Lazy-task creation is an efficient method of overcoming the overhead of the grain-size problem in parallel computing. Work stealing is an effective load balancing strategy for parallel computing. In this paper, we present dynamic work stealing strategies in a lazy-task creation technique for efficient fine-grain task scheduling. The basic idea is to control load balancing granularity depending on the number of task parents in a stack. The dynamic-length strategy of work stealing uses run-time information, which is information on the load of the victim, to determine the number of tasks that a thief is allowed to steal. We compare it with the bottommost first work stealing strategy used in StackThread/MP, and the fixed-length strategy of work stealing, where a thief requests to steal a fixed number of tasks, as well as other multithreaded frameworks such as Cilk and OpenMP task implementations. The experiments show that the dynamic-length strategy of work stealing performs well in irregular workloads such as in UTS benchmarks, as well as in regular workloads such as Fibonacci, Strassen's matrix multiplication, FFT, and Sparse-LU factorization. The dynamic-length strategy works better than the fixed-length strategy because it is more flexible than the latter; this strategy can avoid load imbalance due to overstealing.

We propose and implement a cloud architecture of virtual Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) to improve the usability of TPMs. In this architecture, virtual TPMs can be obtained from the TPM cloud on demand. Hence, the TPM functionality is available for applications that do not have physical TPMs in their local platforms. Moreover, the TPM cloud allows users to access their keys and data in the same virtual TPM even if they move to untrusted platforms. The TPM cloud is easy to access for applications in different languages since cloud computing delivers services in standard protocols. The functionality of the TPM cloud is demonstrated by applying it to implement the Needham-Schroeder public-key protocol for web authentications, such that the strong security provided by TPMs is integrated into high level applications. The chain of trust based on the TPM cloud is discussed and the security properties of the virtual TPMs in the cloud is analyzed.

The mining of a complete set of frequent subgraphs from labeled graph data has been studied extensively. Furthermore, much attention has recently been paid to frequent pattern mining from graph sequences (dynamic graphs or evolving graphs). In this paper, we define a novel subgraph subsequence class called an “induced subgraph subsequence” to enable the efficient mining of a complete set of frequent patterns from graph sequences containing large graphs and long sequences. We also propose an efficient method for mining frequent patterns, called “FRISSs (Frequent Relevant, and Induced Subgraph Subsequences)”, from graph sequences. The fundamental performance of the method is evaluated using artificial datasets, and its practicality is confirmed through experiments using a real-world dataset.

This paper describes on-line recognition of handwritten Lao characters by adopting Markov random field (MRF). The character set to recognize includes consonants, vowels and tone marks, 52 characters in total. It extracts feature points along the pen-tip trace from pen-down to pen-up, and then sets each feature point from an input pattern as a site and each state from a character class as a label. It recognizes an input pattern by using a linear-chain MRF model to assign labels to the sites of the input pattern. It employs the coordinates of feature points as unary features and the transitions of the coordinates between the neighboring feature points as binary features. An evaluation on the Lao character pattern database demonstrates the robustness of our proposed method with recognition rate of 92.41% and respectable recognition time of less than a second per character.

Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are the most popular acoustic features used in automatic speech recognition (ASR), mainly because the coefficients capture the most useful information of the speech and fit well with the assumptions used in hidden Markov models. As is well known, MFCCs already employ several principles which have known counterparts in the peripheral properties of human hearing: decoupling across frequency, mel-warping of the frequency axis, log-compression of energy, etc. It is natural to introduce more mechanisms in the auditory periphery to improve the noise robustness of MFCC. In this paper, a k-nearest neighbors based frequency masking filter is proposed to reduce the audibility of spectra valleys which are sensitive to noise. Besides, Moore and Glasberg's critical band equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB) expression is utilized to determine the filter bandwidth. Furthermore, a new bandpass infinite impulse response (IIR) filter is proposed to imitate the temporal masking phenomenon of the human auditory system. These three auditory perceptual mechanisms are combined with the standard MFCC algorithm in order to investigate their effects on ASR performance, and a revised MFCC extraction scheme is presented. Recognition performances with the standard MFCC, RASTA perceptual linear prediction (RASTA-PLP) and the proposed feature extraction scheme are evaluated on a medium-vocabulary isolated-word recognition task and a more complex large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) task. Experimental results show that consistent robustness against background noise is achieved on these two tasks, and the proposed method outperforms both the standard MFCC and RASTA-PLP.

This paper proposes a method for recognizing hand-shapes by using multi-viewpoint image sets. The recognition of a hand-shape is a difficult problem, as appearance of the hand changes largely depending on viewpoint, illumination conditions and individual characteristics. To overcome this problem, we apply the Kernel Orthogonal Mutual Subspace Method (KOMSM) to shift-invariance features obtained from multi-viewpoint images of a hand. When applying KOMSM to hand recognition with a lot of learning images from each class, it is necessary to consider how to run the KOMSM with heavy computational cost due to the kernel trick technique. We propose a new method that can drastically reduce the computational cost of KOMSM by adopting centroids and the number of images belonging to the centroids, which are obtained by using k-means clustering. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated through evaluation experiments using multi-viewpoint image sets of 30 classes of hand-shapes.

Shape is one of the primary low-level image features in content-based image retrieval. In this paper we propose a new shape description method that consists of a rotationally invariant angular radial transform descriptor (IARTD). The IARTD is a feature vector that combines the magnitude and aligned phases of the angular radial transform (ART) coefficients. A phase correction scheme is employed to produce the aligned phase so that the IARTD is invariant to rotation. The distance between two IARTDs is defined by combining differences in the magnitudes and aligned phases. In an experiment using the MPEG-7 shape dataset, the proposed method outperforms existing methods; the average BEP of the proposed method is 57.69%, while the average BEPs of the invariant Zernike moments descriptor and the traditional ART are 41.64% and 36.51%, respectively.

We present a fast voting scheme for localizing circular objects among clutter and occlusion. Typical solutions for the problem are based on Hough transform that evaluates an instance of circle by counting the number of edge points along its boundary. The evaluated value is proportional to radius, making the normalization with respect to the factor necessary for detecting circles with different radii. By representing circle with a number of sampled points, we get rid of the step. To evaluate an instance then involves obtaining the same number of edge points, each close to a sampled point in both spatial position and orientation. The closeness is measured by compatibility function, where a truncating operation is used to suppress noise and deal with occlusion. To evaluate all instances of circle is fulfilled by letting edge point vote in a maximizing way such that any instance possesses a set of maximally compatible edge points. The voting process is further separated into the radius-independent and -dependent parts. The time-consuming independent part can be shared by different radii and outputs the sparse matrices. The radius-dependent part shifts these sparse matrices according to the radius. We present precision-recall curves showing that the proposed approach outperforms the solutions based on Hough transform, at the same time, achieves the comparable time complexity as algorithm of Hough transform using 2D accumulator array.

This paper presents a system for automatic generation of dancing animation that is synchronized with a piece of music by re-using motion capture data. Basically, the dancing motion is synthesized according to the rhythm and intensity features of music. For this purpose, we propose a novel meta motion graph structure to embed the necessary features including both rhythm and intensity, which is constructed on the motion capture database beforehand. In this paper, we consider two scenarios for non-streaming music and streaming music, where global search and local search are required respectively. In the case of the former, once a piece of music is input, the efficient dynamic programming algorithm can be employed to globally search a best path in the meta motion graph, where an objective function is properly designed by measuring the quality of beat synchronization, intensity matching, and motion smoothness. In the case of the latter, the input music is stored in a buffer in a streaming mode, then an efficient search method is presented for a certain amount of music data (called a segment) in the buffer with the same objective function, resulting in a segment-based search approach. For streaming applications, we define an additional property in the above meta motion graph to deal with the unpredictable future music, which guarantees that there is some motion to match the unknown remaining music. A user study with totally 60 subjects demonstrates that our system outperforms the stat-of-the-art techniques in both scenarios. Furthermore, our system improves the synthesis speed greatly (maximal speedup is more than 500 times), which is essential for mobile applications. We have implemented our system on commercially available smart phones and confirmed that it works well on these mobile phones.

We have proposed a novel geometric model of the eye in order to avoid the problems faced while using the conventional spherical model of the cornea for three dimensional (3D) model-based gaze estimation. The proposed model models the eye, including the boundary region of the cornea, as a general surface of revolution about the optical axis of the eye. Furthermore, a method for calculating the point of gaze (POG) on the basis of our model has been proposed. A prototype system for estimating the POG was developed using this method. The average root mean square errors (RMSEs) of the proposed method were experimentally found to be smaller than those of the gaze estimation method that is based on a spherical model of the cornea.

While phrase-based statistical machine translation systems prefer to translate with longer phrases, this may cause errors in a free word order language, such as Japanese, in which the order of the arguments of the predicates is not solely determined by the predicates and the arguments can be placed quite freely in the text. In this paper, we propose to reorder the arguments but not the predicates in Japanese using a dependency structure as a kind of reordering. Instead of a single deterministically given permutation, we generate multiple reordered phrases for each sentence and translate them independently. Then we apply a re-ranking method using a discriminative approach by Ranking Support Vector Machines (SVM) to re-score the multiple reordered phrase translations. In our experiment with the travel domain corpus BTEC, we gain a 1.22% BLEU score improvement when only 1-best is used for re-ranking and 4.12% BLEU score improvement when n-best is used for Japanese-English translation.

In Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs), private L2 caches have potential benefits in future CMPs, e.g. small access latency, performance isolation, tile-friendly architecture and simple low bandwidth on-chip interconnect. But the major weakness of private cache is the higher cache miss rate caused by small private cache capacity. To deal with this problem, private caches can share capacity through spilling replaced blocks to other private caches. However, indiscriminate spilling can make capacity problem worse and influence performance negatively. This letter proposes throttling capacity sharing (TCS) for effective capacity sharing in private L2 caches. TCS determines whether to spill a replaced block by predicting reuse possibility, based on life time and reuse time. In our performance evaluation, TCS improves weighted speedup by 48.79%, 6.37% and 5.44% compared to non-spilling, Cooperative Caching with best spill probability (CC) and Dynamic Spill-Receive (DSR), respectively.

An active learning method, called Two-stage Active learning algorithm (TAL), is developed for software defect prediction. Combining the clustering and support vector machine techniques, this method improves the performance of the predictor with less labeling effort. Experiments validate its effectiveness.

In 2009, Wang et al. proposed an efficient and secure dynamic ID-based remote user authentication scheme based on the one-way secure hash function. This letter demonstrates that Wang et al.'s scheme is still vulnerable to impersonation attacks.

A user identity anonymity is an important property for roaming services. In 2011, Kang et al. proposed an improved user authentication scheme that guarantees user anonymity in wireless communications. This letter shows that Kang et al.'s improved scheme still cannot provide user anonymity as they claimed.

Hu, Huang and Fan proposed a fully secure hierarchical identity-based encryption (IEICE Trans. Fundamentals, Vol.E92-A, No.6, pp.1494–1499, 2009) that achieves constant size of ciphertext and tight security reduction. Unfortunately, Park and Lee (IEICE Trans. Fundamentals, Vol.E93-A, No.6, pp.1269–1272, 2010) found that the security proof of Hu et al.'s scheme is incorrect; that is, the security of Hu et al.'s scheme cannot be reduced to their claimed q-ABDHE assumption. However, it is unclear whether Hu et al.'s scheme is still secure. In this letter, we provide an attack to show that the scheme is not secure against the chosen-plaintext attack.

We propose a new security model based on MLS Policy to achieve a better security performance on confidentiality, integrity and availability. First, it realizes a combination of BLP model and Biba model through a two-dimensional independent adjustment of integrity and confidentiality. And, the subject's access range is adjusted dynamically according to the security label of related objects and the subject's access history. Second, the security level of the trusted subject is extended to writing and reading privilege range respectively, following the principle of least privilege. Third, it adjusts the objects' security levels after adding confidential information to prevent the information disclosure. Fourth, it uses application-oriented logic to protect specific applications to avoid the degradation of security levels. Thus, it can ensure certain applications operate smoothly. Lastly, examples are presented to show the effectiveness and usability of the proposed model.

In this letter, we analyze the influence of motion and out-of-focus blur on both frequency spectrum and cepstrum of an iris image. Based on their characteristics, we define two new discriminative blur features represented by Energy Spectral Density Distribution (ESDD) and Singular Cepstrum Histogram (SCH). To merge the two features for blur detection, a merging kernel which is a linear combination of two kernels is proposed when employing Support Vector Machine. Extensive experiments demonstrate the validity of our method by showing the improved blur detection performance on both synthetic and real datasets.

In this letter, a novel imaging method to reduce the hand shake blur of a cell phone camera without using frame memory is proposed. The method improves the captured image in real time through the use of two additional preview images whose parameters can be calculated in advance and stored in a look-up table. The method does not require frame memory, and thus it can significantly reduce the chip size. The scheme is suitable for integration into a low-cost image sensor of a cell phone camera.

In this paper, we present a new biometric verification system. The proposed system employs a novel biometric hashing scheme that uses our proposed quantization method. The proposed quantization method is based on error-correcting output codes which are used for classification problems in the literature. We improve the performance of the random projection based biometric hashing scheme proposed by Ngo et al. in the literature [5]. We evaluate the performance of the novel biometric hashing scheme with two use case scenarios including the case where an attacker steals the secret key of a legitimate user. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme.

This paper proposes a method of accurately detecting the boundary of narrow stripes, such as lane markings, by employing gradient cues of edge points. Using gradient direction cues, the edge points at the two sides of the boundary of stripes are classified into two groups before the Hough transform is applied to extract the boundary lines. The experiments show that the proposed method improves significantly the performance in terms of the accuracy of boundary detection of narrow stripes over the conventional approaches without edge point grouping.