Despite Siamese trackers attracting much attention due to their scalability and efficiency in recent years, researchers have ignored the background appearance, which leads to their inapplicability in recognizing arbitrary target objects with various variations, especially in complex scenarios with background clutter and distractors. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective Siamese tracker, where the shifted windows multi-head self-attention is produced to learn the characteristics of a specific given target object for visual tracking. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed tracker, we use the Swin Transformer as the backbone network and introduced an auxiliary feature enhancement network. Extensive experimental results on two evaluation datasets demonstrate that the proposed tracker outperforms other baselines.

In recent years, the market size for internet advertising has been increasing with the expansion of the Internet. Among the internet advertising technologies, affiliate services, which are a performance-based service, use cookies to track and measure the performance of affiliates. However, for the purpose of safeguarding personal information, cookies tend to be regulated, which leads to concerns over whether normal tracking by cookies works as intended. Therefore, in this study, the recent problems from the perspectives of affiliates, affiliate service providers, and advertisers are extracted, and a framework of cookie-independent measuring engagement method using access logs is proposed and open issues are discussed for future affiliate services.

Autonomous driving technology is expected to be applied to various applications with unmanned vehicles (UVs), such as small delivery vehicles for office supplies and smart wheelchairs. UV remote control by a cloud server (CS) would achieve cost-effective applications with a large number of UVs. In general, dead time in real-time feedback control reduces the control accuracy. On remote path tracking control by the CS, UV control accuracy deteriorates due to transmission delay and jitter through the Internet. Digital twin computing (DTC) and jitter buffer are effective to solve this problem. In our previous study, we clarified effectiveness of them in UV remote control by CS. The jitter buffer absorbs the transmission delay jitter of control signals. This is effective to achieve accurate UV remote control. Adaptive buffering time optimization according to real-time transmission characteristics is necessary to achieve more accurate UV control in CS-based remote control system with DTC and jitter buffer. In this study, we proposed a method for the adaptive optimization according to real-time transmission delay characteristics. To quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of the method, we created a UV remote control simulator of the control system. The results of simulations quantitatively clarify that the adaptive optimization by the proposed method improves the UV control accuracy.

The total number of solar power-producing facilities whose Feed-in Tariff (FIT) Program-based ten-year contracts will expire by 2023 is expected to reach approximately 1.65 million in Japan. If the facilities that produce or consume renewable energy would increase to reach a large number, e.g., two million, blockchain would not be capable of processing all the transactions. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based electricity-tracking platform for renewable energy, called ‘ZGridBC,’ which consists of mutually cooperative two novel decentralized schemes to solve scalability, storage cost, and privacy issues at the same time. One is the electricity production resource management, which is an efficient data management scheme that manages electricity production resources (EPRs) on the blockchain by using UTXO tokens extended to two-dimension (period and electricity amount) to prevent double-spending. The other is the electricity-tracking proof, which is a massive data aggregation scheme that significantly reduces the amount of data managed on the blockchain by using zero-knowledge proof (ZKP). Thereafter, we illustrate the architecture of ZGridBC, consider its scalability, security, and privacy, and illustrate the implementation of ZGridBC. Finally, we evaluate the scalability of ZGridBC, which handles two million electricity facilities with far less cost per environmental value compared with the price of the environmental value proposed by METI (=0.3 yen/kWh).

One key to implementing the smart city is letting the smart space know where and how many people are. The visual method is a scheme to recognize people with high accuracy, but concerns arise regarding potential privacy leakage and user nonacceptance. Besides, being functional in a limited environment in an emergency should also be considered. We propose a real-time people counting and tracking system based on a millimeter wave radar (mmWave) as an alternative to the optical solutions in a restaurant. The proposed method consists of four main procedures. First, capture the point cloud of obstacles and generate them using a low-cost, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mmWave radar. Next, cluster the individual point with similar properties. Then the same people in sequential frames would be associated with the tracking algorithm. Finally, the estimated people would be counted, tracked, and shown in the next frame. The experiment results show that our proposed system provided a median position error of 0.17 m and counting accuracy of 83.5% for ten insiders in various scenarios in an actual restaurant environment. In addition, the real-time estimation and visualization of people's numbers and positions show a potential capability to help prevent crowds during the pandemic of Covid-19 and analyze customer visitation patterns for efficient management and target marketing.

Automatic continuous tracking of objects involved in a construction project is required for such tasks as productivity assessment, unsafe behavior recognition, and progress monitoring. Many computer-vision-based tracking approaches have been investigated and successfully tested on construction sites; however, their practical applications are hindered by the tracking accuracy limited by the dynamic, complex nature of construction sites (i.e. clutter with background, occlusion, varying scale and pose). To achieve better tracking performance, a novel deep-learning-based tracking approach called the Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks (MD-CNN) is proposed and investigated. The proposed approach consists of two key stages: 1) multi-domain representation of learning; and 2) online visual tracking. To evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of this approach, it is applied to a metro project in Wuhan China, and the results demonstrate good tracking performance in construction scenarios with complex background. The average distance error and F-measure for the MDNet are 7.64 pixels and 67, respectively. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can be used by site managers to monitor and track workers for hazard prevention in construction sites.

Visual object tracking is always a challenging task in computer vision. During the tracking, the shape and appearance of the target may change greatly, and because of the lack of sufficient training samples, most of the online learning tracking algorithms will have performance bottlenecks. In this paper, an improved real-time algorithm based on deep learning features is proposed, which combines multi-feature fusion, multi-scale estimation, adaptive updating of target model and re-detection after target loss. The effectiveness and advantages of the proposed algorithm are proved by a large number of comparative experiments with other excellent algorithms on large benchmark datasets.

This study explores significant eye-gaze features that can be used to estimate subjective difficulty while reading educational comics. Educational comics have grown rapidly as a promising way to teach difficult topics using illustrations and texts. However, comics include a variety of information on one page, so automatically detecting learners' states such as subjective difficulty is difficult with approaches such as system log-based detection, which is common in the Learning Analytics field. In order to solve this problem, this study focused on 28 eye-gaze features, including the proposal of three new features called “Variance in Gaze Convergence,” “Movement between Panels,” and “Movement between Tiles” to estimate two degrees of subjective difficulty. We then ran an experiment in a simulated environment using Virtual Reality (VR) to accurately collect gaze information. We extracted features in two unit levels, page- and panel-units, and evaluated the accuracy with each pattern in user-dependent and user-independent settings, respectively. Our proposed features achieved an average F1 classification-score of 0.721 and 0.742 in user-dependent and user-independent models at panel unit levels, respectively, trained by a Support Vector Machine (SVM).

This paper refers to the optimal voltage pair, which minimizes the energy consumption of LSI circuits under a target delay constraint, as a Minimum Energy Point (MEP). This paper proposes an approximation-based implementation method for an MEP tracking system over a wide voltage region. This paper focuses on the MEP characteristics that the energy loss is sufficiently small even though the voltage point changes near the MEP. For example, the energy loss is less than 5% even though the estimated MEP differs by a few tens of millivolts in comparison with the actual MEP. Therefore, the complexity for determining the MEP is relaxed by approximating complex operations such as the logarithmic or the exponential functions in the MEP tracking algorithm, which leads to hardware-/software-efficient implementation. When the MEP tracking algorithm is implemented in software, the MEP estimation time is reduced from 1ms to 13µs by the proposed approximation. When implemented in hardware, the proposed method can reduce the area of an MEP estimation circuit to a quarter. Measurement results of a 32-bit RISC-V processor fabricated in a 65-nm SOTB process technology show that the energy loss introduced by the proposed approximation is less than 2% in comparison with the MEP operation. Furthermore, we show that the MEP can be tracked within about 45 microseconds by the proposed MEP tracking system.

This paper considers tracking of a non-cooperative emitter based on a single sensor. To this end, the direct target motion analysis (DTMA) approach, where the target state is straightforwardly achieved from the received signal, is exploited. In order to achieve observability, the sensor has to perform a maneuver relative to the emitter. By suitably building an approximated likelihood function, the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), which is able to work under high nonlinearity of the measurement model, is adopted to recursively estimate the target state. Besides, the posterior Cramér-Rao bound (PCRB) of DTMA, which can be used as performance benchmark, is also achieved. The effectiveness of proposed method is verified via simulation experiments.

With the rapid deployment of the Internet of Things, where various devices are connected to communication networks, remote driving applications for Unmanned Vehicles (UVs) are attracting attention. In addition to automobiles, autonomous driving technology is expected to be applied to various types of equipment, such as small vehicles equipped with surveillance cameras to monitor building internally and externally, autonomous vehicles that deliver office supplies, and wheelchairs. When a UV is remotely controlled, the control accuracy deteriorates due to transmission delay and jitter. The accuracy must be kept high to realize UV control system by a cloud server. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of Digital Twin Computing (DTC) for path tracking control of a UV. We show the results of simulations that use transmission delay values measured on the Internet with some cloud servers. Through the results, we quantitatively clarify that application of DTC improves control accuracy on path tracking control. We also clarify that application of jitter buffer, which absorbs the transmission delay fluctuation, can further improve the accuracy.

Multiple human tracking is a fundamental problem in understanding the context of a visual scene. Although both accuracy and speed are required in real-world applications, recent tracking methods based on deep learning focus on accuracy and require a substantial amount of running time. We aim to improve tracking running speeds by performing human detections at certain frame intervals because it accounts for most of the running time. The question is how to maintain accuracy while skipping human detection. In this paper, we propose a method that interpolates the detection results by using an optical flow, which is based on the fact that someone's appearance does not change much between adjacent frames. To maintain the tracking accuracy, we introduce robust interest point detection within the human regions and a tracking termination metric defined by the distribution of the interest points. On the MOT17 and MOT20 datasets in the MOTChallenge, the proposed SDOF-Tracker achieved the best performance in terms of total running time while maintaining the MOTA metric. Our code is available at https://github.com/hitottiez/sdof-tracker.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems generally adopt hybrid precoding combining digital and analog precoder as an alternative to full digital precoding to reduce RF chains and energy consumption. In order to balance the relationship between spectral efficiency, energy efficiency and hardware complexity, the hybrid-connected system structure should be adopted, and then the solution process of hybrid precoding can be simplified by decomposing the total achievable rate into several sub-rates. However, the singular value decomposition (SVD) incurs high complexity in calculating the optimal unconstrained hybrid precoder for each sub-rate. Therefore, this paper proposes PAST, a low complexity hybrid precoding algorithm based on projection approximate subspace tracking. The optimal unconstrained hybrid precoder of each sub-rate is estimated with the PAST algorithm, which avoids the high complexity process of calculating the left and right singular vectors and singular value matrix by SVD. Simulations demonstrate that PAST matches the spectral efficiency of SVD-based hybrid precoding in full-connected (FC), hybrid-connected (HC) and sub-connected (SC) system structure. Moreover, the superiority of PAST over SVD-based hybrid precoding in terms of complexity and increases with the number of transmitting antennas.

Mobile phone systems continue to evolve from the 2nd generation, which began in the early 1990s, to the 5th generation, which is now in service. Along with this evolution, the power amplifier (PA) is also evolved. The characteristics required for PA are changing with each generation. In this paper, we will give an overview of the evolution of PAs from the 2nd generation mobile phones such as GSM (global system for mobile communications) to the 5th generation mobile phones that is often called NR (new radio), in particular, the circuit system. Specifically, the following five items will be described. (1) Ramp-up and ramp-down power control circuit corresponding to GSM, (2) Self-bias circuit technology for improving linearity that becomes important after W-CDMA (wideband code division multiple access), (3) Power mode switching methods for improving efficiency at low output power, (4) Power combining methods that have become important since LTE (long term evolution), and (5) Backoff efficiency improvement methods represented by ET (envelop tracking) and Doherty PA.

A new approach for multi-target tracking in an occlusion environment is presented. In pedestrian tracking using a video camera, pedestrains must be tracked accurately and continuously in the images. However, in a crowded environment, the conventional tracking algorithm has a problem in that tracks do not continue when pedestrians are hidden behind the foreground object. In this study, we propose a robust tracking method for occlusion that introduces a degeneration hypothesis that relaxes the track hypothesis which has one measurement to one track constraint. The proposed method relaxes the hypothesis that one measurement and multiple trajectories are associated based on the endpoints of the bounding box when the predicted trajectory is approaching, therefore the continuation of the tracking is improved using the measurement in the foreground. A numerical evaluation using MOT (Multiple Object Tracking) image data sets is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Feature representation is a key component of most visual tracking algorithms. It is difficult to deal with complex appearance changes with low-level hand-crafted features due to weak representation capacities of such features. In this paper, we propose a novel tracking algorithm through combining a joint dictionary pair learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN). We utilize CNN model that is trained on ImageNet-Vid to extract target features. The CNN includes three convolutional layers and two fully connected layers. A dictionary pair learning follows the second fully connected layer. The joint dictionary pair is learned upon extracted deep features by the trained CNN model. The temporal variations of target appearances are learned in the dictionary learning. We use the learned dictionaries to encode target candidates. A linear combination of atoms in the learned dictionary is used to represent target candidates. Extensive experimental evaluations on OTB2015 demonstrate the superior performances against SOTA trackers.

In many screen to camera communication (S2C) systems, the barcode preprocessing method is a significant prerequisite because barcodes may be deformed due to various environmental factors. However, previous studies have focused on barcode detection under static conditions; to date, few studies have been carried out on dynamic conditions (for example, the barcode video stream or the transmitter and receiver are moving). Therefore, we present a detection and tracking method for dynamic barcodes based on a Siamese network. The backbone of the CNN in the Siamese network is improved by SE-ResNet. The detection accuracy achieved 89.5%, which stands out from other classical detection networks. The EAO reaches 0.384, which is better than previous tracking methods. It is also superior to other methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. The SE-ResNet in this paper improved the EAO by 1.3% compared with ResNet in SiamMask. Also, our method is not only applicable to static barcodes but also allows real-time tracking and segmentation of barcodes captured in dynamic situations.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have been extensively studied in recent years to improve the safety and efficiency of transportation. The use of a radar system to enable the ITSs monitor the environment is robust to weather conditions and is less invasive to user privacy. Moreover, equipping the roadside units (RSUs) with radar modules has been deemed an economical and efficient option for ITS operators. However, because the detection and tracking parameters can significantly influence the radar system performance and the best parameters for different scenarios are different, the selection of appropriate parameters for the radar systems is critical. In this study, we investigated radar parameter selection and consequently proposes a parameter selection approach capable of automatically choosing the appropriate detection and tracking parameters for radar systems. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method realizes appropriate selection of parameters, thereby significantly improving the detection and tracking performance of radar systems.

In recent years, the development of visual tracking is getting better and better, but some methods cannot overcome the problem of low accuracy and success rate of tracking. Although there are some trackers will be more accurate, they will cost more time. In order to solve the problem, we propose a reinforced tracker based on Hierarchical Convolutional Features (HCF for short). HOG, color-naming and grayscale features are used with different weights to supplement the convolution features, which can enhance the tracking robustness. At the same time, we improved the model update strategy to save the time costs. This tracker is called RHCF and the code is published on https://github.com/z15846/RHCF. Experiments on the OTB2013 dataset show that our tracker can validly achieve the promotion of the accuracy and success rate.

High frame rate and ultra-low delay vision system, which can finish reading and processing of 1000fps sequence within 1ms/frame, draws increasing attention in the field of robotics that requires immediate feedback from image process core. Meanwhile, tracking task plays an important role in many computer vision applications. Among various tracking algorithms, Lucas Kanade (LK)-based template tracking, which tracks targets with high accuracy over the sub-pixel level, is one of the keys for robotic applications, such as factory automation (FA). However, the substantial spatial iterative processing and complex computation in the LK algorithm, make it difficult to achieve a high frame rate and ultra-low delay tracking with limited resources. Aiming at an LK-based template tracking system that reads and processes 1000fps sequences within 1ms/frame with small resource costs, this paper proposes: 1) High temporal resolution-based temporal iterative tracking, which maps the spatial iterations into the temporal domain, efficiently reduces resource cost and delay caused by spatial iterative processing. 2) Label scanner-based multi-stream spatial processing, which maps the local spatial processing into the labeled input pixel stream and aggregates them with a label scanner, makes the local spatial processing in the LK algorithm possible be implemented with a small resource cost. Algorithm evaluation shows that the proposed temporal iterative tracking performs dynamic tracking, which tracks object with coarse accuracy when it's moving fast and achieves higher accuracy when it slows down. Hardware evaluation shows that the proposed label scanner-based multi-stream architecture makes the system implemented on FPGA (zcu102) with resource cost less than 20%, and the designed tracking system supports to read and process 1000fps sequence within 1ms/frame.