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In crowdsourcing, human workers are employed to tackle problems that are traditionally difficult for computers (e.g., data cleaning, missing value filling, and sentiment analysis). In this paper, we study the effective use of crowdsourcing in filling missing values in a given relation (e.g., a table containing different attributes of celebrity stars, such as nationality and age). A task given to a worker typically consists of questions about the missing attribute values (e.g., What is the age of Jet Li?). Although this problem has been studied before, existing work often treats related attributes independently, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we present T-Crowd, which is a crowdsourcing system that considers attribute relationships. Particularly, T-Crowd integrates each worker's answers on different attributes to effectively learn his/her trustworthiness and the true data values. The attribute relationship information is used to guide task allocation to workers. Our solution seamlessly supports categorical and continuous attributes. Our extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets show that T-Crowd outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving the quality of truth inference and reducing the monetary cost of crowdsourcing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the estimation problem for a class of nonlinear tunnel diode circuits with parameter perturbation. The dynamics of the nonlinear circuit is approximated by the Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy model with linear fractional parametric uncertainties. Considering the fuzzy filter with gain uncertainties, a filtering error system can be gotten naturally. The concentration of this paper lies in deriving the design conditions for the desired resilient filter such that the filtering error system preserves asymptotic stability as well as the $\boldsymbol {\mathcal {L}}_{\boldsymbol {\infty }}$ -norm of the transfer function from the external disturbance input to the filtering error output is below a specified bound. The filter design conditions for guaranteeing the prescribed peak-to-peak performance of the filtering error system are provided by a set of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, a simulation result is presented to illustrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed filtering design for the parameter-controlled tunnel diode circuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The occurrence of motion blur along with defocus blur is a common phenomena in natural images. Usually, these blurs are spatially varying in nature for any general image and estimation of one type of blur is affected by presence of other. In this paper, we propose a novel method to estimate the concurrent defocus and motion blurs in a single image. Unlike the recent methods, which perform well only on simulated conditions or in presence of single type of blur, proposed method works well for real images as well as for compressed images. In this paper, we consider only commonly associated motion and defocus blurs for analysis. Decoupling of motion and defocus blur provides a fundamental tool that can be used for various analysis and applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face analysis includes a variety of specific problems as face detection, person identification, gender and ethnicity recognition, just to name the most common ones; in the last two decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the challenging task of age estimation from faces, as witnessed by the high number of published papers. The explosion of the deep learning paradigm, that is determining a spectacular increasing of the performance, is in the public eye; consequently, the number of approaches based on deep learning is impressively growing and this also happened for age estimation. The exciting results obtained have been recently surveyed on almost all the specific face analysis problems; the only exception stands for age estimation, whose last survey dates back to 2010 and does not include any deep learning based approach to the problem. This paper provides an analysis of the deep methods proposed in the last six years; these are analysed from different points of view: the network architecture together with the learning procedure, the used datasets, data preprocessing and augmentation, and the exploitation of additional data coming from gender, race and face expression. The review is completed by discussing the results obtained on public datasets, so as the impact of different aspects on system performance, together with still open issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate sensor localization is a crucial requirement for the deployment of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) in a large variety of applications. However, the asynchronous clock, stratification effect and mobility characteristics of underwater environment make it challenging to realize accurate node localization for UASNs. This paper develops an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) aided localization solution for UASNs, subjected to asynchronous clock, stratification effect and mobility constraints in cyber channels. A hybrid architecture including surface buoys, AUVs, active and passive sensor nodes, is first presented to construct a cooperative location-aware network. Then, an iterative least squares estimator is developed for AUVs to capture the unknown water current parameters, through which the relationship between propagation delay and location estimation can be established. With the assistance of AUVs, two asynchronous localization algorithms are designed to estimate the locations of active and passive sensor nodes. Particularly, motion and ray compensation strategies are jointly employed to improve the localization accuracy. It is worth noticing that, the proposed localization algorithms incorporate the current field estimation into the localization process of UASNs, and more importantly, they can eliminate the influences of asynchronous clock, stratification effect and node mobility together. Moreover, performance analyses for the proposed localization solution are also presented. Finally, simulation and experimental results reveal that the node localization accuracy in this paper can be significantly improved as compared with the other works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An engineering change (EC) is an alteration made to a system that has been released following a system design process. EC propagation is a series of ECs occurring due to dependencies among components of a product. ECs can consume up to 50% of the overall engineering efforts during the development of a complex system. Therefore, EC propagation prediction received considerable attention in past decades as the product development industries started to suffer from the negative impacts of change propagation. This paper evaluates the current approaches to EC propagation prediction and presents a dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) approach to estimate change propagation risk (CPR) as well as a novel approach to estimate EC durations. Literature research shows that although some studies have used design structure matrices to estimate CPR and the total redesign duration (TRD) due to change propagation, an approach that allows iteration while accounting for the conjunction of all impacts has not been explored. This paper aims to fill the gaps for calculating CPR using DBN and evaluating change propagation paths from a Split-and task outcome logic, which accounts for the conjunction of all component relationships. This paper compares the proposed method results with the existing CPR and engineering change duration estimation methods using a real-world dataset from a U.S. Navy shipbuilding program. The results indicate that the CPR can be calculated using the proposed method without the shortcomings of the existing method and the accuracy for estimating engineering change durations is increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the problem of secure parameter estimation when an estimation algorithm is prone to causative attacks. Causative attacks, in general, target decision-making algorithms (e.g., inference or learning algorithm) to alter their decisions in specific scenarios (e.g., distort parameter estimates for specific ranges of the parameter of interest). Such attacks influence the decisions via tampering with the mechanisms through which an algorithm acquires the statistical model of the population about which it aims to form a decision. Such attacks are viable, for instance, by contaminating the historical or training data, or by compromising an expert who provides the statistical model. In the presence of causative attacks, inference algorithms operate under a distorted statistical model for the data samples. This paper introduces a notion of secure parameter estimation and formalizes a framework under which secure estimation can be formulated and analyzed. The central premise underlying the secure estimation framework is that forming secure estimates introduces a new dimension to the estimation objective, pertaining to detecting attacks and isolating the true model. Since detection and isolation decisions themselves are imperfect, their inclusion induces an inherent coupling between the desired secure estimation objective and the auxiliary detection and isolation decisions that need to be formed in conjunction with the estimates. This paper establishes the fundamental interplay among these decisions, and characterizes the general decision rules in closed-forms for any desired estimation cost function. Furthermore, to circumvent the computational complexity associated with growing parameter dimension or attack complexity, a scalable estimation algorithm is provided, which is shown to enjoy certain optimality guarantees. Finally, the theory developed is applied to secure parameter estimation in sensor networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of heterogeneous wideband sources, we propose a new adaptive space-frequency joint processing algorithm. The algorithm is implemented in the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) DOA framework, which is named as ASF-SBL algorithm in this paper. The traditional SBL-based DOA methods suffer from the problem of erroneous DOA estimation due to the structural mismatch between the invariant prior and the sparse coefficients. To solve this problem, the ASF-SBL algorithm employs a new space-frequency correlation prior model that can be adaptively changed to fit heterogeneous DOA scenarios. Specifically, nine alternative space-frequency structural patterns are constructed to represent the joint space-frequency characteristics of spatial sparse signals. By evaluating the space-frequency correlation of the sparse coefficients updated in each iteration under SBL framework, a suitable pattern is selected from the nine choices to determine the adaptive prior of each coefficient. This adaptive method leads to accurate DOA estimation in different wideband sources scenarios. In addition, we introduce a distributed processing method to extend the ASF-SBL algorithm to two-dimensional DOA estimation. This extension is achieved by decoupling the DOA estimation into two one-dimensional estimations. The decoupling avoids the problems of a huge redundant dictionary and excessive computational complexity caused by the combination of azimuth and elevation angles. Numerical simulations show that the ASF-SBL algorithm is superior to existing algorithms in DOA estimation of heterogeneous sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensor placement methods for field estimation based on Gaussian processes are proposed. Generally, sensor placement methods determine the appropriate placement positions by selecting them from predefined candidate positions. Many criteria for the selection have been proposed, with which the quality of the placements is evaluated with regard to the field at the candidate positions. This means that these sensor placement methods seek to find the positions that can estimate the field at the candidate positions accurately. In practical situations, however, the candidate sensor placement region can be different from the target region for field estimation. In this paper, to make sensor placement methods applicable to this situation, we propose two sensor placement methods based on the mean squared error and on conditional entropy that can be applied to cases in which the sensor placement region is arbitrarily restricted. After formulating the sensor placement problems, two approximate algorithms are derived: the greedy algorithm and the convex-relaxation-based algorithm. The application of the proposed methods to sound field estimation is also illustrated, and their effectiveness was confirmed through numerical experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key objective of multi-agent surveillance systems is to monitor a much larger region than the limited field-of-view (FoV) of any individual agent by successfully exploiting cooperation among multiple agents. Whenever either a centralized or a distributed approach is pursued, this goal cannot be achieved unless an appropriately designed fusion strategy is adopted. This paper presents a novel information fusion approach by considering for each agent a known limited, and possibly different, FoV. The proposed method, named Bayesian-operation InvaRiance on Difference-sets (BIRD) fusion, relies on Generalized Covariance Intersection (GCI) and exploits a general and exact decomposition of each multi-object posterior by partitioning the global FoV, i.e. the union of the FoVs of the fusing agents, into common and exclusive FoVs. It is shown how BIRD fusion can be used to perform multi-object estimation based on random finite sets on both a centralized and a distributed peer-to-peer sensor network. Simulation experiments on realistic multi-object tracking scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of BIRD fusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) makes predictions for the target domain data while manual annotations are only available in the source domain. Previous methods minimize the domain discrepancy neglecting the class information, which may lead to misalignment and poor generalization performance. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes contrastive adaptation network (CAN) that optimizes a new metric named Contrastive Domain Discrepancy explicitly modeling the intra-class domain discrepancy and the inter-class domain discrepancy. To optimize CAN, two technical issues need to be addressed: 1) the target labels are not available; and 2) the conventional mini-batch sampling is imbalanced. Thus we design an alternating update strategy to optimize both the target label estimations and the feature representations. Moreover, we develop class-aware sampling to enable more efficient and effective training. Our framework can be generally applied to the single-source and multi-source domain adaptation scenarios. In particular, to deal with multiple source domain data, we propose: 1) multi-source clustering ensemble which exploits the complementary knowledge of distinct source domains to make more accurate and robust target label estimations; and 2) boundary-sensitive alignment to make the decision boundary better fitted to the target. Experiments are conducted on three real-world benchmarks (i.e., Office-31 and VisDA-2017 for the single-source scenario, DomainNet for the multi-source scenario). All the results demonstrate that our CAN performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of each key component of our proposed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In man-made environments, most of the objects and structures are organized in the form of orthogonal and parallel planes. These planes can be approximated by an Atlanta world assumption, in which the normals of planes can be represented by Atlanta frames. The Atlanta world assumption has one vertical frame and multiple horizontal frames. Conventionally, given a set of inputs such as surface normals, the Atlanta frame estimation problem can be solved by a branch-and-bound (BnB) algorithm. However, the runtime of the BnB algorithm will increase greatly when the dimensionality (i.e., the number of horizontal frames) increases. In this paper, we estimate only the vertical direction, instead of all Atlanta frames at once. Accordingly, we propose a vertical direction estimation method by considering the relationship between the vertical frame and horizontal frames. Concretely, our approach employs a BnB algorithm to search the vertical direction, thereby guaranteeing global optimality without requiring prior knowledge of the number of Atlanta frames. In order to guarantee convergence, four novel bounds are investigated, by mapping a 3D hemisphere to a 2D region. We verify the feasibility of the proposed method using various challenging synthetic and real-world data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extremely large-scale multiple-input-multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is promising to meet the high rate requirements for future 6G. To realize efficient precoding, accurate channel state information is essential. Existing channel estimation algorithms with low pilot overhead heavily rely on the channel sparsity in the angular domain, which is achieved by the classical far-field planar-wavefront assumption. However, due to the non-negligible near-field spherical-wavefront property in XL-MIMO, this channel sparsity in the angular domain is not achievable. Therefore, existing far-field channel estimation schemes will suffer from severe performance loss. To address this problem, in this paper, we study the near-field channel estimation by exploiting the polar-domain sparsity. Specifically, unlike the classical angular-domain representation that only considers the angular information, we propose a polar-domain representation, which simultaneously accounts for both the angular and distance information. In this way, the near-field channel also exhibits sparsity in the polar domain, based on which, we propose on-grid and off-grid near-field XL-MIMO channel estimation schemes. Firstly, an on-grid polar-domain simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit (P-SOMP) algorithm is proposed to efficiently estimate the near-field channel. Furthermore, an off-grid polar-domain simultaneous iterative gridless weighted (P-SIGW) algorithm is proposed to improve the estimation accuracy. Finally, simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of our schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The society’s insatiable appetites for personal data are driving the emergence of data markets, allowing data consumers to launch customized queries over the datasets collected by a data broker from data owners. In this paper, we study how the data broker can maximize its cumulative revenue by posting reasonable prices for sequential queries. We thus propose a contextual dynamic pricing mechanism with the reserve price constraint, which features the properties of ellipsoid for efficient online optimization and can support linear and non-linear market value models with uncertainty. In particular, under low uncertainty, the proposed pricing mechanism attains a worst-case cumulative regret logarithmic in the number of queries. We further extend our approach to support other similar application scenarios, including hospitality service and online advertising, and extensively evaluate all three use cases over MovieLens 20M dataset, Airbnb listings in U.S. major cities, and Avazu mobile ad click dataset, respectively. The analysis and evaluation results reveal that: (1) our pricing mechanism incurs low practical regret, while the latency and memory overhead incurred is low enough for online applications; and (2) the existence of reserve price can mitigate the cold-start problem in a posted price mechanism, thereby reducing the cumulative regret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The available road grade information makes a significant impact on improving the quality of vehicle control. In order to solve the limited application scenario and insufficient accuracy of current road grade estimation methods, this paper presents a novel model-based road grade estimation approach. First, a Quaternion Unscented Kalman Filter (QUKF) using the three-axle angular velocities and three-axle accelerations from a low-cost Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and the vehicle speed from CAN bus is designed to estimate the pitch angle of the vehicle. In particular, the measurement noise of UKF is analyzed by integrating Allan variance method. Second, a simplified vehicle-road model is derived to represent the road grade with the estimated pitch angle and longitudinal acceleration. Then, the performance of the proposed algorithm is tested by co-simulation of MATLAB/Simulink and CarSim, which indicates that the error rate of estimation is within 4%. Finally, the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed method implemented in the embedded prototype are verified in experiments conducted on standard slopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the problem of joint direction of departure (DoD) and direction of arrival (DoA) estimation with bistatic MIMO radar. Specifically, a weaved co-prime array (WCA) bistatic MIMO (WCA-bMIMO) radar is proposed to produce a hole-free sum-difference co-array, which enables to offer significantly increased degrees of freedom (DoFs) and enlarged array aperture. Moreover, the two-dimensional spatial smoothing method is introduced to construct a smoothed received signal, which helps to tackle the rank deduction problem rooted in the equivalent one-snapshot received signal from the sum-difference co-array. Subsequently, the joint DoD and DoA estimates can be obtained by extracting the three-way tensor model. Furthermore, co-array Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB) for the bistatic co-prime MIMO radar is provided. Finally, the superiorities of the proposed bistatic co-prime MIMO radar in accuracy and resolution are proved by numerical simulation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The robot’s mobility and intelligence have expanded its application in recent years. Specifically, indoor tracking is a fundamental function of public service robots in nursing homes, hospitals, and warehouses. Existing vision-based tracking requires visual information, which may be unavailable and introduce privacy issues in practical deployment. To this end, in this paper, we propose $\mathsf {LTrack}$ , a long-range tracking system based on LoRa, an emerging low-power wide-area networking (LPWAN) technology, with a single transceiver pair. Note that commodity LoRa devices cannot estimate the angle of arrival (AoA) of signals due to hardware limitations. We design a virtual circular antenna array in the mobile rotating anchor via a lightweight hardware modification to multiplex the only RF channel in the low-cost LoRa device. The difference of time of flight (TDoF) measured in the circular antenna array is fused with the rotating orientation to estimate the target AoA. We also redesign and optimize the primitive LoRa ranging engine based on systematic analysis. Further, we present a real-time mobile target tracking algorithm based on the Doppler frequency shift to combat the uncertainty introduced by the target movement. We have developed the prototype of $\mathsf {LTrack}$ , which consists of a mobile rotating anchor, a LoRa tag, and a commercial robot. The system is evaluated in both LOS and NOLS indoor scenarios. Experiments show that $\mathsf {LTrack}$ supports robust tracking with a median error of 0.12 m and 0.45 m in a $\text{137}\,\text{m}^2$ lab space and a $\text{600}\,\text{m}^2$ corridor, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic awareness is the prerequisite of autonomous driving. Given the limitation of on-board sensors (e.g., precision and price), remote measurement from either infrastructure or other vehicles can improve traffic safety. However, the wireless communication carrying the measurement result undergoes fading, noise and interference and has a certain probability of outage. When the communication fails, the vehicle state can only be predicted by Bayesian filtering with a low precision. Higher communication resource utilization (e.g., transmission power) reduces the outage probability and hence results in an improved estimation precision. The power control subject to an estimate variance constraint is a difficult problem due to the complicated mapping from transmit power to vehicle-state estimate variance. In this paper, we develop an estimator consisting of several Kalman filters (KFs) or extended Kalman filters (EKFs) and an interacting multiple model (IMM) to estimate and predict the vehicle state. We propose to apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for the transmit power optimization. In particular, we consider an intersection and a lane-changing scenario and apply proximal policy optimization (PPO) and soft actor-critic (SAC) to train the DRL model. Testing results show satisfactory power control strategies confining estimate variances below given threshold. SAC achieves higher performance compared to PPO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robust spectral analysis of the sinusoidal signals corrupted by impulsive noise poses a big challenge in the signal processing community. In this paper, we address the issue of robust spectral analysis for multi-channel sinusoidal signals, including order detection and parameter estimation. The successive robust low-rank decomposition is firstly designed to extract the common signal subspace from the multi-channel data matrix. Subsequently, the number of sinusoidal poles is determined with a model order selection criterion, based on the so-obtained subspace. With the signal order information, the sinusoidal parameters and outliers are jointly estimated according to the maximum a posteriori criterion. To find a robust initial guess of the sinusoidal parameters, an estimator based on robust weighted linear prediction is developed. Additionally, the performance analysis is provided, which includes computational complexity, convergence verification of the sinusoidal parameter estimation, and asymptotic consistency of the signal order detection. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed robust spectral analysis framework compared to state-of-the-art schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depth estimation from a camera is an important task for 3D perception. Recently, without using the labeled ground truth of depth map, a self-supervised deep learning network can use relative pose to synthesize the target image from the reference image, and the photometric error between synthesized reference image and real one is used as self-supervisory signal. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised depth estimation network, which takes advantage of the quadtree constraint to optimize the depth estimation network. Based on the quadtree constraint, the photometric loss and depth loss of quadtree are proposed. In order to solve the problem that multiple depth values in repeated structures and uniform texture regions can cause relatively low photometric loss, we use quadtree-based photometric loss, which calculates the averaged photometric loss in quadtree blocks instead of the pixel-wise loss. For the problem of imbalanced depth distribution, we use quadtree depth loss, which constrains the depth inconsistency within quadtree blocks. The depth estimation network is composed of deep fusion module and cross-layer feature fusion module, which can better extract the feature information of RGB image and sparse keypoints depths, and makes full use of the detail information of the shallow feature map and the semantic information of the deep feature map to enrich the feature information extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches of depth estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce a method for multi-class, monocular 3D object detection from a single RGB image, which exploits a novel disentangling transformation and a novel, self-supervised confidence estimation method for predicted 3D bounding boxes. The proposed disentangling transformation isolates the contribution made by different groups of parameters to a given loss, without changing its nature. This brings two advantages: i) it simplifies the training dynamics in the presence of losses with complex interactions of parameters; and ii) it allows us to avoid the issue of balancing independent regression terms. We further apply this disentangling transformation to another novel, signed Intersection-over-Union criterion-driven loss for improving 2D detection results. We also critically review the AP metric used in KITTI3D and resolve a flaw which affected and biased all previously published results on monocular 3D detection. Our improved metric is now used as official KITTI3D metric. We provide extensive experimental evaluations and ablation studies on the KITTI3D and nuScenes datasets, setting new state-of-the-art results. We provide additional results on all the classes of KITTI3D as well as nuScenes datasets to further validate the robustness of our method, demonstrating its ability to generalize for different types of objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial crowdsensing is a special kind of crowdsourcing which allocates tasks to workers in some special places where workers can sense data for them. Due to the lack of priori information about the quality of workers and the ground truth, selecting the most suitable workers, which can guarantee the quality of the sensing tasks, remains a great challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which can choose the most reliable workers among available workers under constraint budget. We model the quality of workers through two factors, bias and variance, which describe the continuous feature of sensing tasks. Our framework first allocate some calibration tasks to calibrate the bias and then iteratively estimate the workers variance more and more accurately. To choose more reliable workers, we face the exploration and exploitation dilemma. Therefore, we design a novel Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithm which based on Upper Confidence Bounds (UCB) scheme and combined with a weighted data aggregation scheme to estimate a more accurate ground truth of a sensing task. Futhermore, a dynamic budget allocation algorithm is designed to achieve global optimization. Then, we prove the expected sensing error can be bounded according to the regret bound of the MAB. In simulation experiments, we compare our algorithm with several baselines with real-world data set and it shows the effectiveness in inferring the ground truth with limited budget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A general class of Bayesian lower bounds when the underlying loss function is a Bregman divergence is demonstrated. This class can be considered as an extension of the Weinstein–Weiss family of bounds for the mean squared error and relies on finding a variational characterization of Bayesian risk. This approach allows for the derivation of a version of the Cramér–Rao bound that is specific to a given Bregman divergence. This new generalization of the Cramér–Rao bound reduces to the classical one when the loss function is taken to be the Euclidean norm. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the new lower bounds, the paper also develops upper bounds on Bayesian risk, which are based on optimal linear estimators. The effectiveness of the new bound is evaluated in the Poisson noise setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of sensor fault estimation has been studied for Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) systems in networked environment. Assuming that the process noise is related to the measurement noise and packet loss will occur during the measurement transmission. We use an event-trigger mechanism (ETM) to save communication resources. Accordingly, an observer is proposed to estimate the state and sensor fault, and the trigger threshold is associated with the correlation coefficient. By adjusting the threshold, the observer performance and energy consumption can be balanced in an ideal situation. The observer designed in this paper reduces the effects of correlation noises effectively and good handling network packet losses, and it has been proved that the expected covariance of the estimation error is bounded. Finally, the simulation experiment on the identified model of USV in the laboratory is performed to validate the relevant conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most works in the literature on parameter estimation with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are limited to estimating only the direction of arrival (DOA), and/or based on the far-field assumption. However, the joint estimation of DOA and range is an important challenge for near-field (NF) applications. In addition, backscatter coefficient estimation, as one of the most important parameters of radar systems, has been neglected in existing works. In this paper, the joint estimation of the DOA, range and reflectivity is presented for a MIMO array in the NF. By employing the symmetry property in the array, first, two special spatial expressions based on fourth-order and second-order statistics from the received data are defined so that the output of the first expression lacks targets’ range information. By collecting the information of all the sensors and calculating all the interactions between the transmit and receive sensors based on the first expression, a spatial cumulant matrix is constructed. In two different approaches, with/without the use of eigendecomposition, the virtual steering vectors are extracted. Next, DOAs are estimated by a one-dimensional (1D) spectral search. The second expression, which contains both angle and range information, is used to construct several covariance submatrices and then to construct a covariance matrix with a size corresponding to the array’s dimensions. Then, corresponding ranges are estimated by employing estimated DOAs, eigendecomposition and 1D spectral searches. Finally, the equations required to estimate the reflectivity are derived. The simulation results show the remarkable performance of the proposed method in terms of computational time and estimation accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The posterior Cramr-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) and a number of its extensions including the unconditional PCRLB (U-PCRLB) and the conditional PCRLB (C-PCRLB) have been widely studied in multi-sensor target tracking (MSTT). Previous MSTT works assume that the measurements are conditionally independent, which is often not the case in practice. When the correlations of the measurements are unknown, the standard Bayes update and PCRLB computations cannot be performed. Inspired by geometric average (GA) fusion that implements data fusion with unknown data correlations by employing exponential mixture density (EMD) to compute the global posterior, EMD-based approximations to U-PCRLB and C-PCRLB are derived in this paper for two classic distributed fusion architectures, namely the hierarchical and consensus architectures. The PCRLB can be decomposed into two parts, one coming from the prior information and the other from the information contained in the data. The data information part of PCRLB is approximated via EMD-based posterior, leading to the approximation of the PCRLB. We present a sequential Monte Carlo solution to recursively compute the proposed approximation to the PCRLB for nonlinear non-Gaussian estimation problems. Numerical simulations are provided to show that the proposed approximation to the bound on the estimation mean square error (MSE) is tighter compared to the existing bounds based on likelihood fusion obtained under the measurement independence assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depth estimation is crucial in several computer vision applications, and a recent trend in this field aims at inferring such a cue from a single camera. Unfortunately, despite the compelling results achieved, state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods are computationally demanding, thus precluding their practical deployment in several application contexts characterized by low-power constraints. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network based on a shallow pyramidal architecture, referred to as $\mu $ PyD-Net, enabling monocular depth estimation on microcontrollers. The network is trained in a peculiar self-supervised manner leveraging proxy labels obtained through a traditional stereo algorithm. Moreover, we propose optimization strategies aimed at performing computations with quantized 8-bit data and map the high-level description of the network to low-level layers optimized for the target microcontroller architecture. Exhaustive experimental results on standard datasets and an in-depth evaluation with a device belonging to the popular Arm Cortex-M family confirm that obtaining sufficiently accurate monocular depth estimation on microcontrollers is feasible. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first one enabling such remarkable achievement, paving the way for the deployment of monocular depth cues onto the tiny end-nodes of distributed sensor networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In semi-supervised medical image segmentation, most previous works draw on the common assumption that higher entropy means higher uncertainty. In this paper, we investigate a novel method of estimating uncertainty. We observe that, when assigned different misclassification costs in a certain degree, if the segmentation result of a pixel becomes inconsistent, this pixel shows a relative uncertainty in its segmentation. Therefore, we present a new semi-supervised segmentation model, namely, conservative-radical network (CoraNet in short) based on our uncertainty estimation and separate self-training strategy. In particular, our CoraNet model consists of three major components: a conservative-radical module (CRM), a certain region segmentation network (C-SN), and an uncertain region segmentation network (UC-SN) that could be alternatively trained in an end-to-end manner. We have extensively evaluated our method on various segmentation tasks with publicly available benchmark datasets, including CT pancreas, MR endocardium, and MR multi-structures segmentation on the ACDC dataset. Compared with the current state of the art, our CoraNet has demonstrated superior performance. In addition, we have also analyzed its connection with and difference from conventional methods of uncertainty estimation in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a convex recovery method for block-sparse signals whose block partitions are unknown a priori. We first introduce a nonconvex penalty function, where the block partition is adapted for the signal of interest by minimizing the mixed $\ell _{2}/\ell _{1}$ norm over all possible block partitions. Then, by exploiting a variational representation of the $\ell _{2}$ norm, we derive the proposed penalty function as a suitable convex relaxation of the nonconvex one. For a block-sparse recovery model designed with the proposed penalty, we develop an iterative algorithm which is guaranteed to converge to a globally optimal solution. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a geometric neural network with edge-aware refinement (GeoNet++) to jointly predict both depth and surface normal maps from a single image. Building on top of two-stream CNNs, GeoNet++ captures the geometric relationships between depth and surface normals with the proposed depth-to-normal and normal-to-depth modules. In particular, the “depth-to-normal” module exploits the least square solution of estimating surface normals from depth to improve their quality, while the “normal-to-depth” module refines the depth map based on the constraints on surface normals through kernel regression. Boundary information is exploited via an edge-aware refinement module. GeoNet++ effectively predicts depth and surface normals with high 3D consistency and sharp boundaries resulting in better reconstructed 3D scenes. Note that GeoNet++ is generic and can be used in other depth/normal prediction frameworks to improve 3D reconstruction quality and pixel-wise accuracy of depth and surface normals. Furthermore, we propose a new 3D geometric metric (3DGM) for evaluating depth prediction in 3D. In contrast to current metrics that focus on evaluating pixel-wise error/accuracy, 3DGM measures whether the predicted depth can reconstruct high quality 3D surface normals. This is a more natural metric for many 3D application domains. Our experiments on NYUD-V2 and KITTI datasets verify that GeoNet++ produces fine boundary details and the predicted depth can be used to reconstruct high quality 3D surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fast and precise dynamic phasor estimation algorithm using an adaptive improved second order Levenberg–Marquadt algorithm under stressed and off-nominal frequency circumstances is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm ventures a faster quasi-second-order method and in addition, the learning rate is also made adaptive to speed up the convergence. Moreover, the projected estimator essentially filters harmonics, estimates transients in a signal during faults and effectually performs in complex modulated setting which is found commonly in a power system with distributed energy resources. Outcomes reveal that the estimation errors and the convergence time of the proposed approach is way below the minimum requirement of the IEEE C37.118.1 standard. Besides, due to its reduced complexity, the estimator has been successfully implemented on the field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform and has been verified on a practical microgrid scenario including photo voltaic systems. The performance during testing indicates that the proposed technique has potential ability to perform under stressed conditions conforming the accuracy and speed of response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the joint estimation of channel fading and user activity for the uplink of a grant-free massive machine-type communication system. Comparing with previous studies, we consider more practical aspects of the system, including non-i.i.d. signature matrices, low-resolution quantization, and random users activated by an unknown sparse rate. A new estimation algorithm, termed hybrid decentralized generalized expectation consistent (HyDeGEC), is then derived based on a hybrid network that applies scalar message passing for the prior inference and vector message passing for the likelihood inference. This new algorithm outperforms many state-of-the-art techniques in terms of robustness (to non-i.i.d. signatures), complexity (in computation per iteration), and/or estimation accuracy (of the channel and the activity rate). The state evolution of the algorithm is also analyzed, which, as validated by simulations, can capture precisely the algorithm’s per-iteration behavior in MSE. Summing up, the algorithm we propose here is practically effective, computationally efficient, and theoretically analyzable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limited access to available spectrum motivates new age radio frequency (RF) systems to co-exist and cooperate. In this paper, we consider a joint communication and radar system (labeled Comm-Radar), that is capable of receiving and decoding communication signals while simultaneously enabling radar functionalities. Traditionally, systems that leverage principles of spectrum convergence, deemed each functions to be detrimental to the others. This has led to successive interference cancellations strategies that effectively isolate each of the functionalities. Here, in the context of Comm-Radar processing structure, we show that ambient communication transmissions actually assist in radar estimation. The insight is that communications multipath reflects off radar targets (we denote these comm-target paths) in the environment, and can be processed at the receiver to extract extra information. In this work we characterize the fundamental performance limits of such a joint system.To demonstrate the radar performance gain achievable via the processing of extra comm-target paths, the closed-form Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) for the estimation of direction, range and velocity of a target is derived, for both the general case, and practical radar and communication signalling schemes. Based on the CRB, joint outer bounds are obtained to characterize the trade off between estimation performance and communication rate. Finally, numerical results verify the advantages of utilizing the target reflections from the communication signal to bolster radar performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel estimation and identification approach for lateral vehicle dynamics. The algorithm leverages on a Linear Fraction Transform (LFT) reformulation of vehicle and tyre models, allowing for a simple and computationally efficient inclusion of complex and nonlinear dynamic models, like, for example, two-wheels, four-wheels or single-track as vehicle model, and Pacejka, brush or Fiala as tyre model. As a result, this technique can be easily adopted in the development of an online identification system, able to run on a standard embedded device, implementing a flexible identification procedure that can handle different driving conditions, up to the limits of handling, different vehicle modelling approaches, and different input measurements. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal, either in a persistent excitation and in a non-persistent excitation scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We recently proposed a direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method for the coexistence of uncorrelated and coherent signals, which is related to the uniform linear antenna arrays with mutual coupling (MC) in the presence of unknown nonuniform noise. This technique, however, relies on the assumption of mixed signals and is not suitable for scenarios with purely coherent signals. This paper extends the mixed signal scenario to the purely coherent signals one on one hand, and on the other hand, allows us to directly adopt the ESPPRIT algorithm to perform DOA estimation in MC environments. To be specific, with the help of the least squares (LS) criterion, the nonuniform noise is first eliminated, and the traditional middle subarray scheme can then be employed to be immune to the influence of MC. Unlike the former operation, following a different line of attack the latter can make full use of the whole array and provide a larger array antenna aperture. Furthermore, we derive a new strategy to directly determine the DOAs without taking MC into account and performing spectral search. This brings substantial benefits to the DOA estimation accuracy and computational cost. The superiority of the proposed approaches is verified by numerical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a design of driveline torque observer with dual clutch transmission (DCT). A goal of this study is to improve estimation performance of the observer. To increase the observer’s performance, it is important to make an accurate driveline model and a robust observer. First, to increase the accuracy of the model, we propose lumped driveline efficiency which is a parameter that expresses driveline transmission loss. In addition, a recursive least square estimation (RLSE) algorithm is proposed to estimate the parameter using driving data. Then, the model is updated using the estimated parameter value. Second, a reduced order observer is proposed to estimate transmitted torques of driveline in both driving and gear shifting process. Moreover, the observer, which is robust against measurement noise and disturbance, is designed through frequency domain analysis. For frequency domain analysis, an eigenstructure assignment method is applied to tune observer gains. Performance of the proposed RLSE algorithm and the observer are verified through simulation and testbench experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cox proportional hazards model is a popular semi-parametric model for survival analysis. In this paper, we aim at developing a federated algorithm for the Cox proportional hazards model over vertically partitioned data (i.e., data from the same patient are stored at different institutions). We propose a novel algorithm, namely VERTICOX, to obtain the global model parameters in a distributed fashion based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) framework. The proposed model computes intermediary statistics and exchanges them to calculate the global model without collecting individual patient-level data. We demonstrate that our algorithm achieves equivalent accuracy for the estimation of model parameters and statistics to that of its centralized realization. The proposed algorithm converges linearly under the ADMM framework. Its computational complexity and communication costs are polynomially and linearly associated with the number of subjects, respectively. Experimental results show that VERTICOX can achieve accurate model parameter estimation to support federated survival analysis over vertically distributed data by saving bandwidth and avoiding exchange of information about individual patients. The source code for VERTICOX is available at: https://github.com/daiwenrui/VERTICOX. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network reliability measures the probability that a target node is reachable from a source node in an uncertain graph, i.e., a graph where every edge is associated with a probability of existence. In this paper, we investigate the novel and fundamental problem of adding a small number of edges in the uncertain network for maximizing the reliability between a given pair of nodes. We study the $\mathbf {NP}$ NP -hardness and the approximation hardness of our problem, and design effective, scalable solutions. Furthermore, we consider extended versions of our problem (e.g., multiple source and target nodes can be provided as input) to support and demonstrate a wider family of queries and applications, including sensor network reliability maximization and social influence maximization. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modular multilevel converters (MMCs) are vulnerable to DC short-circuit faults. Analytical estimation of the AC and DC short-circuit currents in the AC in-feed steady-state stage is essential to reveal fault mechanisms and design protections. However, the nonlinearity of the MMC has brought significant difficulties to the calculation. This paper proposes a novel analytical calculation method for the steady-state AC and DC short-circuit currents. First, various working modes of the MMC in the AC in-feed stage are specified, and the relations between the arm current and the short-circuit current in each mode are studied. Subsequently, the arm current is divided into multiple sub-intervals, and the analytical expressions of the steady-state AC and DC fault current are deduced by solving the arm current in the sub-intervals one by one. Moreover, the derived expressions are further optimized considering the resistive-inductive (R/X) characteristic of AC grids, making them applicable for various scenarios. These analytical expressions intuitively show the relations between the system parameters and the short-circuit currents, thus can guide the rating and tuning of protection devices and power equipment. Finally, the effectiveness of the derived expressions is verified, and the influences of the system parameters on the fault currents are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter prediction is a crucial part of hybrid video coding frameworks, utilized to exploit the temporal redundancy in video sequences and improve the coding performance. During inter prediction, a predicted block is typically derived from reference pictures using motion estimation and motion compensation. To improve the coding performance of inter prediction, a neural network based enhancement to inter prediction (NNIP) is proposed in this paper. NNIP is composed of three networks, namely residue estimation network, combination network, and deep refinement network. Specifically, first, a residue estimation network is designed to estimate the residue between current block and its predicted block using their available spatial neighbors. Second, the feature maps of the estimated residue and the predicted block are extracted and concatenated in a combination network. Finally, the concatenated feature maps are fed into a deep refinement network to generate a refined residue, which is added back to the predicted block to derive a more accurate predicted block. NNIP is integrated in HEVC to evaluate its efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate that NNIP can achieve 4.6%, 3.0%, and 2.7% BD-rate reduction on average under LDP, LDB, and RA configurations compared to HEVC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) has become a popular non-invasive way of diagnosing neurological disorders or their early stages by probing functional connectivity between different brain regions of interest (ROIs) across subjects. In the past decades, researchers have proposed many methods to estimate brain functional networks (BFNs) based on blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals captured by rs-fMRI. However, most of the existing methods estimate BFNs under the assumption that signals are independently sampled, which ignores the temporal dependency and sequential order of different time points (or volumes). To address this problem, in this paper, we first propose a novel BFN estimation model by introducing a latent variable to control the sequence of volumes for encoding the temporal dependency and sequential information of signals into the estimated BFNs. Then, we develop an efficient learning algorithm to solve the proposed model by the alternating optimization scheme. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, the estimated BFNs are used to identify subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCIs) from normal controls (NCs). Experimental results show that our method outperforms the baseline methods in the terms of classification performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new statistical model is proposed for the single image super-resolution of retinal Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images. OCT imaging relies on interfero-metry, which explains why OCT images suffer from a high level of noise. Moreover, data subsampling is carried out during the acquisition of OCT A-scans and B-scans. So, it is necessary to utilize effective super-resolution algorithms to reconstruct high-resolution clean OCT images. In this paper, a nonlocal sparse model-based Bayesian framework is proposed for OCT restoration. For this reason, by characterizing nonlocal patches with similar structures, known as a group, the sparse coefficients of each group of OCT images are modeled by the scale mixture models. In this base, the coefficient vector is decomposed into the point-wise product of a random vector and a positive scaling variable. Estimation of the sparse coefficients depends on the proposed distribution for the random vector and scaling variable where the Laplacian random vector and Generalized Extreme-Value (GEV) scale parameter (Laplacian+GEV model) show the best goodness of fit for each group of OCT images. Finally, a new OCT super-resolution method based on this new scale mixture model is introduced, where the maximum a posterior estimation of both sparse coefficients and scaling variables are calculated efficiently by applying an alternating minimization method. Our experimental results prove that the proposed OCT super-resolution method based on the Laplacian+GEV model outperforms other competing methods in terms of both subjective and objective visual qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more and more satellites are launched into the space, dynamic estimation of spin satellites has become a critical component of the space situation awareness application. Some explored studies using exterior measurements from different sensors such as optical device and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) to estimate dynamic parameters of spin satellites. As a single sensor normally provides two-dimensional observation, three-dimensional estimations resulting from these algorithms are strictly related to the prior knowledge of targets characteristics. As a result, it is difficult to expand these methods to other satellites. In order to support the dynamic estimation of most spin satellites, this paper presents a novel dynamic estimation approach which employs synchronized optical-and-radar images. The optical-and-radar fusion strategy has demonstrated its superiority in image analysis field, and breaks down the dynamic estimation of spin satellites into two sub-problems: target attitude estimation and spin parameters estimation. In this work, the proposed algorithm deduces two explicit expressions of target dynamic parameters under the imaging projection model of the joint optical-and-radar observation. Through the particle swarm optimization (PSO), target dynamic parameters are determined in two stages. This paper presents some experiments illustrating the feasibility of the proposed method and subsequent conclusions, which reflect advantages of the joint optical-and-radar observation mode in image interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single image dehazing has been a challenging problem because of its ill-posed nature. For this reason, numerous efforts have been made in the field of haze removal. This paper proposes a simple, fast, and powerful algorithm for haze removal. The medium transmission is derived as a function of the saturation of the scene radiance only, and the saturation of scene radiance is estimated using a simple stretching method. A different medium transmission can be estimated for each pixel because this method does not assume that transmission is constant in a small patch. Furthermore, this paper presents a color veil removing algorithm, which is useful for an image with fine or yellow dust, using the white balance technique. The proposed algorithm requires no training, prior, and refinement process. The simulation results show that the proposed dehazing scheme outperforms state-of-the-art dehazing approaches in terms of both computational complexity and dehazing efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a blind text image deblurring algorithm by using a text-specific hybrid dictionary. After careful analysis, we find that the text-specific hybrid dictionary has the great ability of providing powerful contextual information for text image deblurring. Here, it is worth noting that our proposed method is inspired by our observation that an intermediate latent image contains not only sharp regions, but also multiple types of small blurred regions. Based upon our discovery, we propose a prior for text images based on sparse representation, which models the relationship between an intermediate latent image and a desired sharp image. To this end, we carefully collect three different image patch pairs, which are 1) Gaussian blur-sharp, 2) motion blur-sharp, and 3) sharp-sharp, in order to construct the text-specific hybrid dictionary. We also propose a new optimization framework suitable for the task of text image deblurring in this paper. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a challenging dataset of synthetic and real-world text images. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art image deblurring methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers estimation of a random variable in Poisson noise with signal scaling coefficient and dark current as explicit parameters of the noise model. Specifically, the paper focuses on properties of the conditional mean estimator as a function of the scaling coefficient, the dark current parameter, the distribution of the input random variable and channel realizations. With respect to the scaling coefficient and the dark current, several identities in terms of derivatives are established. For example, it is shown that the gradient of the conditional mean estimator with respect to the scaling coefficient and dark current parameter is proportional to the conditional variance. Moreover, a score function is proposed and a Tweedie-like formula for the conditional expectation is recovered. With respect to the distribution, several regularity conditions are shown. For instance, it is shown that the conditional mean estimator uniquely determines the input distribution. Moreover, it is shown that if the conditional expectation is close to a linear function in terms of mean squared error, then the input distribution is approximately gamma in the Lévy distance. Furthermore, sufficient and necessary conditions for linearity are found. Interestingly, it is shown that the conditional mean estimator cannot be linear when the dark current parameter of the Poisson noise is non-zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blind noise-level estimation (NLE) is a fundamental issue in digital image processing. This paper provides a noise-level estimator for additive white Gaussian noise and multiplicative Gaussian noise using principal texture patches (PTPs). The proposed algorithm first identifies the principal texture of the noisy image by using the principal component analysis, and then, it chooses PTPs to calculate the noise level. The major contributions of this paper toward addressing the challenges in the NLE literature include: 1) analyzing the nonlinear relationship between the smallest eigenvalue, true noise level, number of chosen patches, and block size; 2) extracting PTPs; and 3) computing noise level using PTPs. The abundant experimental results show that the proposed method works well for various natural images over a large range of noise levels and it performs well for multiplicative noise. Compared with some state-of-the-art approaches, our method has the best performance and a faster running speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]