An online nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm based on recursive least squares (RLS) is described in a matrix form, and a simplified algorithm for a low-complexity calculation is developed for frame-by-frame online audio source separation system. First, the online NMF algorithm based on the RLS method is described as solving the NMF problem recursively. Next, a simplified algorithm is developed to approximate the RLS-based online NMF algorithm with low complexity. The proposed algorithm is evaluated in terms of audio source separation, and the results show that the performance of the proposed algorithms are superior to that of the conventional online NMF algorithm with significantly reduced complexity.

An output voltage-current equation of charge pump DC-DC voltage multiplier using diodes is provided to cover wide clock frequency and output current ranges for designing energy harvester operating at a near-threshold voltage or in sub-threshold region. Equivalent circuits in slow and fast switching limits are extracted. The effective threshold voltage of the diode in slow switching limit is also derived as a function of electrical characteristics of the diodes, such as the saturation current and voltage slope parameter, and design parameters such as the number of stages, capacitance per stage, parasitic capacitance at the top plate of the main boosting capacitor, and the clock frequency. The model is verified compared with SPICE simulation.

Improving robustness in electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection by inserting drain-side isolated silicon-controlled rectifiers (SCRs) in a high-voltage (HV) p-channel lateral-diffused MOSFET (pLDMOS) device was investigated in this paper. Additionally, the effects of anti-ESD reliability in the HV pLDMOS transistors provided by this technique were evaluated. From the experimental data, it was determined that the holding voltage (Vh) values of the pLDMOS with an embedded npn-arranged SCR and discrete thin-oxide (OD) layout on the cathode side increased as the parasitic SCR OD row number decreased. Moreover, the trigger voltage (Vt1) and the Vh values of the pLDMOS with a parasitic pnp-arranged SCR and discrete OD layout on the drain side fluctuated slightly as the SCR OD-row number decreased. Furthermore, the secondary breakdown current (It2) values (i.e., the equivalent ESD-reliability robustness) of all pLDMOS-SCR npn-arranged types increased (>408.4%) to a higher degree than those of the pure pLDMOS, except for npn-DIS_3 and npn-DIS_2, which had low areas of SCRs. All pLDMOS-SCR pnp-arranged types exhibited an increase of up to 2.2A-2.4A, except for the pnp_DIS_3 and pnp_DIS_2 samples; the pnp_DIS_91 increased by approximately 2000.9% (249.1%), exhibiting a higher increase than that of the reference pLDMOS (i.e., the corresponding pnp-stripe type). The ESD robustness of the pLDMOS-SCR pnp-arranged type and npn-arranged type with a discrete OD layout on the SCR cathode side was greater than that of the corresponding pLDMOS-SCR stripe type and a pure pLDMOS, particularly in the pLDMOS-SCR pnp-arranged type.

This paper presents accurate DC and high frequency power-supply rejection (PSR) models for low drop-out (LDO) regulators using different types of active loads and pass transistors. Based on the proposed PSR model, we suggest design guidelines to achieve a high DC PSR or flat bandwidth (BW) by choosing appropriate active loads and pass transistors. Our PSR model captures the intricate interaction between the error amplifiers (EAs) and the pass devices by redefining the transfer function of the LDO topologies. The accuracy of our model has been verified through SPICE simulation and measurements. Moreover, the measurement results of the LDOs fabricated using the 0.18 µm CMOS process are consistent with the design guidelines suggested in this work.

Nowadays, vector map content is widely used in the areas of life, science and the military. Due to the fact that vector maps bring great value and that their production process is expensive, a large volume of vector map data is attacked, stolen and illegally distributed by pirates. Thus, vector map data must be encrypted before being stored and transmitted in order to ensure the access and to prevent illegal copying. This paper presents a novel perceptual encryption algorithm for ensuring the secured storage and transmission of vector map data. Polyline data of vector maps are extracted to interpolate a spline curve, which is represented by an interpolating vector, the curvature degree coefficients, and control points. The proposed algorithm is based on encrypting the control points of the spline curve in the frequency domain of discrete cosine transform. Control points are transformed and selectively encrypted in the frequency domain of discrete cosine transform. They are then used in an inverse interpolation to generate the encrypted vector map. Experimental results show that the entire vector map is altered after the encryption process, and the proposed algorithm is very effective for a large dataset of vector maps.

Image steganography is a technique of embedding secret message into a digital image to securely send the information. In contrast, steganalysis focuses on detecting the presence of secret messages hidden by steganography. The modern approach in steganalysis is based on supervised learning where the training set must include the steganographic and natural image features. But if a new method of steganography is proposed, and the detector still trained on existing methods will generally lead to the serious detection accuracy drop due to the mismatch between training and detecting steganographic method. In this paper, we just attempt to process unsupervised learning problem and propose a detection model called self-learning ensemble discriminant clustering (SEDC), which aims at taking full advantage of the statistical property of the natural and testing images to estimate the optimal projection vector. This method can adaptively select the most discriminative subspace and then use K-means clustering to generate the ultimate class labels. Experimental results on J-UNIWARD and nsF5 steganographic methods with three feature extraction methods such as CC-JRM, DCTR, GFR show that the proposed scheme can effectively classification better than blind speculation.

Automatic music transcription from audio has long been one of the most intriguing problems and a challenge in the field of music information retrieval, because it requires a series of low-level tasks such as onset/offset detection and F0 estimation, followed by high-level post-processing for symbolic representation. In this paper, a comprehensive transcription system for monophonic singing voice based on harmonic structure analysis is proposed. Given a precise tracking of the fundamental frequency, a novel acoustic feature is derived to signify the harmonic structure in singing voice signals, regardless of the loudness and pitch. It is then used to generate a parametric mixture model based on the von Mises-Fisher distribution, so that the model represents the intrinsic harmonic structures within a region of smoothly connected notes. To identify the note boundaries, the local homogeneity in the harmonic structure is exploited by two different methods: the self-similarity analysis and hidden Markov model. The proposed system identifies the note attributes including the onset time, duration and note pitch. Evaluations are conducted from various aspects to verify the performance improvement of the proposed system and its robustness, using the latest evaluation methodology for singing transcription. The results show that the proposed system significantly outperforms other systems including the state-of-the-art systems.

The transmission on fronthaul links in the cloud radio access network has become a bottleneck with the increasing data rate. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage compression scheme for fronthaul links. In the first stage, the commonly used techniques like cyclic prefix stripping and sampling rate adaptation are implemented. In the second stage, a structure called linear prediction coding with decision threshold (LPC-DT) is proposed to remove the redundancies of signal. Considering that the linear prediction outputs have large dynamic range, a two-piecewise quantization with optimized decision threshold is applied to enhance the quantization performance. In order to further lower the transmission rate, a multi-level successive structure of lossless polar source coding is proposed to compress the quantization output with low encoding and decoding complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme with LPC-DT and LPSC offers not only significantly better compression ratios but also more flexibility in bandwidth settings compared with traditional ones.

This paper proposes a practical application of Massive MIMO technology, Massive Antenna Systems for Wireless Entrance (MAS-WE), and along with related inter-user interference cancellation (IUIC) and scheduling techniques. MAS-WE, in which the entrance base station (EBS) employs a large number of antennas, can effectively provide high capacity wireless entrance links to a large number of access points (APs) distributed over a wide coverage area. The proposed techniques are simplified to practical implementation; EBS side uses around 100 antenna elements to spatially multiplex more than 16 signal streams. SIR performance is evaluated by system level simulations that consider imperfect channel state information (CSI). The results show that MAS-WE with the proposed techniques can reliably achieve high spectral efficiency with high level space division multiplexing.

In autonomous vehicles, driving in traffic poses significant challenges in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication and ranging. Currently interest centers on enhanced V2V communication with multi-sensor and cooperative approaches. In this paper we propose a novel bidirectional Laser Radar Visible Light Bidirectional Communication Boomerang System (LRVLB-ComBo). LRVLB-ComBo affords nuanced real-time two-way V2V communication as a basis for complex but reliable decision-making. Our approach involves combining existing automotive laser radar with visible light boomerang systems using THSS techniques. System simulations were performed using a random mix of extraneous interference pulse to evaluate system sensitivity to noise. Results suggest that LRVLB-ComBo is a viable two-way V2V communication system with increased ranging accuracy, enabling provision of detailed bidirectional data exchange for ITS precision, energy efficiency and safety.

Improvement of conventional networks with an incremental approach is an important design method for the development of the future internet. For this approach, we are developing a future aggregation network based on passive optical network (PON) technology to achieve both cost-effectiveness and high reliability. In this paper, we propose a timeslot (TS) synchronization method for sharing a TS from an optical burst mode transceiver between any route of arbitrary fiber length by changing both the route of the TS transmission and the TS control timing on the optical burst mode transceiver. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method for exchanging TSs in bidirectional bufferless wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and time division multiplexing (TDM) multi-ring networks under the condition of the occurrence of a link failure through prototype systems. Also, we evaluate the reduction of the required number of optical interfaces in a multi-ring network by applying the proposed method.

In this paper, we have investigated the characteristics of PdYb-silicide layer formed by the silicidation of Pd/Yb/n-Si(100) stacked structures for the first time. Pd (12-20 nm)/Yb (0-8 nm) stacked layers were deposited on n-Si(100) substrates by the RF magnetron sputtering at room temperature. Then, 10 nm-thick HfN encapsulating layer was deposited at room temperature. Next, silicidation was carried out by the RTA at 500°C/1 min in N2 followed by the selective etching. From the J-V characteristics of fabricated Schottky diode, Schottky barrier height (SBH) for electron was reduced from 0.73 eV of Pd2Si to 0.4 eV of PdYb-silicide in case the Pd/Yb thicknesses were 14/6 nm, respectively.

To ensure secure mobile communication, the communicating entities must know their mutual identities. The entities which need to be identified in a mobile communication system are mobile devices and the network. Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has specified Evolved Packet System Authentication and Key Agreement (EPS AKA) procedure for the mutual authentication of user and the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. EPS AKA certainly overcomes most of the vulnerabilities in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) access procedures. However, the LTE access procedure still has security weaknesses against some of the sophisticated security threats, such as, Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, rogue base station attacks and fails to ensure privacy protection for some of the important parameters. This paper proposes an improved security framework for the LTE access procedure by ensuring the confidentiality protection of International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) and random-challenge RAND. Also, our proposed system is designed to reduce the impact of DoS attacks which try to overwhelm the network with useless computations. We use a one-time shared key with a short lifetime between the UE and MME to protect IMSI and RAND privacy. Finally, we explore the parameters design for the proposed system which leads to satisfy the requirements imposed on computational load and latency as well as security strength.

In this paper, a miniaturized absorptive/transmissive radome with switchable passband and wide absorbing band is designed. Pin diodes are loaded on the radome in order to obtain switchable passband and miniaturized unit cells, while the resistor loaded double square loops are used to absorb the incident wave. The total thickness of the radome is only 4.5mm. Its transmission and absorbing properties are verified by both synthetic experiments and measurements in the anechoic chamber. Furthermore, the switchable passband of the radome is also evaluated using a waveguide simulator.

This paper proposes performance improvement schemes for non-coherent multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems employing per transmit antenna differential mapping (PADM). PADM is one form of differential space-time coding (DSTC), which generates an independent differentially encoded sequence for each of the multiple transmit antennas by means of space-time coding and mapping. The features of the proposed schemes are as follows: 1) it employs an asymmetric space-time mapping instead of the conventional symmetric space-time mapping in order to lower the required signal to noise power ratio (SNR) for maintaining the bit error rate (BER) performance; 2) it employs an analytically derived branch metric criterion based on channel prediction for per-survivor processing (PSP) in order to track fast time-varying channels. Finally, computer simulation results confirm that the proposed schemes improve the required SNR by around 1dB and can track at the maximum Doppler frequency normalized by symbol rate of 5%.

Transfer boosting, a branch of instance-based transfer learning, is a commonly adopted transfer learning method. However, currently popular transfer boosting methods focus on binary classification problems even though there are many multi-classification tasks in practice. In this paper, we developed a new algorithm called MultiTransferBoost on the basis of TransferBoost for multi-classification. MultiTransferBoost firstly separated the multi-classification problem into several orthogonal binary classification problems. During each iteration, MultiTransferBoost boosted weighted instances from different source domains while each instance's weight was assigned and updated by evaluating the difficulty of the instance being correctly classified and the “transferability” of the instance's corresponding source domain to the target. The updating process repeated until it reached the predefined training error or iteration number. The weight update factors, which were analyzed and adjusted to minimize the Hamming loss of the output coding, strengthened the connections among the sub binary problems during each iteration. Experimental results demonstrated that MultiTransferBoost had better classification performance and less computational burden than existing instance-based algorithms using the One-Against-One (OAO) strategy.

Sorting is an extremely important computation kernel that has been accelerated in a lot of fields such as databases, image processing, and genome analysis. Given that advent of Internet of Things (IoT) era due to mobile technology progressions, the future needs a sorting method that is available on any environment, such as not only high performance systems like servers but also low computational performance machines like embedded systems. In this paper, we present an FPGA-based sorting accelerator combining Sorting Network and Merge Sorter Tree, which is customizable by means of tuning design parameters. The proposed FPGA accelerator sorts data sent from a host PC via the PCIe bus, and sends back the fully sorted data sequence to it. We also present a detailed analytical model that accurately estimates the sorting performance. Due to these characteristics, designers can know how fast a developed sorting hardware is in advance and can implement the best one to fulfill the cost and performance constraints. Our experiments show that the proposed hardware achieves up to 19.5x sorting performance, compared with Intel Core i7-3770K operating at 3.50GHz, when sorting 256M 32-bits integer elements. However, this result is limited because of insufficient memory bandwidth. To overcome this problem, we propose a data compression mechanism and the experimental result shows that the sorting hardware with it achieves almost 90% of the estimated performance, while the hardware without it does about 60%. In order to allow every designer to easily and freely use this accelerator, the RTL source code is released as open-source hardware.

The Seebeck coefficient of Si wire co-doped with P and Ga atoms is investigated for applying thermoelectric devices. The observed Seebeck coefficient is closed to the theoretical values of electronic part of Seebeck coefficient due to the electronic transport. From the estimation of phonon scattering processes, it is found that the phonon-drag contribution to the Seebeck coefficient in co-doped Si wire is mainly governed by the phonon-boundary scattering.

This paper focuses on differences in comment densities among individual programmers, and proposes to adjust the conventional code complexity metric (the cyclomatic complexity) by using the abnormality of the comment density. An empirical study with nine popular open source Java products (including 103,246 methods) shows that the proposed metric performs better than the conventional one in predicting change-prone methods; the proposed metric improves the area under the ROC curve (AUC) by about 3.4% on average.

Device-to-device (D2D) communication enables two local users to communicate with each other directly instead of relaying through a third party, e.g., base station. In this paper, we study a subchannel sharing strategy underlaying multichannel cellular network for D2D pairs and existing cellular users (CUs). In the investigated scenario, we try to improve the spectrum efficiency of D2D pairs, but inevitably brings cross interference between two user groups. To combat interference, we attempt to assign each D2D pair with appropriate subchannels, which may belong to different CUs, and manipulate transmission power of all users so as to maximize the sum rate of all D2D pairs, while assuring each CU with a minimum data rate on its subchannel set. The formulated problem is a nonconvex problem and thus, obtaining its optimal solution is a tough task. However, we can find optimal power and subchannel assignment for a special case by setting an independent data rate constraint on each subchannel. Then we find an efficient method to calculate a gradient for our original problem. Finally, we propose a gradient-based search method to address the problem with coupled minimum data rate constraint. The performance of our proposed subchannel sharing strategy is illustrated via extensive simulation results.