In this paper a new method for noise removal from single-trial event-related potentials recorded with a multi-channel electroencephalogram is addressed. An observed signal is separated into multiple signals with a multi-channel Wiener filter whose coefficients are estimated based on parameter estimation of a probabilistic generative model that locally models the amplitude of each separated signal in the time-frequency domain. Effectiveness of using prior information about covariance matrices to estimate model parameters and frequency dependent covariance matrices were shown through an experiment with a simulated event-related potential data set.

Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) has drawn increasing attention as an emerging research field in recent years. In contrast to generic-domain visual recognition, FGVC is characterized by high intra-class and subtle inter-class variations. To distinguish conceptually and visually similar categories, highly discriminative visual features must be extracted. Moreover, FGVC has highly specialized and task-specific nature. It is not always easy to obtain a sufficiently large-scale training dataset. Therefore, the key to success in practical FGVC systems is to efficiently exploit discriminative features from a limited number of training examples. In this paper, we propose an efficient two-step dimensionality compression method to derive compact middle-level part-based features. To do this, we compare both space-first and feature-first convolution schemes and investigate their effectiveness. Our approach is based on simple linear algebra and analytic solutions, and is highly scalable compared with the current one-vs-one or one-vs-all approach, making it possible to quickly train middle-level features from a number of pairwise part regions. We experimentally show the effectiveness of our method using the standard Caltech-Birds and Stanford-Cars datasets.

Based on the completeness of the real-valued discrete Gabor transform, a new biorthogonal relationship between analysis window and synthesis window is derived and a fast algorithm for computing the analysis window is presented for any given synthesis window. The new biorthogonal relationship can be expressed as a linear equation set, which can be separated into a certain number of independent sub-equation sets, where each of them can be fast and independently solved by using convolution operations and FFT to obtain the analysis window for any given synthesis window. Computational complexity analysis and comparison indicate that the proposed algorithm can save a considerable amount of computation and is more efficient than the existing algorithms.

A non-linear extension of generalized hyperplane approximation (GHA) method is introduced in this letter. Although GHA achieved a high-confidence result in motion parameter estimation by utilizing the supervised learning scheme in histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) feature space, it still has unstable convergence range because it approximates the non-linear function of regression from the feature space to the motion parameter space as a linear plane. To extend GHA into a non-linear regression for larger convergence range, we derive theoretical equations and verify this extension's effectiveness and efficiency over GHA by experimental results.

In recent years, optical music recognition (OMR) has been extensively developed, particularly for use with mobile devices that require fast processing to recognize and play live the notes in images captured from sheet music. However, most techniques that have been developed thus far have focused on playing back instrumental music and have ignored the importance of lyric extraction, which is time consuming and affects the accuracy of the OMR tools. The text of the lyrics adds complexity to the page layout, particularly when lyrics touch or overlap musical symbols, in which case it is very difficult to separate them from each other. In addition, the distortion that appears in captured musical images makes the lyric lines curved or skewed, making the lyric extraction problem more complicated. This paper proposes a new approach in which lyrics are detected and extracted quickly and effectively. First, in order to resolve the distortion problem, the image is undistorted by a method using information of stave lines and bar lines. Then, through the use of a frequency count method and heuristic rules based on projection, the lyric areas are extracted, the cases where symbols touch the lyrics are resolved, and most of the information from the musical notation is kept even when the lyrics and music notes are overlapping. Our algorithm demonstrated a short processing time and remarkable accuracy on two test datasets of images of printed Korean musical scores: the first set included three hundred scanned musical images; the second set had two hundred musical images that were captured by a digital camera.

A brain-computer interface (BCI) translates the brain activity into commands to control external devices. P300 speller based character recognition is an important kind of application system in BCI. In this paper, we propose a framework to integrate channel correlation analysis into P300 detection. This work is distinguished by two key contributions. First, a coefficient matrix is introduced and constructed for multiple channels with the elements indicating channel correlations. Agglomerative clustering is applied to group correlated channels. Second, the statistics of central tendency are used to fuse the information of correlated channels and generate virtual channels. The generated virtual channels can extend the EEG signals and lift up the signal-to-noise ratio. The correlated features from virtual channels are combined with original signals for classification and the outputs of discriminative classifier are used to determine the characters for spelling. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the channel correlation analysis based framework. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the recognition rate was increased by both 6% with 5 and 10 epochs by the proposed framework.

This paper proposes an appearance-based novel descriptor for estimating head orientation. Our descriptor is inspired by the Weber-based feature, which has been successfully implemented for robust texture analysis, and the gradient which performs well for shape analysis. To further enhance the orientation differences, we combine them with an analysis of the intensity deviation. The position of a pixel and its intrinsic intensity are also considered. All features are then composed as a feature vector of a pixel. The information carried by each pixel is combined using a covariance matrix to alleviate the influence caused by rotations and illumination. As the result, our descriptor is compact and works at high speed. We also apply a weighting scheme, called Block Importance Feature using Genetic Algorithm (BIF-GA), to improve the performance of our descriptor by selecting and accentuating the important blocks. Experiments on three head pose databases demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. Also, we can extend the proposed method by combining it with a head detection and tracking system to enable it to estimate human head orientation in real applications.

MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) is a standard technique for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation with high resolution. However, MUSIC cannot estimate DOAs accurately in the case of underdetermined conditions, where the number of sources exceeds the number of microphones. To overcome this drawback, an extension of MUSIC using cumulants called 2q-MUSIC has been proposed, but this method greatly suffers from the variance of the statistics, given as the temporal mean of the observation process, and requires long observation. In this paper, we propose a new approach for extending MUSIC that exploits higher-order moments of the signal for the underdetermined DOA estimation with smaller variance. We propose an estimation algorithm that nonlinearly maps the observed signal onto a space with expanded dimensionality and conducts MUSIC-based correlation analysis in the expanded space. Since the dimensionality of the noise subspace is increased by the mapping, the proposed method enables the estimation of DOAs in the case of underdetermined conditions. Furthermore, we describe the class of mapping that allows us to analyze the higher-order moments of the observed signal in the original space. We compare 2q-MUSIC and the proposed method through an experiment assuming that the true number of sources is known as prior information to evaluate in terms of the bias-variance tradeoff of the statistics and computational complexity. The results clarify that the proposed method has advantages for both computational complexity and estimation accuracy in short-time analysis, i.e., the time duration of the analyzed data is short.

This paper presents a novel data compression method for testing integrated circuits within the selective dictionary coding framework. Due to the inverse value of dictionary indices made use of for the compatibility analysis with the heuristic algorithm utilized to solve the maximum clique problem, the method can obtain a higher compression ratio than existing ones.

In this study we investigate the synchronization of relaxation oscillators having individual differences by using non-periodic signal injection. When a common non-periodic signal is injected into the relaxation oscillators, the oscillators exhibit synchronization phenomena. Such synchronization phenomena can be classified as injection locking. We also consider the relation between the synchronization state and the individual difference. Further, we pay attention to the effect of the fluctuation range of the non-periodic injected signal. When the fluctuation range is wide, we confirm that the synchronization range increases if the individual difference is small.

The dyadic filter bank property of multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) for white Gaussian noise (WGN) is well established. In order to investigate the way MEMD behaves in the presence of fractional Gaussian noise (fGn), we conduct thorough numerical experiments for MEMD for fGn inputs. It turns out that similar to WGN, MEMD follows dyadic filter bank structure for fGn inputs, which is more stable than empirical mode decomposition (EMD) regardless of the Hurst exponent. Moreover, the estimation of the Hurst exponent of fGn contaminated with different kinds of signals is also presented via MEMD in this work.

In the future Internet of Things/M2M network, enormous amounts of data generated from sensors must be processed and utilized by cloud applications. In recent years, sensor data stream delivery, which collects and sends sensor data periodically, has been attracting great attention. As for sensor data stream delivery, the receivers have different delivery cycle requirements depending on the applications or situations. In this paper, we propose a sensor data stream delivery method to accommodate heterogeneous cycles on the cloud. The proposed method uses distributed hashing to determine relay nodes on the cloud and construct delivery paths autonomously. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed method halves the maximum load of nodes compared to the baseline methods and achieves high load balancing.

This paper analyzes three passive noise shaping techniques in a SAR ADC. These passive noise shaping techniques can realize 1st and 2nd order noise shaping. These proposed opamp-less noise shaping techniques are realized by charge-redistribution. This means that the proposals maintain the basic architecture and operation principle of a charge-redistribution SAR ADC. Since the proposed techniques work in a passive mode, the proposals have high power efficiency. Meanwhile, the proposed noise shaping SAR ADCs are robust to feature size scaling and power supply reduction. Flicker noise is not introduced into the ADC by passive noise shaping techniques. Therefore, no additional calibration techniques for flicker noise are required. The noise shaping effects of the 1st and 2nd order noise shaping are verified by behavioral simulation results. The relationship between resolution improvement and oversampling rate is also explored in this paper.

Sentence similarity computation is an increasingly important task in applications of natural language processing such as information retrieval, machine translation, text summarization and so on. From the viewpoint of information theory, the essential attribute of natural language is that the carrier of information and the capacity of information can be measured by information content which is already successfully used for word similarity computation in simple ways. Existing sentence similarity methods don't emphasize the information contained by the sentence, and the complicated models they employ often need using empirical parameters or training parameters. This paper presents a fully unsupervised computational model of sentence semantic similarity. It is also a simply and straightforward model that neither needs any empirical parameter nor rely on other NLP tools. The method can obtain state-of-the-art experimental results which show that sentence similarity evaluated by the model is closer to human judgment than multiple competing baselines. The paper also tests the proposed model on the influence of external corpus, the performance of various sizes of the semantic net, and the relationship between efficiency and accuracy.

The recently proposed distributed adaptive direct position determination (D-ADPD) algorithm provides an efficient way to locating a radio emitter using a sensor network. However, this algorithm may be suboptimal in the situation of colored emitted signals. We propose an enhanced distributed adaptive direct position determination (EDA-DPD) algorithm. Simulations validate that the proposed EDA-DPD outperforms the D-ADPD in colored emitted signals scenarios and has the similar performance with the D-ADPD in white emitted signal scenarios.

As three dimensional (3D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is widely used for high resolution volumetric data compression, and to further improve the performance of lossless coding, the adaptive directional lifting (ADL) structure based on non-separable 3D DWT with a (5,3) filter is proposed in this paper. The proposed 3D DWT has less lifting steps and better prediction performance compared to the existing separable 3D DWT with fixed filter coefficients. It also has compatibility with the conventional DWT defined by the JPEG2000 international standard. The proposed method shows comparable and better results with the non-separable 3D DWT and separable 3D DWT and it is effective for lossless coding of high resolution volumetric data.

In this paper, a self optimization beamforming null control (SOBNC) scheme is proposed. There is a need of maintaining signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) threshold to control modulation and coding schemes (MCS) in recent technologies like Wi-Fi, Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A). Selection of MCS depends on the SINR threshold that allows maintaining key performance index (KPI) like block error rate (BLER), bit error rate (BER) and throughput at certain level. The SOBNC is used to control the antenna pattern for SINR estimation and improve the SINR performance of the wireless communication systems. The nulling comes with a price; if wider nulls are introduced, i.e. more number of nulls are used, the 3dB beam-width and peak side lobe level (SLL) in antenna pattern changes critically. This paper proposes a method which automatically controls the number of nulls in the antenna pattern as per the changing environment based on adaptive-network based fuzzy interference system (ANFIS) to maintain output SINR level higher or equal to the required threshold. Finally, simulation results show a performance superiority of the proposed SOBNC compared with minimum mean square error (MMSE) based adaptive nulling control algorithm and conventional fixed null scheme.

Ever-evolving malware makes it difficult to prevent it from infecting hosts. Botnets in particular are one of the most serious threats to cyber security, since they consist of a lot of malware-infected hosts. Many countermeasures against malware infection, such as generating network-based signatures or templates, have been investigated. Such templates are designed to introduce regular expressions to detect polymorphic attacks conducted by attackers. A potential problem with such templates, however, is that they sometimes falsely regard benign communications as malicious, resulting in false positives, due to an inherent aspect of regular expressions. Since the cost of responding to malware infection is quite high, the number of false positives should be kept to a minimum. Therefore, we propose a system to generate templates that cause fewer false positives than a conventional system in order to achieve more accurate detection of malware-infected hosts. We focused on the key idea that malicious infrastructures, such as malware samples or command and control, tend to be reused instead of created from scratch. Our research verifies this idea and proposes here a new system to profile the variability of substrings in HTTP requests, which makes it possible to identify invariable keywords based on the same malicious infrastructures and to generate more accurate templates. The results of implementing our system and validating it using real traffic data indicate that it reduced false positives by up to two-thirds compared to the conventional system and even increased the detection rate of infected hosts.

Because accurate position information plays an important role in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), target localization has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this paper, based on target spatial domain discretion, the target localization problem is formulated as a sparsity-seeking problem that can be solved by the compressed sensing (CS) technique. To satisfy the robust recovery condition called restricted isometry property (RIP) for CS theory requirement, an orthogonalization preprocessing method named LU (lower triangular matrix, unitary matrix) decomposition is utilized to ensure the observation matrix obeys the RIP. In addition, from the viewpoint of the positioning systems, taking advantage of the joint posterior distribution of model parameters that approximate the sparse prior knowledge of target, the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) approach is utilized to improve the positioning performance. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed algorithm has higher positioning accuracy in multi-target scenarios than existing algorithms.

In this paper, we study the impact of imperfect channel information on an amplify-and-forward (AF)-based two-way relaying network (TWRN) with adaptive modulation which consists of two end-terminals and multiple relays. Specifically, we consider a single-relay selection scheme of the TWRN in the presence of outdated channel state information (CSI) and channel estimation errors. First, we choose the best relay based on outdated CSI, and perform adaptive modulation on both relaying paths with channel estimation errors. Then, we discuss the impact of the outdated CSI on the statistics of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per hop. In addition, we formulate the end-to-end SNRs with channel estimation errors and offer statistic analyses in the presence of both the outdated CSI and channel estimation errors. Finally, we provide the performance analyses of the proposed TWRN with adaptive modulation in terms of average spectral efficiency, average bit error rate, and outage probability. Numerical examples are given to verify our obtained analytical results for various system conditions.