Secure two-party comparison plays a crucial role in many privacy-preserving applications, such as privacy-preserving data mining and machine learning. In particular, the available comparison protocols with the appropriate input/output configuration have a significant impact on the performance of these applications. In this paper, we firstly describe a taxonomy of secure two-party comparison protocols which allows us to describe the different configurations used for these protocols in a systematic manner. This taxonomy leads to a total of 216 types of comparison protocols. We then describe conversions among these types. While these conversions are based on known techniques and have explicitly or implicitly been considered previously, we show that a combination of these conversion techniques can be used to convert a perhaps less-known two-party comparison protocol by Nergiz et al. (IEEE SocialCom 2010) into a very efficient protocol in a configuration where the two parties hold shares of the values being compared, and obtain a share of the comparison result. This setting is often used in multi-party computation protocols, and hence in many privacy-preserving applications as well. We furthermore implement the protocol and measure its performance. Our measurement suggests that the protocol outperforms the previously proposed protocols for this input/output configuration, when off-line pre-computation is not permitted.

The packet classification problem to determine the behavior of incoming packets at the network devices. The processing latency of packet classification by linear search is proportional to the number of classification rules. To limit the latency caused by classification to a certain level, we should develop a classification algorithm that classifies packets in a time independent of the number of classification rules. Arbitrary (including noncontiguous) bitmask rules are efficiently expressive for controlling higher layer communication, achiving access control lists, Quality of Service and so on. In this paper, we propose a classification algorithm based on run-based trie [1] according to arbitrary bitmask rules. The space complexity of proposed algorithm is in linear in the size of a rule list. The time complexity except for construction of that can be regarded as constant which is independent the number of rules. Experimental results using a packet classification algorithm benchmark [2] show that our method classifies packets in constant time independent of the number of rules.

In this paper, we consider the problem of enumerating spanning subgraphs with high edge-connectivity of an input graph. Such subgraphs ensure multiple routes between two vertices. We first present an algorithm that enumerates all the 2-edge-connected spanning subgraphs of a given plane graph with n vertices. The algorithm generates each 2-edge-connected spanning subgraph of the input graph in O(n) time. We next present an algorithm that enumerates all the k-edge-connected spanning subgraphs of a given general graph with m edges. The algorithm generates each k-edge-connected spanning subgraph of the input graph in O(mT) time, where T is the running time to check the k-edge-connectivity of a graph.

Revisiting the Sekine-Imai-Tani top-down algorithm to compute the BDD of all spanning trees and the Tutte polynomial of a given graph, we explicitly analyze the Fixed-Parameter Tractable (FPT) time complexity with respect to its (proper) pathwidth, pw (ppw), and obtain a bound of O*(Bellmin{pw}+1,ppw}), where Belln denotes the n-th Bell number, defined as the number of partitions of a set of n elements. We further investigate the case of complete graphs in terms of Bell numbers and related combinatorics, obtaining a time complexity bound of Belln-O(n/log n).

Social networks often demonstrate hierarchical community structure with communities embedded in other ones. Most existing hierarchical community detection methods need one or more tunable parameters to control the resolution levels, and the obtained dendrograms, a tree describing the hierarchical community structure, are extremely complex to understand and analyze. In the paper, we propose a parameter-free hierarchical community detection method based on micro-community and minimum spanning tree. The proposed method first identifies micro-communities based on link strength between adjacent vertices, and then, it constructs minimum spanning tree by successively linking these micro-communities one by one. The hierarchical community structure of social networks can be intuitively revealed from the merging order of these micro-communities. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world networks show that our proposed method exhibits good accuracy and efficiency performance and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our proposed method does not require any pre-defined parameters, and the output dendrogram is simple and meaningful for understanding and analyzing the hierarchical community structure of social networks.

We studied the detection of the incongruence between the two eyes' retinal images from occlusion perception. We previously analyzed the evasion action caused by occlusion by using green-red equiluminance, which is processed by parvocellular cells. Here we analyzed this action by using yellow-blue equiluminance, which is said to be treated by koniocellular cells and parvocellular cells. We observed that there were the cases in which the subject could perceive incongruence by the occlusion and other cases in which the subject could not perceive it. Significant differences were not seen in all conditions. Because a difference was seen in an evasion action at the time of the rim occlusion gaze when we compare the result for the yellow-blue equiluminance with the green-red equiluminance, it is suggested that the response for each equiluminance is different. We were able to clarify the characteristic difference between parvocellular cells and koniocellular cells from an occlusion experiment.

The sparse unmixing of hyperspectral data has attracted much attention in recent years because it does not need to estimate the number of endmembers nor consider the lack of pure pixels in a given hyperspectral scene. However, the high mutual coherence of spectral libraries strongly affects the practicality of sparse unmixing. The collaborative sparse unmixing via variable splitting and augmented Lagrangian (CLSUnSAL) algorithm is a classic sparse unmixing algorithm that performs better than other sparse unmixing methods. In this paper, we propose a CLSUnSAL-based hyperspectral unmixing method based on dictionary pruning and reweighted sparse regression. First, the algorithm identifies a subset of the original library elements using a dictionary pruning strategy. Second, we present a weighted sparse regression algorithm based on CLSUnSAL to further enhance the sparsity of endmember spectra in a given library. Third, we apply the weighted sparse regression algorithm on the pruned spectral library. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated on both simulated and real hyperspectral datasets. For simulated data cubes (DC1, DC2 and DC3), the number of the pruned spectral library elements is reduced by at least 94% and the runtime of the proposed algorithm is less than 10% of that of CLSUnSAL. For simulated DC4 and DC5, the runtime of the proposed algorithm is less than 15% of that of CLSUnSAL. For the real hyperspectral datasets, the pruned spectral library successfully reduces the original dictionary size by 76% and the runtime of the proposed algorithm is 11.21% of that of CLSUnSAL. These experimental results show that our proposed algorithm not only substantially improves the accuracy of unmixing solutions but is also much faster than some other state-of-the-art sparse unmixing algorithms.

In this paper, we propose a Pyramid Predictive Attention Network (PPAN) for medical image segmentation. In the medical field, the size of dataset generally restricts the performance of deep CNN and deploying the trained network with gross parameters into the terminal device with limited memory is an expectation. Our team aims to the future home medical diagnosis and search for lightweight medical image segmentation network. Therefore, we designed PPAN mainly made of Xception blocks which are modified from DeepLab v3+ and consist of separable depthwise convolutions to speed up the computation and reduce the parameters. Meanwhile, by utilizing pyramid predictions from each dimension stage will guide the network more accessible to optimize the training process towards the final segmentation target without degrading the performance. IoU metric is used for the evaluation on the test dataset. We compared our designed network performance with the current state of the art segmentation networks on our RGB tongue dataset which was captured by the developed TIAS system for tongue diagnosis. Our designed network reduced 80 percentage parameters compared to the most widely used U-Net in medical image segmentation and achieved similar or better performance. Any terminal with limited storage which is needed a segment of RGB image can refer to our designed PPAN.

In this paper, we propose a packet loss detection mechanism called Interest ACKnowledgement (ACK). Interest ACK provides information on the history of successful Interest packet receptions at a repository (i.e., content provider); this information is conveyed to the corresponding entity (i.e., content consumer) via the header of Data packets. Interest ACKs enable the entity to quickly and accurately detect Interest and Data packet losses in the network. We conduct simulations to investigate the effectiveness of Interest ACKs under several scenarios. Our results show that Interest ACKs are effective for improving the adaptability and stability of CCN with window-based flow control and that packet losses at the repository can be reduced by 10%-20%. Moreover, by extending Interest ACK, we propose a lossy link detection mechanism called LLD-IA (Lossy Link Detection with Interest ACKs), which is a mechanism for an entity to estimate the link where the packet was discarded in a network. Also, we show that LLD-IA can effectively detect links where packets were discarded under moderate packet loss ratios through simulation.

FPGA-based switches are appealing nowadays due to the balance between hardware performance and software flexibility. Packet parser, as the foundational component of FPGA-based switches, is to identify and extract specific fields used in forwarding decisions, e.g., destination IP address. However, traditional parsers are too rigid to accommodate new protocols. In addition, FPGAs usually have a much lower clock frequency and fewer hardware resources, compared to ASICs. In this paper, we present PLANET, a programmable packet-level parallel parsing architecture for FPGA-based switches, to overcome these two limitations. First, PLANET has flexible programmability of updating parsing algorithms at run-time. Second, PLANET highly exploits parallelism inside packet parsing to compensate FPGA's low clock frequency and reduces resource consumption with one-block recycling design. We implemented PLANET on an FPGA-based switch prototype with well-integrated datacenter protocols. Evaluation results show that our design can parse packets at up to 100 Gbps, as well as maintain a relative low parsing latency and fewer hardware resources than existing proposals.

Image quality depends on the randomness of the k-space signal under-sampling in compressed sensing MRI (CS-MRI), especially for two-dimensional image acquisition. We investigate the feasibility of non-random signal under-sampling CS-MRI to stabilize the quality of reconstructed images and avoid arbitrariness in sampling point selection. Regular signal under-sampling for the phase-encoding direction is adopted, in which sampling points are chosen at equal intervals for the phase-encoding direction while varying the sampling density. Curvelet transform was adopted to remove the aliasing artifacts due to regular signal under-sampling. To increase the incoherence between the measurement matrix and the sparsifying transform function, the scale of the curvelet transform was varied in each iterative image reconstruction step. We evaluated the obtained images by the peak-signal-to-noise ratio and root mean squared error in localized 3×3 pixel regions. Simulation studies and experiments showed that the signal-to-noise ratio and the structural similarity index of reconstructed images were comparable to standard random under-sampling CS. This study demonstrated the feasibility of non-random under-sampling based CS by using the multi-scale curvelet transform as a sparsifying transform function. The technique may help to stabilize the obtained image quality in CS-MRI.

In recent years, multi-party computation (MPC) frameworks based on replicated secret sharing schemes (RSSS) have attracted the attention as a method to achieve high efficiency among known MPCs. However, the RSSS-based MPCs are still inefficient for several heavy computations like algebraic operations, as they require a large amount and number of communication proportional to the number of multiplications in the operations (which is not the case with other secret sharing-based MPCs). In this paper, we propose RSSS-based three-party computation protocols for modular exponentiation, which is one of the most popular algebraic operations, on the case where the base is public and the exponent is private. Our proposed schemes are simple and efficient in both of the asymptotic and practical sense. On the asymptotic efficiency, the proposed schemes require O(n)-bit communication and O(1) rounds,where n is the secret-value size, in the best setting, whereas the previous scheme requires O(n2)-bit communication and O(n) rounds. On the practical efficiency, we show the performance of our protocol by experiments on the scenario for distributed signatures, which is useful for secure key management on the distributed environment (e.g., distributed ledgers). As one of the cases, our implementation performs a modular exponentiation on a 3,072-bit discrete-log group and 256-bit exponent with roughly 300ms, which is an acceptable parameter for 128-bit security, even in the WAN setting.

The Gabidulin-based locally repairable code (LRC) construction by Silberstein et al. is an important example of distance optimal (r,δ)-LRCs. Its distance optimality has been further shown to cover the case of multiple (r,δ)-locality, where the (r,δ)-locality constraints are different among different symbols. However, the optimality only holds under the ordered (r,δ) condition, where the parameters of the multiple (r,δ)-locality satisfy a specific ordering condition. In this letter, we show that Gabidulin-based LRCs are still distance optimal even without the ordered (r,δ) condition.

We propose a simple framework for evaluating the performance of pairing-based cryptographic schemes for various types of curves and parameter settings. The framework, which we call ‘Opcount’, enables the selection of an appropriate curve and parameters by estimating the performance of a cryptographic scheme from a pseudo-code describing the cryptographic scheme and an implementation-information database that records the performance of basic operations in curves targeted for evaluation. We apply Opcount to evaluate and compare the computational efficiency of several structure-preserving signature schemes that involve tens of pairing products in their signature verification. In addition to showing the usefulness of Opcount, our experiments also reveal the overlooked importance of taking account of the properties of underlying curves when optimizing computations and demonstrate the impact of tight security reductions.

Miller [9] proposed a linear-time algorithm for computing small separators for 2-connected planar graphs. We explain his algorithm and present a way to modify it to a space efficient version. Our algorithm can be regarded as a log-space reduction from the separator construction to the breadth first search tree construction.

Forecasting commodity futures price is a challenging task. We present an algorithm to predict the trend of commodity futures price based on a type of structuring data and back propagation neural network. The random volatility of futures can be filtered out in the structuring data. Moreover, it is not restricted by the type of futures contract. Experiments show the algorithm can achieve 80% accuracy in predicting price trends.

A fast cross-validation algorithm for model selection in kernel ridge regression problems is proposed, which is aiming to further reduce the computational cost of the algorithm proposed by An et al. by eigenvalue decomposition of a Gram matrix.

Wavelength-division multiplexing multicore fibers can transmit a large amount of information over one fiber, and high-density core allocations enable a large number of fiber lines to be deployed in limited spaces. However, inter-core crosstalk degrades the signal in these systems. This paper describes the design of a frequency interleaving scheme for a 7-core hexagonal multicore fiber. Interleaving schemes shift signal spectra between neighboring cores to reduce the signal degradation caused by inter-core crosstalk. The channel frequency allocation that most efficiently lowers the bit error rate is numerically determined in this study. The results indicate that the optimum frequency interleaving improves the allowable crosstalk ratio by 6.3 dB for QPSK signals, demonstrating its potential for improving wavelength-division multiplexing multicore fiber transmission systems.

Accurate estimation of the state-of-charge is a crucial need for the battery, which is the most important power source in electric vehicles. To achieve better estimation result, an accurate battery model with optimum parameters is required. In this paper, a gradient-free optimization technique, namely tree seed algorithm (TSA), is utilized to identify specific parameters of the battery model. In order to strengthen the search ability of TSA and obtain more quality results, the original algorithm is improved. On one hand, the DE/rand/2/bin mechanism is employed to maintain the colony diversity, by generating mutant individuals in each time step. On the other hand, the control parameter in the algorithm is adaptively updated during the searching process, to achieve a better balance between the exploitation and exploration capabilities. The battery state-of-charge can be estimated simultaneously by regarding it as one of the parameters. Experiments under different dynamic profiles show that the proposed method can provide reliable and accurate estimation results. The performance of conventional algorithms, such as genetic algorithm and extended Kalman filter, are also compared to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of accuracy and robustness.

This letter presents a computational complexity reduction technique for space diversity based spectrum sensing when the number of receive antennas is greater than three (NR≥3 where NR is the number of receive antenna). The received signals are combined with phase inversion so as to not attenuate the combined signal, and a statistic for signal detection is computed from the combined signal. Because the computation of only one statistic is required regardless of the number of receive antenna, the complexity can be reduced. Numerical examples and simple analysis verify the effectiveness of the presented technique.