Feature visualization is of great significances in volume visualization, and feature extraction has been becoming extremely popular in feature visualization. While precise definition of features is usually absent which makes the extraction difficult. This paper employs probability density function (PDF) as statistical property, and proposes a statistical property guided approach to extract features for volume data. Basing on feature matching, it combines simple liner iterative cluster (SLIC) with Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and could do extraction without accurate feature definition. Further, GMM is paired with a normality test to reduce time cost and storage requirement. We demonstrate its applicability and superiority by successfully applying it on homogeneous and non-homogeneous features.

We propose a wideband antenna that has both vertical and horizontal polarization to create access points with enhanced connectivity. The antenna is composed of a rectangular plate and a ground plate, and the rectangular plate is fed sideways from the ground plate. Its -10dB fractional bandwidth is approximately 162%. It is shown that the offset feed of the rectangular plate is important to attain wideband impedance matching and vertical polarized wave. The results of a parametric study to characterize the first- and second-lowest resonant frequencies are presented. Moreover, the behavior of the impedance matching and polarization is interpreted by dividing the current distribution around the feed port on the rectangular plate into the same direction current mode and the opposite direction current mode. The measured results for the return loss and the radiation pattern of a prototype antenna agree well with the simulation results, therefore the wideband property was experimentally confirmed.

In this paper, we use the MCA (Multi-Cache Approximation) algorithm to numerically determine cache hit probability in a multi-cache network. We then analytically obtain performance metrics for Content-Centric networking (CCN). Our analytical model contains multiple routers, multiple repositories (e.g., storage servers), and multiple entities (e.g., clients). We obtain three performance metrics: content delivery delay (i.e., the average time required for an entity to retrieve a content through a neighboring router), throughput (i.e., number of contents delivered from an entity per unit of time), and availability (i.e., probability that an entity can successfully retrieve a content from a network). Through several numerical examples, we investigate how network topology affects the performance of CCN. A notable finding is that content caching becomes more beneficial in terms of content delivery time and availability (resp., throughput) as distance between the entity and the requesting repository narrows (resp., widens).

Many concurrency control protocols for B-trees use latch-coupling because its execution is efficient on a single machine. Some studies have indicated that latch-coupling may involve a performance bottleneck when using multicore processors in a shared-everything environment, but no studies have considered the possible performance bottleneck caused by sending messages between processing elements (PEs) in shared-nothing environments. We propose two new concurrency control protocols, “LCFB” and “LCFB-link”, which require no latch-coupling in optimistic processes. The LCFB-link also innovates B-link approach within each PE to reduce the cost of modifications in the PE, as a solution to the difficulty of consistency management for the side pointers in a parallel B-tree. The B-link algorithm is well known as a protocol without latch-coupling, but B-link has the difficulty of guaranteeing the consistency of the side pointers in a parallel B-tree. Experimental results in various environments indicated that the system throughput of the proposed protocols was always superior to those of the conventional protocols, particularly in large-scale configurations, and using LCFB-link was effective for higher update ratios. In addition, to mitigate access skew, data should migrate between PEs. We have demonstrated that our protocols always improve the system throughput and are effective as concurrency controls for data migration.

This paper presents a pivot-set generation algorithm for accelerating exact similarity search in a large-scale data set. To deal with the large-scale data set, it is important to efficiently construct a search index offline as well as to perform fast exact similarity search online. Our proposed algorithm efficiently generates competent pivots with two novel techniques: hierarchical data partitioning and fast pivot optimization techniques. To make effective use of a small number of pivots, the former recursively partitions a data set into two subsets with the same size depending on the rank order from each of two assigned pivots, resulting in a complete binary tree. The latter calculates a defined objective function for pivot optimization with a low computational cost by skillfully operating data objects mapped into a pivot space. Since the generated pivots provide the tight lower bounds on distances between a query object and the data objects, an exact similarity search algorithm effectively avoids unnecessary distance calculations. We demonstrate that the search algorithm using the pivots generated by the proposed algorithm reduces distance calculations with an extremely high rate regarding a range query problem for real large-scale image data sets.

Strategic Dual Image method (SDI) for three-dimensional magnetic field problems is proposed. The basic idea of the SDI method is that the open boundary solution is in-between the Dirichlet and Neumann solutions. The relationship between the specific topology (e.g. sphere, and ellipsoid) of the boundary and the averaging weight has been discussed in the previous literature, however no discussions on the arbitrary topology. In this paper, combined with “the perturbation approach using equivalence theorem”, the methodology to derive the averaging weight of Dirichlet and Neumann solutions on the arbitrary topology has been proposed. Some numerical examples are also demonstrated.

The security of current public-key cryptosystems relies on the hardness of factoring large integers or solving discrete logarithm problems. However, these mathematical problems can be solved in polynomial time using a quantum computer. This vulnerability has prompted research into post-quantum cryptography using alternative mathematical problems that are secure in the era of quantum computers. In this regard, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began to standardize post-quantum cryptography in 2016. In this expository article, we give an overview of recent research on post-quantum cryptography. In particular, we describe the construction and security of multivariate polynomial cryptosystems and lattice-based cryptosystems, which are the main candidates of post-quantum cryptography.

This letter investigates the performance of a legitimate surveillance system, where a wireless powered legitimate monitor aims to eavesdrop a suspicious communication link. Power splitting technique is adopted at the monitor for simultaneous information eavesdropping and energy harvesting. In order to maximize the successful eavesdropping probability, the power splitting ratio is optimized under the minimum harvested energy constraint. Assuming that perfect channel state information (CSI) or only the channel distribution information (CDI) is available, the closed-form maximum successful eavesdropping probability is obtained in Rayleigh fading channels. It is shown that the minimum harvested energy constraint has no impact on the eavesdropping performance if the minimum harvested energy constraint is loose. It is also shown that the eavesdropping performance loss due to partial knowledge of CSI is negligible when the eavesdropping link channel condition is much better than that of the suspicious communication link channel.

Transient scattering by a metal cylinder covered with inhomogeneous lossy material is analyzed for application of radar systems to nondestructive testing of reinforced concrete structures. First, inhomogeneous lossy material that is a model of corrosion by rust is approximated by a cylindrical multilayered medium, and analytic solution of a scattered field in frequency domain is derived. Next, time domain scattering response is calculated from the frequency domain data by using the inverse Fourier transform. Numerical results of pulse responses indicate that corrosion rate of the concrete can be evaluated by checking the waveform distortion of the pulse responses.

To support the rapid increase of mobile traffic, the LTE-based air interface is expected to be employed in the unlicensed spectrum known as “Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA).” The LAA terminal, which employs an LTE-based air interface, suffers from interference from WiFi access points as well as the LAA base station. The interference rejection combining (IRC) receiver, which employs a linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) filter, can suppress this interference from WiFi access points in addition to that of the LAA base station. The IRC receiver is effective, since it requires no knowledge of the interference, which is generally difficult to obtain for different systems. In this paper, we use a link-level simulation to evaluate the performance of the IRC receiver in suppressing the interference from WiFi access points, and show that the IRC receiver can effectively cancel the interference from WiFi systems as well as LTE systems, although we observed a slight performance degradation due to the covariance matrix estimation error caused by the WiFi interference fluctuation in the frequency-domain.

To aim to achieve a high-performance computation for microwave simulations with low cost, small size machine and low energy consumption, a method of the FDTD dedicated computer has been investigated. It was shown by VHDL logical circuit simulations that the FDTD dedicated computer with a dataflow architecture has much higher performance than that of high-end PC and GPU. Then the remaining task of this work is large scale computations by the dedicated computer, since microwave simulations for only 18×18×Z grid space (Z is the number of girds for z direction) can be executed in a single FPGA at most. To treat much larger numerical model size for practical applications, this paper considers an implementation of a domain decomposition method operation of the FDTD dedicated computer in a single FPGA.

The aim of this paper is to apply automatic jigsaw puzzle solvers, which are methods of assembling jigsaw puzzles, to the field of information security. Encryption-then-Compression (EtC) systems have been considered for the user-controllable privacy protection of digital images in social network services. Block scrambling-based encryption schemes, which have been proposed to construct EtC systems, have enough key spaces for protecting brute-force attacks. However, each block in encrypted images has almost the same correlation as that of original images. Therefore, it is required to consider the security from different viewpoints from number theory-based encryption methods with provable security such as RSA and AES. In this paper, existing jigsaw puzzle solvers, which aim to assemble puzzles including only scrambled and rotated pieces, are first reviewed in terms of attacking strategies on encrypted images. Then, an extended jigsaw puzzle solver for block scrambling-based encryption scheme is proposed to solve encrypted images including inverted, negative-positive transformed and color component shuffled blocks in addition to scrambled and rotated ones. In the experiments, the jigsaw puzzle solvers are applied to encrypted images to consider the security conditions of the encryption schemes.

The Smart City paradigm has become one of the most important research topics around the globe. Particularly in Europe, it is considered as a solution for the unstoppable increase of high density urban environments and the European Commission has included the Smart City research as one of the key objectives for the FP7 (Seventh Framework Program) and H2020 (Horizon 2020) research initiatives. As a result, a considerable amount of quality research, with particular emphasis on information and communication technologies, has been produced. In this paper, we review the current efforts dedicated in Europe to this research topic. Particular attention is paid in the review to the platforms and infrastructure technologies adopted to introduce the Internet of Things into the city, taking into account the constraints and harshness of urban environments. Furthermore, this paper also considers the efforts in the experimental perspective, which includes the review of existing Smart City testbeds, part of wider European initiatives such as FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) and FIWARE. Last but not least, the main efforts in providing interoperability between the different experimental facilities are also presented.

In order to cope with severe interference in heterogeneous networks, this paper proposes a semi-blind interference cancellation scheme, which does not require multiple receive antennas or knowledge about training sequences of the interfering signals. The proposed scheme performs joint channel estimation and signal detection (JCESD) during the training period in order to blindly estimate channels of the interfering signals. On the other hand, maximum likelihood detection (MLD), which can be considered the optimum JCESD, must perform channel estimation for all transmitted signal candidates of the interfering signals and must search for the most likely signal candidate. Therefore, MLD incurs a prohibitive amount of computational complexity. To reduce such complexity drastically, the proposed scheme enhances the quantized channel approach, and applies the enhanced version to JCESD. In addition, a recalculation scheme is introduced to avoid inaccurate channel estimates due to local minima. Using the estimated channels, the proposed scheme performs multiuser detection (MUD) of the data sequences in order to cancel the interference. Computer simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms a conventional scheme based on the Viterbi algorithm, and can achieve almost the same average bit error rate performance as the MUD with channels estimated from sufficiently long training sequences of both the desired signal and the interfering signals, while reducing the computational complexity significantly compared with full search involving all interfering signal candidates during the training period.

Information-centric networking (ICN) has received increasing attention from all over the world. The novel aspects of ICN (e.g., the combination of caching, multicasting, and aggregating requests) is based on names that act as addresses for content. The communication with name has the potential to cope with the growing and complicating Internet technology, for example, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and a smart society. To realize ICN, router hardware must implement an innovative cache replacement algorithm that offers performance far superior to a simple policy-based algorithm while still operating with feasible computational and memory overhead. However, most previous studies on cache replacement policies in ICN have proposed policies that are too blunt to achieve significant performance improvement, such as first-in first-out (popularly, FIFO) and random policies, or impractical policies in a resource-restricted environment, such as least recently used (LRU). Thus, we propose CLOCK-Pro Using Switching Hash-tables (CUSH) as the suitable policy for network caching. CUSH can identify and keep popular content worth caching in a network environment. CUSH also employs CLOCK and hash-tables, which are low-overhead data structure, to satisfy the cost requirement. We numerically evaluate our proposed approach, showing that our proposal can achieve cache hits against the traffic traces that simple conventional algorithms hardly cause any hits.

In this paper, we present a new three-way split formula for binary polynomial multiplication (PM) with five recursive multiplications. The scheme is based on a recently proposed multievaluation and interpolation approach using field extension. The proposed PM formula achieves the smallest space complexity. Moreover, it has about 40% reduced time complexity compared to best known results. In addition, using developed techniques for PM formulas, we propose a three-way split formula for Toeplitz matrix vector product with five recursive products which has a considerably improved complexity compared to previous known one.

SIMON is a lightweight block cipher designed by NSA in 2013. NSA presented the specification and the implementation efficiency, but they did not provide detailed security analysis nor the design rationale. The original SIMON has rotation constants of (1,8,2), and Kölbl et al. regarded the constants as a parameter (a,b,c), and analyzed the security of SIMON block cipher variants against differential and linear attacks for all the choices of (a,b,c). This paper complements the result of Kölbl et al. by considering integral and impossible differential attacks. First, we search the number of rounds of integral distinguishers by using a supercomputer. Our search algorithm follows the previous approach by Wang et al., however, we introduce a new choice of the set of plaintexts satisfying the integral property. We show that the new choice indeed extends the number of rounds for several parameters. We also search the number of rounds of impossible differential characteristics based on the miss-in-the-middle approach. Finally, we make a comparison of all parameters from our results and the observations by Kölbl et al. Interesting observations are obtained, for instance we find that the optimal parameters with respect to the resistance against differential attacks are not stronger than the original parameter with respect to integral and impossible differential attacks. Furthermore, we consider the security against differential attacks by considering differentials. From the result, we obtain a parameter that is potential to be better than the original parameter with respect to security against these four attacks.

Image sensor communication (ISC), derived from visible light communication (VLC) is an attractive solution for outdoor mobile environments, particularly for intelligent transport systems (ITS). In ITS-ISC, tracking a transmitter in the image plane is critical issue since vehicle vibrations make it difficult to selsct the correct pixels for data reception. Our goal in this study is to develop a precise tracking method. To accomplish this, vehicle vibration modeling and its parameters estimation, i.e., represetative frequencies and their amplitudes for inherent vehicle vibration, and the variance of the Gaussian random process represnting road surface irregularity, are required. In this paper, we measured actual vehicle vibration in a driving situation and determined parameters based on the frequency characteristics. Then, we demonstrate that vehicle vibration that induces transmitter displacement in an image plane can be modeled by only Gaussian random processes that represent road surface irregularity when a high frame rate (e.g., 1000fps) image sensor is used as an ISC receiver. The simplified vehicle vibration model and its parameters are evaluated by numerical analysis and experimental measurement and obtained result shows that the proposed model can reproduce the characteristics of the transmitter displacement sufficiently.

Dynamic textures are sequences of images of moving scenes that exhibit certain stationarity properties in time. Hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical model, which has been used to model the dynamic texture. However, the texture is a region property. The traditional HMM models the property of a single pixel along the time, and does not consider the dependence of the spatial adjacent pixels of the dynamic texture. In this paper, the multivariate hidden Markov model (MHMM) is proposed to characterize and classify the dynamic textures. Specifically, the spatial adjacent pixels are modeled with multivariate hidden Markov model, in which the hidden states of those pixels are modeled with the multivariate Markov chain, and the intensity values of those pixels are modeled as the observation variables. Then the model parameters are used to describe the dynamic texture and the classification is based on the maximum likelihood criterion. The experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced method.

This paper reports the development of a landmine visualization system based on complex-valued self-organizing map (CSOM) by employing one-dimensional (1-D) array of taper-walled tapered slot antennas (TSAs). Previously we constructed a high-density two-dimensional array system to observe and classify complex-amplitude texture of scattered wave. The system has superiority in its adaptive distinction ability between landmines and other clutters. However, it used so many (144) antenna elements with many mechanical radio-frequency (RF) switches and cables that it has difficulty in its maintenance and also requires long measurement time. The 1-D array system proposed here uses only 12 antennas and adopts electronic RF switches, resulting in easy maintenance and 1/4 measurement time. Though we observe stripe noise specific to this 1-D system, we succeed in visualization with effective solutions.