretical bound. Compared with the existing constructions of IGC sequence sets, the proposed method can provide not only flexible ZCZ width but also flexible choice of basic sequences, which works well in both synchronous and asynchronous operational modes. The proposed AZPC sequence sets are suitable for multiuser environments.

This paper proposes multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar waveforms consisting of Doppler-offset orthogonal complementary codes (DO-OCC) for raising the Doppler resilience of MIMO radar systems. The DO-OCC waveforms have low cross-correlation among multiplexed waves and a low autocorrelation peak sidelobe level (PSL) even in the Doppler shift condition. They are verified by computer simulations and measurements. Computer simulations show that the peak sidelobe ratio (PSR) of the DO-OCC exceeds over 60dB and the desired to undesired signal power ratio (DUR) is over 60dB in the case that the Doppler shift is 0.048 rad per pulse repetition interval (PRI). And through the experimental measurements, it has been verified that the PSR of the DO-OCC is over 40dB and the DUR is over 50dB in the case that Doppler shift is 0.05 rad per PRI and that The DO-OCC waveforms enable to maintain the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation accuracy for moving targets as almost same as the one for static targets. The results prove the effectiveness of the proposed MIMO waveforms in achieving Doppler tolerance while maintaining orthogonality and autocorrelation properties.

One of the most promising compression methods for XML documents is the one that translates a given document to a tree grammar that generates it. A feature of this compression is that the internal structures are kept in production rules of the grammar. This enables us to directly manipulate the tree structure without decompression. However, previous studies assume that a given XML document does not have data values because they focus on direct retrieval and manipulation of the tree structure. This paper proposes a direct update method for XML documents with data values and shows the effectiveness of the proposed method based on experiments conducted on our implemented tool.

Instruction set randomization (ISR) is a cost-effective obfuscation technique that modifies or enhances the relationship between instructions and machine languages. An Instruction Register File (IRF), a list of frequently used instructions, can be used for ISR by providing the way of indirect access to them. This study examines the IRF that integrates a positional register, which was proposed as a supplementary unit of the IRF, for the sake of tamper resistance. According to our evaluation, with a new design for the contents of the positional register, the measure of tamper resistance was increased by 8.2% at a maximum, which corresponds to a 32.2% increase in the size of the IRF. The number of logic elements increased by the addition of the positional register was 3.5% of its baseline processor.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image classification is a popular yet challenging research topic in the field of SAR image interpretation. This paper presents a new classification method based on extreme learning machine (ELM) and the superpixel-guided composite kernels (SGCK). By introducing the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) similarity, a modified simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) algorithm is firstly developed to generate superpixel for SAR image. Instead of using a fixed-size region, the shape-adaptive superpixel is used to exploit the spatial information, which is effective to classify the pixels in the detailed and near-edge regions. Following the framework of composite kernels, the SGCK is constructed base on the spatial information and backscatter intensity information. Finally, the SGCK is incorporated an ELM classifier. Experimental results on both simulated SAR image and real SAR image demonstrate that the proposed framework is superior to some traditional classification methods.

In this paper, we propose a highly accurate method for estimating the quality of images compressed using fractal image compression. Using an iterated function system, fractal image compression compresses images by exploiting their self-similarity, thereby achieving high levels of performance; however, we cannot always use fractal image compression as a standard compression technique because some compressed images are of low quality. Generally, sufficient time is required for encoding and decoding an image before it can be determined whether the compressed image is of low quality or not. Therefore, in our previous study, we proposed a method to estimate the quality of images compressed using fractal image compression. Our previous method estimated the quality using image features of a given image without actually encoding and decoding the image, thereby providing an estimate rather quickly; however, estimation accuracy was not entirely sufficient. Therefore, in this paper, we extend our previously proposed method for improving estimation accuracy. Our improved method adopts a new image feature, namely lacunarity. Results of simulation showed that the proposed method achieves higher levels of accuracy than those of our previous method.

This paper proposes an image denoising method using singular value decomposition (SVD) with block-rotation-based operations in wavelet domain. First, we decompose a noisy image to some sub-blocks, and use the single-level discrete 2-D wavelet transform to decompose each sub-block into the low-frequency image part and the high-frequency parts. Then, we use SVD and rotation-based SVD with the rank-1 approximation to filter the noise of the different high-frequency parts, and get the denoised sub-blocks. Finally, we reconstruct the sub-block from the low-frequency part and the filtered the high-frequency parts by the inverse wavelet transform, and reorganize each denoised sub-blocks to obtain the final denoised image. Experiments show the effectiveness of this method, compared with relevant methods.

Reinforcement learning has been used to adaptive service composition. However, traditional algorithms are not suitable for large-scale service composition. Based on Q-Learning algorithm, a multi-task oriented algorithm named multi-Q learning is proposed to realize subtask-assistance strategy for large-scale and adaptive service composition. Differ from previous studies that focus on one task, we take the relationship between multiple service composition tasks into account. We decompose complex service composition task into multiple subtasks according to the graph theory. Different tasks with the same subtasks can assist each other to improve their learning speed. The results of experiments show that our algorithm could obtain faster learning speed obviously than traditional Q-learning algorithm. Compared with multi-agent Q-learning, our algorithm also has faster convergence speed. Moreover, for all involved service composition tasks that have the same subtasks between each other, our algorithm can improve their speed of learning optimal policy simultaneously in real-time.

Radar is expected in advanced driver-assistance systems for environmentally robust measurements. In this paper, we propose a novel radar signal segmentation method by using a complex-valued fully convolutional network (CvFCN) that comprises complex-valued layers, real-valued layers, and a bidirectional conversion layer between them. We also propose an efficient automatic annotation system for dataset generation. We apply the CvFCN to two-dimensional (2D) complex-valued radar signal maps (r-maps) that comprise angle and distance axes. An r-maps is a 2D complex-valued matrix that is generated from raw radar signals by 2D Fourier transformation. We annotate the r-maps automatically using LiDAR measurements. In our experiment, we semantically segment r-map signals into pedestrian and background regions, achieving accuracy of 99.7% for the background and 96.2% for pedestrians.

In wireless communication systems, OFDM technology is a communication method that can yield high data rates. However, OFDM systems suffer high PAPR values due to the use of many of subcarriers. The SLM and the PTS technique were proposed to solve the PAPR problem in OFDM systems. However, these approaches have the disadvantage of having high complexity. This paper proposes a method which has lower complexity than the conventional PTS method but has less performance degradation.