In this paper, we propose a secure computation of sparse coding and its application to Encryption-then-Compression (EtC) systems. The proposed scheme introduces secure sparse coding that allows computation of an Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm in an encrypted domain. We prove theoretically that the proposed method estimates exactly the same sparse representations that the OMP algorithm for non-encrypted computation does. This means that there is no degradation of the sparse representation performance. Furthermore, the proposed method can control the sparsity without decoding the encrypted signals. Next, we propose an EtC system based on the secure sparse coding. The proposed secure EtC system can protect the private information of the original image contents while performing image compression. It provides the same rate-distortion performance as that of sparse coding without encryption, as demonstrated on both synthetic data and natural images.

Web service users are overwhelmed by the amount of information presented to them and have difficulties in finding the information that they need. Therefore, a recommendation system that predicts users' taste is an essential factor for the success of businesses. However, recommendation systems require users' personal information and can thus lead to serious privacy violations. To solve this problem, many research has been conducted about protecting personal information in recommendation systems and implementing differential privacy, a privacy protection technique that inserts noise into the original data. However, previous studies did not examine the following factors in applying differential privacy to recommendation systems. First, they did not consider the sparsity of user rating information. The total number of items is much more than the number of user-rated items. Therefore, a rating matrix created for users and items will be very sparse. This characteristic renders the identification of user patterns in rating matrixes difficult. Therefore, the sparsity issue should be considered in the application of differential privacy to recommendation systems. Second, previous studies focused on protecting user rating information but did not aim to protect the lists of user-rated items. Recommendation systems should protect these item lists because they also disclose user preferences. In this study, we propose a differentially private recommendation scheme that bases on a grouping method to solve the sparsity issue and to protect user-rated item lists and user rating information. The proposed technique shows better performance and privacy protection on actual movie rating data in comparison with an existing technique.

Software defect prediction (SDP) plays a vital role in allocating testing resources reasonably and ensuring software quality. When there are not enough labeled historical modules, considerable semi-supervised SDP methods have been proposed, and these methods utilize limited labeled modules and abundant unlabeled modules simultaneously. Nevertheless, most of them make use of traditional features rather than the powerful deep feature representations. Besides, the cost of the misclassification of the defective modules is higher than that of defect-free ones, and the number of the defective modules for training is small. Taking the above issues into account, we propose a cost-sensitive and sparse ladder network (CSLN) for SDP. We firstly introduce the semi-supervised ladder network to extract the deep feature representations. Besides, we introduce the cost-sensitive learning to set different misclassification costs for defective-prone and defect-free-prone instances to alleviate the class imbalance problem. A sparse constraint is added on the hidden nodes in ladder network when the number of hidden nodes is large, which enables the model to find robust structures of the data. Extensive experiments on the AEEEM dataset show that the CSLN outperforms several state-of-the-art semi-supervised SDP methods.

In this work, we present one novel rust detection method based upon one-class classification and L2 sparse representation (SR) with decision fusion. Firstly, a new color contrast descriptor is proposed for extracting the rust features of steel structure images. Considering that the patterns of rust features are more simplified than those of non-rust ones, one-class support vector machine (SVM) classifier and L2 SR classifier are designed with these rust image features, respectively. After that, a multiplicative fusion rule is advocated for combining the one-class SVM and L2 SR modules, thereby achieving more accurate rust detecting results. In the experiments, we conduct numerous experiments, and when compared with other developed rust detectors, the presented method can offer better rust detecting performances.

In this paper, we propose secure dictionary learning based on a random unitary transform for sparse representation. Currently, edge cloud computing is spreading to many application fields including services that use sparse coding. This situation raises many new privacy concerns. Edge cloud computing poses several serious issues for end users, such as unauthorized use and leak of data, and privacy failures. The proposed scheme provides practical MOD and K-SVD dictionary learning algorithms that allow computation on encrypted signals. We prove, theoretically, that the proposal has exactly the same dictionary learning estimation performance as the non-encrypted variant of MOD and K-SVD algorithms. We apply it to secure image modeling based on an image patch model. Finally, we demonstrate its performance on synthetic data and a secure image modeling application for natural images.

A light field, which is equivalent to a dense set of multi-view images, has various applications such as depth estimation and 3D display. One of the essential problems in light field applications is light field interpolation, i.e., view interpolation. The interpolation accuracy is enhanced by exploiting an inherent property of a light field. One example is that an epipolar plane image (EPI), which is a 2D subset of the 4D light field, consists of many lines, and these lines have almost the same slope in a local region. This structure induces a sparse representation in the frequency domain, where most of the energy resides on a line passing through the origin. On the basis of this observation, we propose a group sparsity prior suitable for light fields to exploit their line structure fully for interpolation. Specifically, we designed the directional groups in the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) domain so that the groups can represent the concentration of the energy, and we thereby formulated an LF interpolation problem as an overlapping group lasso. We also introduce several techniques to improve the interpolation accuracy such as applying a window function, determining group weights, expanding processing blocks, and merging blocks. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve better or comparable quality as compared to state-of-the-art LF interpolation methods such as convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods.

Linear Prediction (LP) analysis is commonly used in speech processing. LP is based on Auto-Regressive (AR) model and it estimates the AR model parameter from signals with l2-norm optimization. Recently, sparse estimation is paid attention since it can extract significant features from big data. The sparse estimation is realized by l1 or l0-norm optimization or regularization. Sparse LP analysis methods based on l1-norm optimization have been proposed. Since excitation of speech is not white Gaussian, a sparse LP estimation can estimate more accurate parameter than the conventional l2-norm based LP. These are time-invariant and real-valued analysis. We have been studied Time-Varying Complex AR (TV-CAR) analysis for an analytic signal and have evaluated the performance on speech processing. The TV-CAR methods are l2-norm methods. In this paper, we propose the sparse TV-CAR analysis based on adaptive LASSO (Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) that is l1-norm regularization and evaluate the performance on F0 estimation of speech using IRAPT (Instantaneous RAPT). The experimental results show that the sparse TV-CAR methods perform better for a high level of additive Pink noise.

Sparse arrays can usually achieve larger array apertures than uniform linear arrays (ULA) with the same number of physical antennas. However, the conventional direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithms for sparse arrays usually require the spatial smoothing operation to recover the matrix rank which inevitably involves heavy computational complexity and leads to a reduction in the degrees-of-freedom (DOFs). In this paper, a low-complex DOA estimation algorithm by exploiting the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is proposed. Firstly, the spatial spectrum of the virtual array constructed from the sparse array is established by exploiting the DFT operation. The initial DOA estimation can obtain directly by searching the peaks in the DFT spectrum. However, since the number of array antennas is finite, there exists spectrum power leakage which will cause the performance degradation. To further improve the angle resolution, an iterative process is developed to suppress the spectrum power leakage. Thus, the proposed algorithm does not require the spatial smoothing operation and the computational complexity is reduced effectively. In addition, due to the extention of DOF with the application of the sparse arrays, the proposed algorithm can resolve the underdetermined DOA estimation problems. The superiority of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by simulation results.

Distributed compressive video sensing (DCVS) has received considerable attention due to its potential in source-limited communication, e.g., wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs). Multi-hypothesis (MH) prediction, which treats the target block as a linear combination of hypotheses, is a state-of-the-art technique in DCVS. The common approach is under the supposition that blocks that are dissimilar from the target block are given lower weights than blocks that are more similar. This assumption can yield acceptable reconstruction quality, but it is not suitable for scenarios with more details. In this paper, based on the joint sparsity model (JSM), the authors present a Tikhonov-regularized MH prediction scheme in which the most similar block provides the similar common portion and the others blocks provide respective unique portions, differing from the common supposition. Specifically, a new scheme for generating hypotheses and a Euclidean distance-based metric for the regularized term are proposed. Compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms, the authors show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme when there are a limited number of hypotheses.

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation as a fundamental issue in array signal processing has been extensively studied for many applications in military and civilian fields. Many DOA estimation algorithms have been developed for different application scenarios such as low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), limited snapshots, etc. However, there are still some practical problems that make DOA estimation very difficult. One of them is the correlation between sources. In this paper, we develop a sparsity-based method to estimate the DOA of coherent signals with sparse linear array (SLA). We adopt the off-grid signal model and solve the DOA estimation problem in the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework. By considering the SLA as a ‘missing sensor’ ULA, our proposed method treats the output of the SLA as a partial output of the corresponding virtual uniform linear array (ULA) to make full use of the expanded aperture character of the SLA. Then we employ the expectation-maximization (EM) method to update the hyper-parameters and the output of the virtual ULA in an iterative manner. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method has a better performance in correlated signal scenarios than the reference methods in comparison, confirming the advantage of exploiting the extended aperture feature of the SLA.

Depth (disparity) estimation from a light field (a set of dense multi-view images) is currently attracting much research interest. This paper focuses on how to handle a noisy light field for disparity estimation, because if left as it is, the noise deteriorates the accuracy of estimated disparity maps. Several researchers have worked on this problem, e.g., by introducing disparity cues that are robust to noise. However, it is not easy to break the trade-off between the accuracy and computational speed. To tackle this trade-off, we have integrated a fast denoising scheme in a fast disparity estimation framework that works in the epipolar plane image (EPI) domain. Specifically, we found that a simple 1-D slanted filter is very effective for reducing noise while preserving the underlying structure in an EPI. Moreover, this simple filtering does not require elaborate parameter configurations in accordance with the target noise level. Experimental results including real-world inputs show that our method can achieve good accuracy with much less computational time compared to some state-of-the-art methods.

To efficiently collect sensor readings in cluster-based wireless sensor networks, we propose a structural compressed network coding (SCNC) scheme that jointly considers structural compressed sensing (SCS) and network coding (NC). The proposed scheme exploits the structural compressibility of sensor readings for data compression and reconstruction. Random linear network coding (RLNC) is used to re-project the measurements and thus enhance network reliability. Furthermore, we calculate the energy consumption of intra- and inter-cluster transmission and analyze the effect of the cluster size on the total transmission energy consumption. To that end, we introduce an iterative reweighed sparsity recovery algorithm to address the all-or-nothing effect of RLNC and decrease the recovery error. Experiments show that the SCNC scheme can decrease the number of measurements required for decoding and improve the network's robustness, particularly when the loss rate is high. Moreover, the proposed recovery algorithm has better reconstruction performance than several other state-of-the-art recovery algorithms.

We research device-free (DF) multi-target tracking scheme in this paper. The existing localization and tracking algorithms are always pay attention to the single target and need to collect a large amount of localization information. In this paper, we exploit the sparse property of multiple target locations to achieve target trace accurately with much less sampling both in the wireless links and the time slots. The proposed approach mainly includes the target localization part and target trace recovery part. In target localization part, by exploiting the inherent sparsity of the target number, Compressive Sensing (CS) is utilized to reduce the wireless links distributed. In the target trace recovery part, we exploit the compressive property of target trace, as well as designing the measurement matrix and the sparse matrix, to reduce the samplings in time domain. Additionally, Kronecker Compressive Sensing (KCS) theory is used to simultaneously recover the multiple traces both of the X label and the Y Label. Finally, simulations show that the proposed approach holds an effective recovery performance.

An underdetermined direction of arrival estimation method based on signal sparsity is proposed when independent and coherent signals coexist. Firstly, the estimate of the mixing matrix of the impinging signals is obtained by clustering the single source points which are detected by the ratio of time-frequency transforms of the received signals. Then, each column vector of the mixing matrix is processed by exploiting the forward and backward vectors in turn to obtain the directions of arrival of all signals. The number of independent signals and coherent signal groups that can be estimated by the proposed method can be greater than the number of sensors. The validity of the method is demonstrated by simulations.

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.

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 compressive sensing theory (CS), the restricted isometry property (RIP) is commonly used for the measurement matrix to guarantee the reliable recovery of sparse signals from linear measurements. Although many works have indicated that random matrices with excellent recovery performance satisfy the RIP with high probability, Toeplitz-structured matrices arise naturally in real scenarios, such as applications of linear time-invariant systems. Thus, the corresponding measurement matrix can be modeled as a Toeplitz (partial) structured matrix instead of a completely random matrix. The structure characteristics introduce coherence and cause the performance degradation of the measurement matrix. To enhance the recovery performance of the Toeplitz structured measurement matrix in multichannel convolution source separation, an efficient construction of measurement matrix is presented, referred to as sparse random block-banded Toeplitz matrix (SRBT). The sparse signal is pre-randomized by locally scrambling its sample locations. Then, the signal is subsampled using the sparse random banded matrix. Finally, the mixing measurements are obtained. Based on the analysis of eigenvalues, the theoretical results indicate that the SRBT matrix satisfies the RIP with high probability. Simulation results show that the SRBT matrix almost matches the recovery performance of random matrices. Compared with the existing banded block Toeplitz matrix, SRBT significantly improves the probability of successful recovery. Additionally, SRBT has the advantages of low storage requirements and fast computation in reconstruction.

The large computational complexity makes stereo matching a big challenge in real-time application scenario. The problem of stereo matching in a video sequence is slightly different with that in a still image because there exists temporal correlation among video frames. However, no existing method considered temporal consistency of disparity for algorithm acceleration. In this work, we proposed a scheme called the dynamic disparity range (DDR) to optimize matching cost calculation and cost aggregation steps by narrowing disparity searching range, and a scheme called temporal cost aggregation path to optimize the cost aggregation step. Based on the schemes, we proposed the DDR-SGM and the DDR-MCCNN algorithms for the stereo matching in video sequences. Evaluation results showed that the proposed algorithms significantly reduced the computational complexity with only very slight loss of accuracy. We proved that the proposed optimizations for the stereo matching are effective and the temporal consistency in stereo video is highly useful for either improving accuracy or reducing computational complexity.

Cell phones with GPS function as well as GPS loggers are widely used and we can easily obtain users' geographic information. Now classifying the measured GPS positions into indoor/outdoor positions is one of the major challenges. In this letter, we propose a robust indoor/outdoor detection method based on sparse GPS measured positions utilizing machine learning. Given a set of clusters of measured positions whose center position shows the user's estimated stayed position, we calculate the feature values composed of: positioning accuracy, spatial features, and temporal feature of measured positions included in every cluster. Then a random forest classifier learns these feature values of the known data set. Finally, we classify the unknown clusters of measured positions into indoor/outdoor clusters using the learned random forest classifier. The experiments demonstrate that our proposed method realizes the maximum F1 measure of 1.000, which classifies measured positions into indoor/outdoor ones with almost no errors.

This paper proposes an enhanced affinity graph (EA-graph) for image segmentation. Firstly, the original image is over-segmented to obtain several sets of superpixels with different scales, and the color and texture features of the superpixels are extracted. Then, the similarity relationship between neighborhood superpixels is used to construct the local affinity graph. Meanwhile, the global affinity graph is obtained by sparse reconstruction among all superpixels. The local affinity graph and global affinity graph are superimposed to obtain an enhanced affinity graph for eliminating the influences of noise and isolated regions in the image. Finally, a bipartite graph is introduced to express the affiliation between pixels and superpixels, and segmentation is performed using a spectral clustering algorithm. Experimental results on the Berkeley segmentation database demonstrate that our method achieves significantly better performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.