Most existing object detection methods and text detection methods are mainly designed to detect either text or objects. In some scenarios where the task is to find the target word pointed-at by an object, results of existing methods are far from satisfying. However, such scenarios happen often in human-computer interaction, when the computer needs to figure out which word the user is pointing at. Comparing with object detection, pointed-at word localization (PAWL) requires higher accuracy, especially in dense text scenarios. Moreover, in printed document, characters are much smaller than those in scene text detection datasets such as ICDAR-2013, ICDAR-2015 and ICPR-2018 etc. To address these problems, the authors propose a novel target word localization network (TWLN) to detect the pointed-at word in printed documents. In this work, a single deep neural network is trained to extract the features of markers and text sequentially. For each image, the location of the marker is predicted firstly, according to the predicted location, a smaller image is cropped from the original image and put into the same network, then the location of pointed-at word is predicted. To train and test the networks, an efficient approach is proposed to generate the dataset from PDF format documents by inserting markers pointing at the words in the documents, which avoids laborious labeling work. Experiments on the proposed dataset demonstrate that TWLN outperforms the compared object detection method and optical character recognition method on every category of targets, especially when the target is a single character that only occupies several pixels in the image. TWLN is also tested with real photographs, and the accuracy shows no significant differences, which proves the validity of the generating method to construct the dataset.

Music is often used for emotion induction because it can change the emotions of people. However, since we subjectively feel different emotions when listening to music, we propose an emotion induction system that generates music that is adapted to each individual. Our system automatically generates suitable music for emotion induction based on the emotions predicted from an electroencephalogram (EEG). We examined three elements for constructing our system: 1) a music generator that creates music that induces emotions that resemble the inputs, 2) emotion prediction using EEG in real-time, and 3) the control of a music generator using the predicted emotions for making music that is suitable for inducing emotions. We constructed our proposed system using these elements and evaluated it. The results showed its effectiveness for inducing emotions and suggest that feedback loops that tailor stimuli to individuals can successfully induce emotions.

This study tries to predict date of ear emergence of rice plants, based on cropping records over 25 years. Predicting ear emergence of rice plants is known to be crucial for practicing good harvesting quality, and has long been dependent upon old farmers who acquire skills of intuitive prediction based on their long term experiences. Facing with aging farmers, data driven approach for the prediction have been pursued. Nevertheless, they are not necessarily sufficient in terms of practical use. One of the issue is to adopt weather forecast as the feature so that the predictive performance is varied by the accuracy of the forecast. The other issue is that the performance is varied by region and the regional characteristics have not been used as the features for the prediction. With this background, we propose a feature engineering to quantify hidden regional characteristics as the feature for the prediction. Further the feature is engineered based only on observational data without any forecast. Applying our proposal to the data on the cropping records resulted in sufficient predictive performance, ±2.69days of RMSE.

With the rapid increase in the number of CPU cores, software that can utilize these many cores is required. A lock-free algorithm based on compare-and-swap (CAS) operations is one of the concurrency control methods to implement such multi-threading software. A multi-word CAS (MwCAS) operation is an extension of a CAS operation to swap multiple words atomically. However, we noticed that the performance of the existing MwCAS implementation is limited because of garbage collection even if in a low-contention environment. To achieve high performance in low-contention workloads, we propose a new MwCAS algorithm without garbage collection. Experimental results show that our approach is three to five times faster than implementation with garbage collection in low-contention workloads. Moreover, the performance of the proposed method is also superior in a high-contention environment.

In this study, we generate dialogue contents in which two systems discuss their distress with each other. The user inputs sentences that include environment and feelings of distress. The system generates the dialogue content from the input. In this study, we created dialogue data about distress in order to generate them using deep learning. The generative model fine-tunes the GPT of the pre-trained model using the TransferTransfo method. The contribution of this study is the creation of a conversational dataset using publicly available data. This study used EmpatheticDialogues, an existing empathetic dialogue dataset, and Reddit r/offmychest, a public data set of distress. The models fine-tuned with each data were evaluated both automatically (such as by the BLEU and ROUGE scores) and manually (such as by relevance and empathy) by human assessors.

Recently, machine learning approaches and user movement history analysis on mobile devices have attracted much attention. Generally, we need to apply text data into the word embedding tool for acquiring word vectors as the preprocessing of machine learning approaches. However, it is difficult for mobile devices to afford the huge cost of high-dimensional vector calculation. Thus, a low-cost user behavior and user movement history analysis approach should be considered. To address this issue, firstly, we convert the zip code and street house number into vectors instead of textual address information to reduce the cost of spatial vector calculation. Secondly, we propose a low-cost high-performance semantic and physical distance (real distance) calculation method that applied zip-code-based vectors. Finally, to verify the validity of our proposed method, we utilize the US zip code data to calculate both semantic and physical distances and compare their results with the previous method. The experimental results showed that our proposed method could significantly improve the performance of distance calculation and effectively control the cost to a low level.

Peer assessment in education has pedagogical benefits and is a promising method for grading a large number of submissions. At the same time, student reliability has been regarded as a problem; consequently, various methods of estimating highly reliable grades from scores given by multiple students have been proposed. Under most of the existing methods, a nonadaptive allocation pattern, which performs allocation in advance, is assumed. In this study, we analyze the effect of student-submission allocation on score estimation in peer assessment under a nonadaptive allocation setting. We examine three types of nonadaptive allocation methods, random allocation, circular allocation and group allocation, which are considered the commonly used approaches among the existing nonadaptive peer assessment methods. Through simulation experiments, we show that circular allocation and group allocation tend to yield lower accuracy than random allocation. Then, we utilize this result to improve the existing adaptive allocation method, which performs allocation and assessment in parallel and tends to make similar allocation result to circular allocation. We propose the method to replace part of the allocation with random allocation, and show that the method is effective through experiments.

This paper studies the performance of quantized massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with superimposed pilots (SP), using linear minimum mean-square-error (LMMSE) channel estimation and maximum ratio combining (MRC) detection. In contrast to previous works, arbitrary-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are considered. We derive an accurate approximation of the uplink achievable rate considering the removal of estimated pilots. Based on the analytical expression, the optimal pilot power factor that maximizes the achievable rate is deduced and an expression for energy efficiency (EE) is given. In addition, the achievable rate and the optimal power allocation policy under some asymptotic limits are analyzed. Analysis shows that the systems with higher-resolution ADCs or larger number of base station (BS) antennas need to allocate more power to pilots. In contrast, more power needs to be allocated to data when the channel is slowly varying. Numerical results show that in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region, for 1-bit quantizers, SP outperforms time-multiplexed pilots (TP) in most cases, while for systems with higher-resolution ADCs, the SP scheme is suitable for the scenarios with comparatively small number of BS antennas and relatively long channel coherence time.

The haze situation will seriously affect the quality of license plate recognition and reduce the performance of the visual processing algorithm. In order to improve the quality of haze pictures, a license plate recognition algorithm based on haze weather is proposed in this paper. The algorithm in this paper mainly consists of two parts: The first part is MPGAN image dehazing, which uses a generative adversarial network to dehaze the image, and combines multi-scale convolution and perceptual loss. Multi-scale convolution is conducive to better feature extraction. The perceptual loss makes up for the shortcoming that the mean square error (MSE) is greatly affected by outliers; the second part is to recognize the license plate, first we use YOLOv3 to locate the license plate, the STN network corrects the license plate, and finally enters the improved LPRNet network to get license plate information. Experimental results show that the dehazing model proposed in this paper achieves good results, and the evaluation indicators PSNR and SSIM are better than other representative algorithms. After comparing the license plate recognition algorithm with the LPRNet algorithm, the average accuracy rate can reach 93.9%.

Previous studies on anomaly detection in videos have trained detectors in which reconstruction and prediction tasks are performed on normal data so that frames on which their task performance is low will be detected as anomalies during testing. This paper proposes a new approach that involves sorting video clips, by using a generative network structure. Our approach learns spatial contexts from appearances and temporal contexts from the order relationship of the frames. Experiments were conducted on four datasets, and we categorized the anomalous sequences by appearance and motion. Evaluations were conducted not only on each total dataset but also on each of the categories. Our method improved detection performance on both anomalies with different appearance and different motion from normality. Moreover, combining our approach with a prediction method produced improvements in precision at a high recall.

Traditional safety analysis techniques have shown difficulties in incorporating dynamically changing structures of CPSs (Cyber-Physical Systems). STPA (System-Theoretic Process Analysis), one of the widely used, needs to unfold and arrange all hidden structures before beginning a full-fledged analysis. This paper proposes an intermediate model “Information Unfolding Model (IUM)” and a process “Information Unfolding Process (IUP)” to unfold dynamic structures which are hidden in CPSs and so help analysts construct control structures in STPA thoroughly.

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has made extraordinary progress in image classification tasks. However, it is less effective to use CNN directly to detect image manipulation. To address this problem, we propose an image filtering layer and a multi-scale feature fusion module which can guide the model more accurately and effectively to perform image manipulation detection. Through a series of experiments, it is shown that our model achieves improvements on image manipulation detection compared with the previous researches.

Aiming for accurate data-driven predictions for the passenger walking time, this study proposes a novel neuron-network-based mixture probability (NNBMP) model with repetition learning (RL) to estimate the probability density distribution of passenger walking time (PWT) in the metro station. Our conducted experiments for Fuzhou metro stations demonstrate that the proposed NNBMP-RL model achieved the mean absolute error, mean square error, and mean absolute percentage error of 0.0078, 1.33 × 10-4, and 19.41%, respectively, and it outperformed all the seven compared models. The developed NNBMP model fitting accurately the PWT distribution in the metro station is readily applicable to the microscopic analyses of passenger flow.

This letter proposes a post-processing method to improve the smoothness and safety of the path for an autonomous vehicle navigating in an urban environment. The proposed method transforms the initial path given by local path planning algorithms using a stochastic approach to improve its smoothness and safety. Using the proposed method, the initial path is efficiently transformed by iteratively updating the position of each waypoint within it. The proposed method also guarantees the feasibility of the transformed path. Experimental results verify that the proposed method can improve the smoothness and safety of the initial path and ensure the feasibility of the transformed path.

In this letter, we propose a deep neural network and semi-supervised learning based dehazing algorithm. The dehazing network uses a pyramidal architecture to recover the haze-free scene from a single hazy image in a coarse-to-fine order. To faithfully restore the objects with different scales, we incorporate cascaded multi-scale convolutional blocks into each level of the pyramid. Feature fusion and transfer in the network are achieved using the paths constructed by interleaved residual connections. For better generalization to the complicated haze in real-world environments, we also devise a discriminator that enables semi-supervised adversarial training. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed work outperforms comparative ones with higher quantitative metrics and more visually pleasant outputs. It can also enhance the robustness of object detection under haze.

Goal refinement is a crucial step in goal-oriented requirements analysis to create a goal model of high quality. Poor goal refinement leads to missing requirements and eliciting incorrect requirements as well as less comprehensiveness of produced goal models. This paper proposes a technique to automate detecting bad smells of goal refinement, symptoms of poor goal refinement. At first, to clarify bad smells, we asked subjects to discover poor goal refinement concretely. Based on the classification of the specified poor refinement, we defined four types of bad smells of goal refinement: Low Semantic Relation, Many Siblings, Few Siblings, and Coarse Grained Leaf, and developed two types of measures to detect them: measures on the graph structure of a goal model and semantic similarity of goal descriptions. We have implemented a supporting tool to detect bad smells and assessed its usefulness by an experiment.

We propose a target detection network (RMF-Net) based on the multi-scale strategy to solve the problems of large differences in the detection scale and mutual occlusion, which result in inaccurate locations. A multi-layer feature fusion module and multi-expansion dilated convolution pyramid module were designed based on the ResNet-101 residual network. The ability of the network to express the multi-scale features of the target could be improved by combining the shallow and deep features of the target and expanding the receptive field of the network. Moreover, RoI Align pooling was introduced to reduce the low accuracy of the anchor frame caused by multiple quantizations for improved positioning accuracy. Finally, an AD-IoU loss function was designed, which can adaptively optimise the distance between the prediction box and real box by comprehensively considering the overlap rate, centre distance, and aspect ratio between the boxes and can improve the detection accuracy of the occlusion target. Ablation experiments on the RMF-Net model verified the effectiveness of each factor in improving the network detection accuracy. Comparative experiments were conducted on the Pascal VOC2007 and Pascal VOC2012 datasets with various target detection algorithms based on convolutional neural networks. The results demonstrated that RMF-Net exhibited strong scale adaptability at different occlusion rates. The detection accuracy reached 80.4% and 78.5% respectively.

In this study, edge diffraction of an electromagnetic plane wave by two-dimensional conducting wedges has been analyzed by the physical optics (PO) method for both E and H polarizations. Non-uniform and uniform asymptotic solutions of diffracted fields have been derived. A unified edge diffraction coefficient has also been derived with four cotangent functions from the conventional angle-dependent coefficients. Numerical calculations have been made to compare the results with those by other methods, such as the exact solution and the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction (UTD). A good agreement has been observed to confirm the validity of our method.

Use case modeling is popular to represent the functionality of the system to be developed, and it consists of two parts: a use case diagram and use case descriptions. Use case descriptions are structured text written in natural language, and the usage of natural language can lead to poor descriptions such as ambiguous, inconsistent, and/or incomplete descriptions. Poor descriptions lead to missing requirements and eliciting incorrect requirements as well as less comprehensiveness of the produced use case model. This paper proposes a technique to automate detecting bad smells of use case descriptions, i.e., symptoms of poor descriptions. At first, to clarify bad smells, we analyzed existing use case models to discover poor use case descriptions concretely and developed the list of bad smells, i.e., a catalog of bad smells. Some of the bad smells can be refined into measures using the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm to automate their detection. The main contributions of this paper are the developed catalog of bad smells and the automated detection of these bad smells. We have implemented an automated smell detector for 22 bad smells at first and assessed its usefulness by an experiment. As a result, the first version of our tool got a precision ratio of 0.591 and a recall ratio of 0.981. Through evaluating our catalog and the automated tool, we found additional six bad smells and two metrics. Then, we obtained the precision of 0.596 and the recall of 1.000 by our final version of the automated tool.

With the high development of computation requirements in Internet of Things, resource-limited edge servers usually require to cooperate to perform the tasks. Most related studies usually assume a static cooperation approach which might not suit the dynamic environment of edge computing. In this paper, we consider a dynamic cooperation approach by guiding edge servers to form coalitions dynamically. It raises two issues: 1) how to guide them to optimally form coalitions and 2) how to cope with the dynamic feature where server statuses dynamically change as the tasks are performed. The coalitional Markov decision process (CMDP) model proposed in our previous work can handle these issues well. However, its basic solution, coalitional Q-learning, cannot handle the large scale problem when the task number is large in edge computing. Our response is to propose a novel algorithm called deep coalitional Q-learning (DCQL) to solve it. To sum up, we first formulate the dynamic cooperation problem of edge servers as a CMDP: each edge server is regarded as an agent and the dynamic process is modeled as a MDP where the agents observe the current state to formulate several coalitions. Each coalition takes an action to impact the environment which correspondingly transfers to the next state to repeat the above process. Then, we propose DCQL which includes a deep neural network and so can well cope with large scale problem. DCQL can guide the edge servers to form coalitions dynamically with the target of optimizing some goal. Furthermore, we run experiments to verify our proposed algorithm's effectiveness in different settings.