Many quality metrics have been proposed for the compliance perception to assess haptic device performance and perceived results. Perceived compliance may be influenced by factors such as object properties, experimental conditions and human perceptual habits. In this paper, analysis of softness perception was conducted to find out relevant quality metrics dominating in the compliance perception system and their correlation with perception results, by expressing these metrics by basic physical parameters that characterizing these factors. Based on three psychophysical experiments, just noticeable differences (JNDs) for perceived softness of combination of different stiffness coefficients and damping levels rendered by haptic devices were analyzed. Interaction data during the interaction process were recorded and analyzed. Preliminary experimental results show that the discrimination ability of softness perception changes with the ratio of damping to stiffness when subjects exploring at their habitual speed. Analysis results indicate that quality metrics of Rate-hardness, Extended Rate-hardness and ratio of damping to stiffness have high correlation for perceived results. Further analysis results show that parameters that reflecting object properties (stiffness, damping), experimental conditions (force bandwidth) and human perceptual habits (initial speed, maximum force change rate) lead to the change of these quality metrics, which then bring different perceptual feeling and finally result in the change of discrimination ability. Findings in this paper may provide a better understanding of softness perception and useful guidance in improvement of haptic and teleoperation devices.

Software diversity can be utilized in cyberspace security to defend against the zero-day attacks. Existing researches have proved the effectiveness of diversity in bringing security benefits, but few of them touch the problem that whether there is a positive correlation between the security and the diversity. In addition, there is little guidance on how to construct an effective diversified system. For that, this paper develops two diversity metrics based on system attribute matrix, proposes a diversity measurement and verifies the effectiveness of the measurement. Through several simulations on the diversified systems which use voting strategy, the relationship between diversity and security is analyzed. The results show that there is an overall positive correlation between security and diversity. Though some cases are against the correlation, further analysis is made to explain the phenomenon. In addition, the effect of voting strategy is also discussed through simulations. The results show that the voting strategy have a dominant impact on the security, which implies that security benefits can be obtained only with proper strategies. According to the conclusions, some guidance is provided in constructing a more diversified as well as securer system.

Access control and surveillance applications like walking-through security gates and immigration control points have a great demand for convenient and accurate biometric recognition in unconstrained scenarios with low user cooperation. The periocular region, which is a relatively new biometric trait, has been attracting much attention for recognition of an individual in such scenarios. This paper proposes a periocular recognition method that combines Phase-Based Correspondence Matching (PB-CM) with a texture enhancement technique. PB-CM has demonstrated high recognition performance in other biometric traits, e.g., face, palmprint and finger-knuckle-print. However, a major limitation for periocular region is that the performance of PB-CM degrades when the periocular skin has poor texture. We address this problem by applying texture enhancement and found out that variance normalization of texture significantly improves the performance of periocular recognition using PB-CM. Experimental evaluation using three public databases demonstrates the advantage of the proposed method compared with conventional methods.

In this paper, we study the approximate point set matching (APSM) problem with minimum RMSD score under translation, rotation, and one-to-one correspondence in d-dimension. Since most of the previous works about APSM problems use similality scores that do not especially care about one-to-one correspondence between points, such as Hausdorff distance, we cannot easily apply previously proposed methods to our APSM problem. So, we focus on speed-up of exhaustive search algorithms that can find all approximate matches. First, we present an efficient branch-and-bound algorithm using a novel lower bound function of the minimum RMSD score for the enumeration version of APSM problem. Then, we modify this algorithm for the optimization version. Next, we present another algorithm that runs fast with high probability when a set of parameters are fixed. Experimental results on both synthetic datasets and real 3-D molecular datasets showed that our branch-and-bound algorithm achieved significant speed-up over the naive algorithm still keeping the advantage of generating all answers.

Geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) is a measure showing the positioning accuracy at different spatial locations in location systems. Although expressions of GDOP for the time of arrival (TOA), time difference of arrival (TDOA), and angle of arrival (AOA) systems have been developed, no closed form expression of GDOP are available for the received signal strength (RSS) system. This letter derives an explicit GDOP expression utilizing the RSS measurement in the wireless sensor networks.

Deterioration of software quality developed by multiple organizations has become a serious problem. To predict software degradation after an organizational change, this paper investigates the influence of quality deterioration on software metrics by analyzing three software projects. To detect factors indicating a low evolvability, we focus on the relationships between the change in software metric values and refactoring tendencies. Refactoring after an organization change impacts the quality.

Nowadays, malware is a serious threat to the Internet. Traditional signature-based malware detection method can be easily evaded by code obfuscation. Therefore, many researchers use the high-level structure of malware like function call graph, which is impacted less from the obfuscation, to find the malware variants. However, existing graph match methods rely on approximate calculation, which are inefficient and the accuracy cannot be effectively guaranteed. Inspired by the successful application of graph convolutional network in node classification and graph classification, we propose a novel malware similarity metric method based on graph convolutional network. We use graph convolutional network to compute the graph embedding vectors, and then we calculate the similarity metric of two graph based on the distance between two graph embedding vectors. Experimental results on the Kaggle dataset show that our method can applied to the graph based malware similarity metric method, and the accuracy of clustering application with our method reaches to 97% with high time efficiency.

It has been reported repeatedly that discriminative learning of distance metric boosts the pattern recognition performance. Although the ITML (Information Theoretic Metric Learning)-based methods enjoy an advantage that the Bregman projection framework can be applied for optimization of distance metric, a weak point of ITML-based methods is that the distance threshold for similarity/dissimilarity constraints must be determined manually, onto which the generalization performance is sensitive. In this paper, we present a new formulation of metric learning algorithm in which the distance threshold is optimized together. Since the optimization is still in the Bregman projection framework, the Dykstra algorithm can be applied for optimization. A nonlinear equation has to be solved to project the solution onto a half-space in each iteration. We have developed an efficient technique for projection onto a half-space. We empirically show that although the distance threshold is automatically tuned for the proposed metric learning algorithm, the accuracy of pattern recognition for the proposed algorithm is comparable, if not better, to the existing metric learning methods.

Rotation symmetric Boolean functions which are invariant under the action of cyclic group have been used in many different cryptosystems. This paper presents a new construction of balanced odd-variable rotation symmetric Boolean functions with optimum algebraic immunity. It is checked that, at least for some small variables, such functions have very good behavior against fast algebraic attacks. Compared with some known rotation symmetric Boolean functions with optimum algebraic immunity, the new construction has really better nonlinearity. Further, the algebraic degree of the constructed functions is also high enough.

Biometric authentication, namely using biometric features for authentication is gaining popularity in recent years as further modalities, such as fingerprint, iris, face, voice, gait, and others are exploited. We explore the effectiveness of three simple Electroencephalography (EEG) related biometric authentication tasks, namely resting, thinking about a picture, and moving a single finger. We present details of the data processing steps we exploit for authentication, including extracting features from the frequency power spectrum and MFCC, and training a multilayer perceptron classifier for authentication. For evaluation purposes, we record an EEG dataset of 27 test subjects. We use three setups, baseline, task-agnostic, and task-specific, to investigate whether person-specific features can be detected across different tasks for authentication. We further evaluate, whether different tasks can be distinguished. Our results suggest that tasks are distinguishable, as well as that our authentication approach can work both exploiting features from a specific, fixed, task as well as using features across different tasks.

This paper proposes a low-profile unidirectional supergain antenna applicable to wireless communication devices such as mobile terminals, the Internet of Things and so on. The antennas used for such systems are required to be not only electrically low-profile but also unsusceptible to surrounding objects such as human body and/or electrical equipment. The proposed antenna achieves both requirements due to its supergain property using planar elements and a closely placed planar reflector. The primary antenna is an asymmetric dipole type, and consists of a monopole element mounted on an edge of a rectangular conducting plane. Both elements are placed on a dielectric substrate backed by the planar reflector. It is numerically and experimentally shown that the supergain property is achieved by optimizing the geometrical parameters of the antenna. It is also shown that the impedance characteristics can be successfully adjusted by changing the lengths of the ground plane element and the monopole element. Thus, no additional impedance matching circuit is necessary. Furthermore, it is shown that surrounding objects have insignificant impact on the antenna performance.

This article proposes a method to improve the performance of Message Exchange Network (MeNW) which is modern data distribution network incorporating the search and obtain mechanism. We explore an idea of shortcut creation which can be widely adapted to a topological structure of various network applications. We first define a metric called Efficiency Coefficient (EC) that quantifies the performance enhancement by a shortcut creation. In the design of EC, we consider not only diameter of the topology but also the amount of messages exchanged in the network. Then, we theoretically analyze the creation of a single optimal shortcut in the system based on the performance metric. The simulation results show that the shortcut by the proposed method reduces the network resource to further 30% compared with conventional approaches.

Network embedding has attracted an increasing amount of attention in recent years due to its wide-ranging applications in graph mining tasks such as vertex classification, community detection, and network visualization. Network embedding is an important method to learn low-dimensional representations of vertices in networks, aiming to capture and preserve the network structure. Almost all the existing network embedding methods adopt the so-called Skip-gram model in Word2vec. However, as a bag-of-words model, the skip-gram model mainly utilized the local structure information. The lack of information metrics for vertices in global network leads to the mix of vertices with different labels in the new embedding space. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a Network Representation Learning method with Deep Metric Learning, namely DML-NRL. By setting the initialized anchor vertices and adding the similarity measure in the training progress, the distance information between different labels of vertices in the network is integrated into the vertex representation, which improves the accuracy of network embedding algorithm effectively. We compare our method with baselines by applying them to the tasks of multi-label classification and data visualization of vertices. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the baselines in all three datasets, and the method has proved to be effective and robust.

We propose to discover approximate primary functional dependency (aPFD) for web tables, which focus on the determination relationship between primary attributes and non-primary attributes and are more helpful for entity column detection and topic discovery on web tables. Based on association rules and information theory, we propose metrics Conf and InfoGain to evaluate PFDs. By quantifying PFDs' strength and designing pruning strategies to eliminate false positives, our method could select minimal non-trivial approximate PFD effectively and are scalable to large tables. The comprehensive experimental results on real web datasets show that our method significantly outperforms previous work in both effectiveness and efficiency.

In this letter, a construction of asymmetric Gaussian integer zero correlation zone (ZCZ) sequence sets is presented based on interleaving and filtering. The proposed approach can provide optimal or almost optimal single Gaussian integer ZCZ sequence sets. In addition, arbitrary two sequences from different sets have inter-set zero cross-correlation zone (ZCCZ). The resultant sequence sets can be used in the multi-cell QS-CDMA system to reduce the inter-cell interference and increase the transmission data.

When time difference of arrival (TDOA)-based bearing measurements are used in passive triangulation, the accuracy of localization depends on the geometric relationship between the emitter and the sensors. In particular, the localization accuracy varies with the geometric conditions in TDOA-based direction finding (DF) for bearing measurement and lines of bearing (LOBs) crossing for triangulation. To obtain an accurate estimate in passive triangulation using TDOA-based bearing measurements, we shall use these bearings selectively by considering geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) between the emitter and the sensors. To achieve this goal, we first define two GDOPs related to TDOA-based DF and LOBs crossing geometries, and then propose a new hybrid GDOP by combining these GDOPs for a better selection of bearings. Subsequently, two bearings with the lowest hybrid GDOP condition are chosen as the inputs to a triangulation localization algorithm. In simulations, the proposed method shows its enhancement to the localization accuracy.

Pose estimation is a basic requirement for the autonomous behavior of robots. In this article we present a robust and fast visual odometry method to obtain camera poses by using RGB-D images. We first propose a motion estimation method based on sparse geometric constraint and derive the analytic Jacobian of the geometric cost function to improve the convergence performance, then we use our motion estimation method to replace the tracking thread in ORB-SLAM for improving its runtime performance. Experimental results show that our method is twice faster than ORB-SLAM while keeping the similar accuracy.

Software defect prediction (SDP) plays a significant part in allocating testing resources reasonably, reducing testing costs, and ensuring software quality. One of the most widely used algorithms of SDP models is Naive Bayes (NB) because of its simplicity, effectiveness and robustness. In NB, when a data set has continuous or numeric attributes, they are generally assumed to follow normal distributions and incorporate the probability density function of normal distribution into their conditional probabilities estimates. However, after conducting a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, we find that the 21 main software metrics follow non-normal distribution at the 5% significance level. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved NB approach, which estimates the conditional probabilities of NB with kernel density estimation of training data sets, to help improve the prediction accuracy of NB for SDP. To evaluate the proposed method, we carry out experiments on 34 software releases obtained from 10 open source projects provided by PROMISE repository. Four well-known classification algorithms are included for comparison, namely Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression and Random Tree. The obtained results show that this new method is more successful than the four well-known classification algorithms in the most software releases.

In the model of no-dictionary searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) schemes, the client does not need to keep the list of keywords W. In this paper, we first show a generic method to transform any passively secure SSE scheme to a no-dictionary SSE scheme such that the client can verify search results even if w ∉ W. In particular, it takes only O(1) time for the server to prove that w ∉ W. We next present a no-dictionary SSE scheme such that the client can hide even the search pattern from the server.

We propose a method for accurately identifying people using temporal and spatial changes in local movements measured from video sequences of body sway. Existing methods identify people using gait features that mainly represent the large swinging of the limbs. The use of gait features introduces a problem in that the identification performance decreases when people stop walking and maintain an upright posture. To extract informative features, our method measures small swings of the body, referred to as body sway. We extract the power spectral density as a feature from local body sway movements by dividing the body into regions. To evaluate the identification performance using our method, we collected three original video datasets of body sway sequences. The first dataset contained a large number of participants in an upright posture. The second dataset included variation over the long term. The third dataset represented body sway in different postures. The results on the datasets confirmed that our method using local movements measured from body sway can extract informative features for identification.