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A previously unknown form of compromising emanations has been discovered. LED status indicators on data communication equipment, under certain conditions, are shown to carry a modulated optical signal that is significantly correlated with information being processed by the device. Physical access is not required; the attacker gains access to all data going through the device, including plaintext in the case of data encryption systems. Experiments show that it is possible to intercept data under realistic conditions at a considerable distance. Many different sorts of devices, including modems and Internet Protocol routers, were found to be vulnerable. A taxonomy of compromising optical emanations is developed, and design changes are described that will successfully block this kind of "Optical TEMPEST" attack., 26 pages, 11 figures

Solving inverse problems, where we find the input values that result in desired values of outputs, can be challenging. The solution process is often computationally expensive and it can be difficult to interpret the solution in high-dimensional input spaces. In this paper, we use a problem from additive manufacturing to address these two issues with the intent of making it easier to solve inverse problems and exploit their results. First, focusing on Gaussian process surrogates that are used to solve inverse problems, we describe how a simple modification to the idea of tapering can substantially speed up the surrogate without losing accuracy in prediction. Second, we demonstrate that Kohonen self-organizing maps can be used to visualize and interpret the solution to the inverse problem in the high-dimensional input space. For our data set, as not all input dimensions are equally important, we show that using weighted distances results in a better organized map that makes the relationships among the inputs obvious., 16 figures and 4 tables

In the recent past, complex deep neural networks have received huge interest in various document understanding tasks such as document image classification and document retrieval. As many document types have a distinct visual style, learning only visual features with deep CNNs to classify document images have encountered the problem of low inter-class discrimination, and high intra-class structural variations between its categories. In parallel, text-level understanding jointly learned with the corresponding visual properties within a given document image has considerably improved the classification performance in terms of accuracy. In this paper, we design a self-attention-based fusion module that serves as a block in our ensemble trainable network. It allows to simultaneously learn the discriminant features of image and text modalities throughout the training stage. Besides, we encourage mutual learning by transferring the positive knowledge between image and text modalities during the training stage. This constraint is realized by adding a truncated-Kullback-Leibler divergence loss Tr-KLD-Reg as a new regularization term, to the conventional supervised setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to leverage a mutual learning approach along with a self-attention-based fusion module to perform document image classification. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of accuracy for the single-modal and multi-modal modalities. Thus, the proposed ensemble self-attention-based mutual learning model outperforms the state-of-the-art classification results based on the benchmark RVL-CDIP and Tobacco-3482 datasets., Accepted at IJDAR 2021

Surveying wide areas with only one camera is a typical scenario in surveillance and automotive applications. Ultra wide-angle fisheye cameras employed to that end produce video data with characteristics that differ significantly from conventional rectilinear imagery as obtained by perspective pinhole cameras. Those characteristics are not considered in typical image and video processing algorithms such as motion estimation, where translation is assumed to be the predominant kind of motion. This contribution introduces an adapted technique for use in block-based motion estimation that takes into the account the projection function of fisheye cameras and thus compensates for the non-perspective properties of fisheye videos. By including suitable projections, the translational motion model that would otherwise only hold for perspective material is exploited, leading to improved motion estimation results without altering the source material. In addition, we discuss extensions that allow for a better prediction of the peripheral image areas, where motion estimation falters due to spatial constraints, and further include calibration information to account for lens properties deviating from the theoretical function. Simulations and experiments are conducted on synthetic as well as real-world fisheye video sequences that are part of a data set created in the context of this paper. Average synthetic and real-world gains of 1.45 and 1.51 dB in luminance PSNR are achieved compared against conventional block matching. Furthermore, the proposed fisheye motion estimation method is successfully applied to motion compensated temporal resolution enhancement, where average gains amount to 0.79 and 0.76 dB.

Mmillimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system usually utilizes hybrid precoding to reduce complex hardware and high energy consumption. However, most hybrid precoding scheme consider the fully connected architecture, which may result in a significant loss of energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose a hybrid precoding scheme based on the overlapped subarray architecture (OSA), where the analog part of the MU-MIMO system is realized by a OSA network. Based on the OSA architecture, a modified generalized low rank approximation of matrices (GLRAM) based hybrid precoding scheme is designed to maximize the achievable sum-rate, where the analog precoding algorithm apply the phase alignment technology and GLRAM approach to obtain RF precoder/combiner with high array gain provided by massive MIMO system. Then, the block diagonalization (BD) technology is performed to obtain the digital precoding matrix for the multiplexing gain. Simulation results show that the modified GLRAM based hybrid precoding algorithm for OSA architecture can reduce the number of iterations. Compared with the existing hybrid precoding algorithm, it achieves higher spectral efficiency and lower complexity.

Fisheye cameras prove a convenient means in surveillance and automotive applications as they provide a very wide field of view for capturing their surroundings. Contrary to typical rectilinear imagery, however, fisheye video sequences follow a different mapping from the world coordinates to the image plane which is not considered in standard video processing techniques. In this paper, we present a motion estimation method for real-world fisheye videos by combining perspective projection with knowledge about the underlying fisheye projection. The latter is obtained by camera calibration since actual lenses rarely follow exact models. Furthermore, we introduce a re-mapping for ultra-wide angles which would otherwise lead to wrong motion compensation results for the fisheye boundary. Both concepts extend an existing hybrid motion estimation method for equisolid fisheye video sequences that decides between traditional and fisheye block matching in a block-based manner. Compared to that method, the proposed calibration and re-mapping extensions yield gains of up to 0.58 dB in luminance PSNR for real-world fisheye video sequences. Overall gains amount to up to 3.32 dB compared to traditional block matching.

The processing quality of the block hole system affects the working performance of the marine diesel engine block directly. Choosing an appropriate combination of process parameters is a prerequisite to improving the accuracy of the block hole system. Uncertain fluctuations of process parameters during the machining process would affect the process reliability of the block hole system, resulting in an ultra-poor accuracy. For this reason, the RBF method is used to establish the relationship between the verticality of the cylinder hole and process parameters, including cutting speed, depth of cut, and feed rate. The minimum cylinder hole verticality is taken as the goal and the process reliability constraints of the cylinder hole are set based on Monte Carlo, a reliability optimization model of processing parameters for cylinder hole is established in this paper. Meanwhile, an improved particle swarm algorithm was designed to solve the model, and eventually, the global optimal combination of process parameters for the cylinder hole processing of the diesel engine block in the reliability stable region was obtained.

Network security and data security are the biggest concerns now a days. Every organization decides their future business process based on the past and day to day transactional data. This data may consist of consumer’s confidential data, which needs to be kept secure. Also, the network connections when established with the external communication devices or entities, a care should be taken to authenticate these and block the unwanted access. This consists of identification of the malicious connection nodes and identification of normal connection nodes. For that, we use a continuous monitoring of the network input traffic to recognize the malicious connection request called as intrusion and this type of monitoring system is called as an Intrusion detection system (IDS). IDS helps us to protect our network and data from insecure and malicious network connections. Many such systems exists in the real time scenario, but they have critical issues of performance like accuracy and efficiency. These issues are addressed as a part of this research work of IDS using machine learning techniques and HDFS. The TP-IDS is designed in two phases for increasing accuracy. In phase I of TP-IDS, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) are used. In phase II of TP-IDS, Decision Tree (DT) and Naïve Bayes (NB) are used, where phase II is the validation phase of the system for increasing accuracy. Also, both the phases are having Hadoop distributed file system underlying data storage and processing architecture, which allows parallel processing to increase the speed of the system and hence achieve the efficiency in TP-IDS.

Design and optimization of well spacing is a key indicator for evaluating the development effect of shale gas reservoirs. On the basis of theoretical understanding, and after the verification by analogy, numerical simulation, and economic evaluation, a complete workflow from inter-well interference simulation and dynamic data diagnosis to multi-well production simulation and well spacing optimization was formed. First, a pressure detection boundary propagation model is established to simulate the response degree of inter-well interference under different connected conditions. Second, inter-well interference is identified and diagnosed depending on the inter-well interference response behaviors and the interpretation of performance data from gas wells. Third, taking the geological interpretation and dynamic analysis results as basic parameters, a multi-well numerical model for volume fracturing in gas reservoirs is established to simulate the production performance of gas field, and then well spacing is optimized in combination with the net present value model. The application in the Ning 201 well block in the Changning National Shale Gas Demonstration Area has shown that a smaller well spacing can allow a premature inter-well interference and also the enhancement of recovery in the entire block. Given the current fracturing scale and parameter system, the well spacing of 300–400 m can be optimized to 260–320 m, that is, the number of wells per unit area increases by 20%–30%. As a result, the recovery percent of reserves in the block increase by about 10%. The net present value of the block rises, but the corresponding optimal well spacing does not change, with the production period.

Despite the prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there is little information about the purpose and risks of the Internet traffic these devices generate, and consumers have limited options for controlling those risks. A key open question is whether one can mitigate these risks by automatically blocking some of the Internet connections from IoT devices, without rendering the devices inoperable. In this paper, we address this question by developing a rigorous methodology that relies on automated IoT-device experimentation to reveal which network connections (and the information they expose) are essential, and which are not. We further develop strategies to automatically classify network traffic destinations as either required (i.e., their traffic is essential for devices to work properly) or not, hence allowing firewall rules to block traffic sent to non-required destinations without breaking the functionality of the device. We find that indeed 16 among the 31 devices we tested have at least one blockable non-required destination, with the maximum number of blockable destinations for a device being 11. We further analyze the destination of network traffic and find that all third parties observed in our experiments are blockable, while first and support parties are neither uniformly required or non-required. Finally, we demonstrate the limitations of existing blocklists on IoT traffic, propose a set of guidelines for automatically limiting non-essential IoT traffic, and we develop a prototype system that implements these guidelines.

Blockchain technology has the characteristics of decentralization and tamper resistance, which can store data safely and reduce the cost of trust effectively. However, the existing blockchain system has weak performance in data management, and only supports traversal queries with transaction hashes as keywords. The query method based on the account transaction trace chain (ATTC) improves the query efficiency of historical transactions of the account. However, the efficiency of querying accounts with longer transaction chains has not been effectively improved. Given the inefficiency and single method of the ATTC index in the query, we propose a subchain-based account transaction chain (SCATC) index structure. First, the account transaction chain is divided into subchains, and the last block of each subchain is connected by a hash pointer. The block-by-block query mode in ATTC is converted to the subchain-by-subchain query mode, which shortens the query path. Multiple transactions of the same account in the same block are merged and stored, which simplifies the construction cost of the index and saves storage resources. then, the construction algorithm and query algorithm is given for the SCATC index structure. Simulation analysis shows that the SCATC index structure significantly improves query efficiency.

Construction materials contribute to environmental pollution and the impoverishment of natural raw materials. The villages of Upper Egypt were exposed to high thermal loads owing to their geographical location. Moreover, the current building materials do not comply with the principles of sustainability and environmental adaptation of the residents of these buildings. Therefore, attaining admission to one sustainable building material in Upper Egypt and using it as an environmentally compatible, inexpensive, accessible, and easy building material for the users of these blocks is essential. In this study, the author selected various sites in Upper Egypt, analyzed climate and urban data, and after that, suggested prototypes with many variables and measured using the DesignBuilder V5 computer simulation program to select an optimal building type. Reached that can be saved energy about 40:50% and decreased annual discomfort hours more than 50%, finally, discussed with community members by a questionnaire on societal acceptance. The research concluded that building with compressed stabilized earth block is an environmentally sustainable solution applied in residential areas in the villages of Upper Egypt to reduce deficiencies in environmental adaptation.

Most psychological experiments measure human cognitive function through the response time and accuracy of the response to a set of stimuli. Since response time and accuracy complement each other, it is often difficult to interpret cognitive performance based on only one dependent measurement and raises a speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) problem. In overcoming this problem, SAT experimental paradigms and models that integrate response time and accuracy have been proposed to understand information processing in human cognitive function. However, due to a lengthy SAT experiment for reliable model estimation, SAT experiments' practical limitations have been pointed out. Thus, these limitations call for an efficient technique to shorten the number of trials required to estimate the SAT function reliably. Instead of using a block's stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) accuracy with long block-based task trials, we introduced a Bayesian SAT function estimation using trial-by-trial response time and correctness, which makes SAT tasks flexible and easily extendable to multiple trials. We then proposed a Bayesian adaptive method to select optimal SOA by maximizing information gain to estimate model parameters. Simulation results showed that the proposed Bayesian adaptive estimation was highly efficient and robust for accuracy and precision of estimating SAT function by enabling "multiple-step ahead search."

Foreground object segmentation is an important task which comes with various applications in outdoor surveillance and navigation. Most existing methods focus on the accuracy and therefore are computational expensive and low in speed, which makes them difficult to use for real applications. In this paper, we are aiming to tackle the accuracy and efficiency trade-off. In particular, different from existing methods that use finetuning routine on heavyweight pre-trained models and/or use optimization techniques to enhance results, we propose a lightweight end-to-end network that can be trained from scratch effectively and efficiently. First,long and short skip connections are used among convolutional blocks and within bottleneck block; by doing this, the information flow within the networks is enhanced in the training stage and thus usage of parameters in model is increased which allows more compact and efficient networks design. Second, we use element-wise summing based feature fusions before each up-sampling layer. This is aiming to reduce the size of decoder, accelerate up-sampling process and make training convergence more stable. Our proposed method is tested rigorously. Particularly, we achieved 1000 times higher speed compared to the state-of-the-art methods on CD2014 and SBI2015 datasets with a comparable accuracy.

International audience; Licensed Shared Access (LSA) is a new concept proposed by the radio spectrum policy group in order to optimize spectrum usage: a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) can access temporarily to other incumbent's spectrum after obtaining a license. The licensing process is made via an auction mechanism. The mechanisms proposed in the literature for the LSA context are oneshot auction mechanisms which allocate all the available spectrum as a unique block. In this paper, we first show how to increase the performance of those auctions (in terms of revenue, efficiency and fairness of the allocation) while preserving truthful bidding, by splitting spectrum and converting single block auctions into multi-block auctions. Simulation results illustrate how appropriately choosing the number of blocks allows to increase the aforementioned metrics. Second, we show how to convert one-shot mechanisms to equivalent ascending mechanisms (in terms of allocations and payments) so that we add transparency and privacy to the auction.

In this paper, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer based on time-frequency block allocation (TFBA-SWIPT) is proposed to save the energy of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplex (OFDM) decode-and-forward cooperative communication system, by allocating different resource blocks for information decoding and energy harvesting at the relay and destinations. The joint allocation of time-frequency blocks and power is optimized to maximize the transmission rate of the destination, while ensuring the transmission rate and energy supply of the relay. The time-frequency block pairing algorithm and the block power allocation algorithm are integrated to achieve the optimal solution. Simulation results illustrate the benefits of using TFBA-SWIPT in the OFDM cooperative communication system over time-varying channels.

The artistic community is increasingly relying on automatic computational analysis for authentication and classification of artistic paintings. In this paper, we identify hidden patterns and relationships present in artistic paintings by analysing their complexity, a measure that quantifies the sum of characteristics of an object. Specifically, we apply Normalized Compression (NC) and the Block Decomposition Method (BDM) to a dataset of 4,266 paintings from 91 authors and examine the potential of these information-based measures as descriptors of artistic paintings. Both measures consistently described the equivalent types of paintings, authors, and artistic movements. Moreover, combining the NC with a measure of the roughness of the paintings creates an efficient stylistic descriptor. Furthermore, by quantifying the local information of each painting, we define a fingerprint that describes critical information regarding the artists' style, their artistic influences, and shared techniques. More fundamentally, this information describes how each author typically composes and distributes the elements across the canvas and, therefore, how their work is perceived. Finally, we demonstrate that regional complexity and two-point height difference correlation function are useful auxiliary features that improve current methodologies in style and author classification of artistic paintings. The whole study is supported by an extensive website (http://panther.web.ua.pt) for fast author characterization and authentication., Comment: Website: http://panther.web.ua.pt 24 Pages; 19 pages article; 5 pages supplementary material

Motivated by the practical import free-flow program that aims to expedite the container retrieval process, we conceptualize a new container stacking strategy, termed Smart Stacking (SS) strategy. The SS strategy aims to create relocation-free stacks (smart stacks) by utilizing customer information. The Storage Location Assignment Problem (SLAP) under the SS strategy is addressed. The problem is to determine the smart customers/containers, and the number and locations of smart stacks, when assigning a batch of import containers to a yard block at an automated container terminal to minimize the total retrieval time. Two variants of SLAP are investigated under the non-split policy and the split policy, depending on whether the containers from the same customer are allowed to be split between smart stacks and non-smart stacks. For the non-split variant, a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is formulated first. By analyzing the properties of the optimal solution, an improved formulation with enhanced computational performance is then proposed. Based on the structure of the model, a divide-and-conquer heuristic is designed to solve the non-split variant more efficiently. For the split variant, a MIP model under the optimal partitions of the non-split model is developed. We theoretically prove that the split variant yields better results than the non-split variant. Extensive experiments are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of smart stacking. It is found that customer information and yard utilization rate have a significant influence on the effectiveness of smart stacking.

Knowledge integration is well explained by the human–organization–technology (HOT) approach known from knowledge management. This approach contains the horizontal and vertical interaction and communication between employees, human-to-machine, but also machine-to-machine. Different organizational structures and processes are supported with the help of appropriate technologies and suitable data processing and integration techniques. In a Smart Factory, manufacturing systems act largely autonomously on the basis of continuously collected data. The technical design concerns the networking of machines, their connectivity and the interaction between human and machine as well as machine-to-machine. Within a Smart Factory, machines can be considered as intelligent manufacturing systems. Such manufacturing systems can autonomously adapt to events through the ability to intelligently analyze data and act as adaptive manufacturing systems that consider changes in production, the supply chain and customer requirements. Inter-connected physical devices, sensors, actuators, and controllers form the building block of the Smart Factory, which is called the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT uses different data processing solutions, such as cloud computing, fog computing, or edge computing, to fuse and process data. This is accomplished in an integrated and cross-device manner.

Photonic implementations of reservoir computing (RC) promise to reach ultra-high bandwidth of operation with moderate training efforts. Several optoelectronic demonstrations reported state of the art performances for hard tasks as speech recognition, object classification and time series prediction. Scaling these systems in space and time faces challenges in control complexity, size and power demand, which can be relieved by integrated optical solutions. Silicon photonics can be the disruptive technology to achieve this goal. However, the experimental demonstrations have been so far focused on spatially distributed reservoirs, where the massive use of splitters/combiners and the interconnection loss limits the number of nodes. Here, we propose and validate an all optical RC scheme based on a silicon microring (MR) and time multiplexing. The input layer is encoded in the intensity of a pump beam, which is nonlinearly transferred to the free carrier concentration in the MR and imprinted on a secondary probe. We harness the free carrier dynamics to create a chain-like reservoir topology with 50 virtual nodes. We give proof of concept demonstrations of RC by solving two nontrivial tasks: the delayed XOR and the classification of Iris flowers. This forms the basic building block from which larger hybrid spatio-temporal reservoirs with thousands of nodes can be realized with a limited set of resources.

When describing complex interconnected systems, one often has to go beyond the standard network description to account for generalized interactions. Here, we establish a unified framework to simplify the stability analysis of cluster synchronization patterns for a wide range of generalized networks, including hypergraphs, multilayer networks, and temporal networks. The framework is based on finding a simultaneous block diagonalization of the matrices encoding the synchronization pattern and the network topology. As an application, we use simultaneous block diagonalization to unveil an intriguing type of chimera states that appear only in the presence of higher-order interactions. The unified framework established here can be extended to other dynamical processes and can facilitate the discovery of emergent phenomena in complex systems with generalized interactions., Published version. Part of the Focus Collection on higher-order interaction networks. The code for the simultaneous block diagonalization algorithm is available at https://github.com/y-z-zhang/SBD

In this paper, the secure transmission for high-speed railway (HSR) communication system is studied. The considered HSR wireless communication system consists of a macro base station, B roadside base stations, and K vehicle stations (VSs) on the top of the train, and the eavesdropping user is a mobile unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). We consider maximizing the sum of the minimum security rate of each time slot as the objective function, and the constraint conditions contain the quality of service (QoS), switch requirements and the total power constraint. The original optimization problem is mixed-integer and non-convex, it is intractable to solve directly. The block coordinate descent (BCD) method is applied, and the original problem can be decoupled into two sub-problems. The one is the joint BS-VS association problem, and the other is the power control problem. The first sub-problem of optimizing BS-VS association can be solved by the successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm, and the second one of optimizing transmit power can be solved by the lagrangian dual method. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms have good convergence.

Hybrid precoding achieves a compromise between the sum rate and hardware complexity of millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, most prior works on multi-user hybrid precoding only consider the full-connected structure. In this paper, a novel multi-user hybrid precoding algorithm is proposed for the sub-connected structure. Based on the improved successive interference cancellation (SIC), the analog precoding matrix optimization problem is decomposed into multiple analog precoding sub-matrix optimization problems. Further, a near-optimal analog precoder is designed through factorizing the precoding sub-matrix for each sub-array. Furthermore, digital precoding is designed according to the block diagonalization (BD) technology. Finally, the water-filling power allocation method is used to further improve the communication quality. The extensive simulation results demonstrate that the sum rate of the proposed algorithm is higher than the existing hybrid precoding methods with the sub-connected structure, and has higher energy efficiency compared with existing approaches. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is closer to the state-of-the-art optimization approach with the full-connected structure. In addition, the simulation results also verify the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid precoding design of the uniform planar array (UPA).

3D tree objects can be used in various applications, like estimation of physiological equivalent temperature (PET). During this project, a method is designed to extract 3D tree objects from a country-wide point cloud. To apply this method on large scale, the algorithm needs to be efficient. Extraction of trees is done in two steps: point-wise classification using the PointNet deep learning network, and Watershed segmentation to split points into individual trees. After that, 3D tree models are made. The method is evaluated on 3 areas, a park, city center and housing block in the city of Deventer, the Netherlands. This resulted into an average accuracy of 92% and a F1-score of 0.96.

In this paper, we conduct rate-distortion and outage probability analyses for Wyner-Ziv (WZ) systems, where the information sequences from a source and a helper are transmitted to the destination over block Rayleigh fading multiple access channels (MACs). This work has been motivated by decision-making systems, where the aim is to make right decisions based on the observations. Hence, the most critical performance metric is the accuracy of decisions, even allowing distortion in wireless transmission. A sufficient condition for the successful transmissions is that the WZ and MAC regions intersect. For the ease of calculating the outage probability, we propose an approximated, yet accurate, WZ rate region. The outage probabilities of the WZ systems are then evaluated both in orthogonal and MAC transmissions. It is shown that the transmission efficiency of the system with MAC is significantly improved compared to orthogonal transmission. Furthermore, a helper-selection scheme is introduced to further reduce the outage probability of the WZ-MAC systems. The results show that the outage probability decreases, of which decay corresponds to the $(L+1)$ -order diversity with $L$ helpers in small value range of the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), while it converges into $L$ as the average SNR becomes large.

A dome-shape deformation has been found to affect the photogrammetric surface reconstruction in several real and simulated experiments. Its origin has been recognised in inaccurate estimation of the camera parameters and many papers already concentrated on conditions to avoid its development, especially as far as block design is concerned. This paper presents a Monte Carlo simulation to investigate surface reconstruction elevation errors in UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) photogrammetric blocks. The simulation tests are designed to find out the effect of block shape, camera axis inclination, side-lap, cross strips addition and block control by GCP or GNSS-assisted on the extent of the deformations. The main findings are: i) that GNSS-assisted blocks are generally more robust compared to GCP-controlled ones; ii) that, in GNSS-assisted blocks, unless a mix of nadiral and inclined strips is present, at least one fixed GCP must be provided; iii) that cross strip can conveniently be slimmed to save flight time and processing time; iv) that the effectiveness of GNSS deteriorate as the block shape slims out.

Accurate image-based measurement based on UAV data is attracting attention in various applications. While the external accuracy of the UAV image blocks could be mainly affected by object-space information like number and distribution of ground control points and RTK-GNSS accuracy, its internal accuracy highly depends on camera specifications, flight height, data capturing setup and accuracy of scale estimation. For many small-scale projects accurate local measurements are highly demanded. This necessitates high internal accuracy of images block which could be transferred from model space to object space by accurate estimation of the scale parameter. This research aims at improving the internal accuracy of UAV image blocks using low-altitude flight(s) over small parts of the project area without using any ground control points. Possible further improvement by using calibrated scale-bars which serve as scale-constraints is also investigated. To this end, different scenarios of the flight configuration and distance measurements in the two photogrammetric blocks are also considered and the results are analyzed. Our investigations show 50% accuracy improvement achieved by performing local flights over small parts of the scene, given that RTK information is available. Moreover, adding accurate scale-bars increased the accuracy improvement to 67%. Furthermore, when RTK information is not available, adding local low-altitude flights and scale-bars decrease the error of local distance measurement form 1–3 meters to less than 4 centimeters.

The possibility of equipping UAVs with lightweight GNSS receivers in order to estimate the camera position within a photogrammetric block allows for a reduction of the number of Ground Control Points (GCP), saving time during the field work and decreasing operational costs. Additionally, this makes it possible to build photogrammetric models even in morphologically complex areas or in emergency situations. This work is proposing a non-intrusive and low-cost procedure to retrieve the coordinates of the camera projection centre with decimetric accuracy. The method was designed and tested with the quadcopter DJI Matrice 210 V2 drone equipped with a DJI ZENMUSE X5S camera and an Emlid reach M, a low-cost, single-frequency (L1) GNSS receiver. GNSS observations are post-processed in PPK in order to obtain the UAV trajectory. Synchronization between the camera and the GNSS receiver is achieved by looking at the camera triggering timestamps in flight telemetry data, without requiring an electronic connection between camera and the GNSS that may be troublesome with commercial UAVs. Two surveys were carried out, respectively to calibrate and validate the procedure. The validation test evidenced the possibility of obtaining the coordinates of the camera projection centres with decimetric accuracy. The centre of projections can then be employed for GNSS-assisted aerial triangulation as input of the bundle block adjustment. Provided that at least one GCP is used, it is possible to reach centimetric accuracy on the ground.

For the difficulty of boundary-fitting in region-based algorithms, a region adaptive adjustment strategy based on information entropy is proposed for remote sensing image segmentation. Considering the characteristics of imperfect blocks that cover two homogeneous regions, a selection factor constructed by the spectral coefficient of variation and the information entropy of prior probability representing neighborhood constraint is designed to find the imperfect blocks. Then, the selected imperfect block is split into four equal parts, and new blocks enjoy the same membership as the original block. The model parameters are updated based on the current tessellation. If the fuzzy clustering objective function decrease, the split operation is certainly accepted, otherwise, it will be accepted with a certain probability to avoid local optimum. Finally, the experiments on simulated and multi-spectral remote sensing images show that the proposed strategy can accurately locate the imperfect blocks and effectively fit the boundary of homogeneous regions.

To improve effectiveness of ASP flooding, it is necessary to establish a reliable parameter design and tracking adjustment method to monitor the process of oil displacement. A differential wide field electromagnetic method was proposed and applied to the ASP displacement monitoring test in a block of the Daqing Oilfield. In the process of ASP flooding, the electromagnetic field was measured many times. The data acquired before the ASP flooding were set as the background field, and the resistivity model was obtained by inversion. Then, the resistivity data were calibrated by logging data and the resistivity model was established. Finally, the range and front of ASP flooding were deduced with the residual gradient from the spatial domain first-order difference of the resistivity model. Production data of well groups in this block have proved that this method can work out the range and front of ASP flooding accurately, providing support for optimization of ASP flooding parameters.

The growing deployment of multi-head camera systems encouraged the emergence of specific processing algorithms, able to face the challenges posed by slanted view geometry. Such multi-camera systems are rigidly tied by their manufacturers hence the exploitation of this internal constraint should be further exploited. Several approaches have been proposed to deal with orientation constraints, with the aim of reducing the number of unknowns, computational time and possibly improve the accuracy. In this paper we compare the results provided by publicly available implementations in order to further investigate the advantages of enforcing relative orientation constraints for aerial and terrestrial triangulation of multi-head camera systems. Data from a Leica CityMapper and a Stereopolis-Ladybug are considered, reporting how constrained solution can improve accuracy with respect to traditional (unconstrained) bundle block adjustment solutions.

3D modeling and DEM results have played an important role in economic construction, national defense construction, social development, and ecological protection. And the regional network adjustment is the basic work of DEM, and 3D modeling. In order to ensure the quality of the following results, this paper selects the regional network adjustment results of the ZY3 stereo satellite image and puts forward the test method of the regional network adjustment results from the inspection content. Meanwhile, the northwest of Africa is selected as the test area, and the inspection contents and methods proposed in this paper are verified. The inspection results show that the quality problems existing in the adjustment results of the regional network can be effectively checked. It has a certain reference function to the quality problem of the production process.

In this paper, we introduce a new, single-component model for maintenance optimization under time-varying costs, specifically oriented at offshore wind turbine maintenance. We extend the standard age replacement policy (ARP), block replacement policy (BRP) and modified block replacement policy (MBRP) to address time-varying costs. We prove that an optimal maintenance policy under time-varying costs is a time-dependent ARP policy. Via a discretization of time, the optimal time-dependent ARP can be found using a linear programming formulation. We also present mixed integer linear programming models for parameter optimization of BRP and MBRP. We present a business case and apply our policies for maintenance planning of a wind turbine gearbox and show that we can achieve savings up-to 23%.

The Sample Adaptive Offset (SAO) filter has been introduced in HEVC to reduce general coding and banding artefacts in the reconstructed pictures, in complement to the De-Blocking Filter (DBF) which reduces artifacts at block boundaries specifically. The new video compression standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC) reduces the BD-rate by about 36% at the same reconstruction quality compared to HEVC. It implements an additional new in-loop Adaptive Loop Filter (ALF) on top of the DBF and the SAO filter, the latter remaining unchanged compared to HEVC. However, the relative performance of SAO in VVC has been lowered significantly. In this paper, it is proposed to revisit the SAO filter using Neural Networks (NN). The general principles of the SAO are kept, but the a-priori classification of SAO is replaced with a set of neural networks that determine which reconstructed samples should be corrected and in which proportion. Similarly to the original SAO, some parameters are determined at the encoder side and encoded per CTU. The average BD-rate gain of the proposed SAO improves VVC by at least 2.3% in Random Access while the overall complexity is kept relatively small compared to other NN-based methods.

Number-theoretic transforms (NTTs) have been applied in the fragile watermarking of digital images. A block-parallel systolic-array architecture is proposed for watermarking based on the 2-D special Hartley NTT (HNTT). The proposed core employs two 2-D special HNTT hardware cores, each using digital arithmetic over $\mathrm{GF}(3)$, and processes $4\times4$ blocks of pixels in parallel every clock cycle. Prototypes are operational on a Xilinx Sx35-10ff668 FPGA device. The maximum estimated throughput of the FPGA circuit is 100 million $4\times4$ HNTT fragile watermarked blocks per second, when clocked at 100 MHz. Potential applications exist in high-traffic back-end servers dealing with large amounts of protected digital images requiring authentication, in remote-sensing for high-security surveillance applications, in real-time video processing of information of a sensitive nature or matters of national security, in video/photographic content management of corporate clients, in authenticating multimedia for the entertainment industry, in the authentication of electronic evidence material, and in real-time news streaming., 11 pages, 4 figures

In the process industry, fault monitoring related to output is an important step to ensure product quality and improve economic benefits. In order to distinguish the influence of input variables on the output more accurately, this paper introduces a subalgorithm of fault-unrelated block partition into the prototype knockoff filter (PKF) algorithm for its improvement. The improved PKF algorithm can divide the input data into three blocks: fault-unrelated block, output-related block, and output-unrelated block. Removing the data of fault-unrelated blocks can greatly reduce the difficulty of fault monitoring. This paper proposes a feature selection based on the Laplacian Eigen maps and sparse regression algorithm for output-unrelated blocks. The algorithm has the ability to detect faults caused by variables with small contribution to variance and proves the descent of the algorithm from a theoretical point of view. The output relation block is monitored by the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno method. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed fault detection method is verified by the recognized Eastman process data in Tennessee.

The number of mitotic tumor cells detected in each slide is one of the key indicators of breast cancer prognosis. However, accurate mitotic cell counts are still a difficult problem for pathologists and related experts. Traditional methods use manual design algorithms to extract features of mitotic cells, and most methods rely on sliding windows to achieve pixel-level classification through deep learning. However, the complex background and high resolution of pathological images make the above methods time-consuming and ineffective. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a new cascaded convolutional neural network UBCNN (cascaded CNN based on UNet), which consists of three parts: semantic segmentation and classification to detect mitosis. First, we use an improved UNet ++ segmentation network to locate the candidate set of mitotic targets. Secondly, an adequately labeled cell nucleus data set is sent to an improved two-dimensional VNet network, and the cell nucleus is located by means of semantic segmentation to obtain accurate image blocks of mitotic and non-mitotic cells. Finally, the obtained cell image block is used to train a convolutional neural network to achieve binary classification, and the candidate set area is screened to retain the final result of mitosis cells. This paper verifies the detection effect of the above-mentioned cascade detection algorithm on the ICPR 2012 and 2014 mitosis automatic detection competition data sets. The evaluation indicators include accuracy, recall and F-score. Our cascade detection algorithm based on segmentation and classification reached 0.831 on the ICPR 2012 data set and 0.576 on the ICPR 2014 data set. Compared with other existing algorithms, the detection effect was improved, which was very competitive.

As a typical fine-grained image recognition task, flower category recognition is one of the most popular research topics in the field of computer vision and forestry informatization. Although the image recognition method based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNNs) has achieved acceptable performance on natural scene image, there are still shortcomings such as lack of training samples, intra-class similarity and low accuracy in flowers category recognition. In this paper, we study deep learning-based flowers' category recognition problem, and propose a novel attention-driven deep learning model to solve it. Specifically, since training the deep learning model usually requires massive training samples, we perform image augmentation for the training sample by using image rotation and cropping. The augmented images and the original image are merged as a training set. Then, inspired by the mechanism of human visual attention, we propose a visual attention-driven deep residual neural network, which is composed of multiple weighted visual attention learning blocks. Each visual attention learning block is composed by a residual connection and an attention connection to enhance the learning ability and discriminating ability of the whole network. Finally, the model is training in the fusion training set and recognize flowers in the testing set. We verify the performance of our new method on public Flowers 17 dataset and it achieves the recognition accuracy of 85.7%.

One-to-many transfers in a fast and efficient manner are essential to meet the growing need for duplicating, migrating, or sharing bulk data among servers in a datacenter and across geographically distributed datacenters. Some existing works utilize multiple multicast trees for a one-to-many transfer request to increase network link utilization and its transfer throughput. However, since those schemes do not fully utilize the max-flow value of transmission from a single sender to each recipient, there is room for each recipient to retrieve data more quickly. Therefore, assuming fully-controlled networks with full-duplex links, we pose a problem to find a set of multicast flows with an allocation of block-wise transmissions by which each of multiple recipients with diverse max-flow values from the sender can utilize its own max-flow value. Based on that, assuming a sender-side coding capability on file blocks, we design a schedule of block transmissions over multiple phases by which each recipient can achieve a lower-bound of its file retrieval completion time, i.e., the file size divided by its own max-flow value. This paper presents the coded Multipath Multicast (Coded-MPMC) for one-to-many transfers with heuristic procedures to find a desired set of multicast flows on which block transmissions are scheduled. Through extensive simulations on large-scale real-world network topologies and different types of randomly-generated synthetic topologies, the proposed method is shown to design a desired schedule efficiently. A preliminary implementation on OpenFlow is also reported to show the fundamental feasibility of Coded-MPMC.

Background Liver cancer is the sixth most common cancer worldwide. It is mostly diagnosed with a computed tomography scan. Nowadays deep learning methods have been used for the segmentation of the liver and its tumor from the computed tomography (CT) scan images. This research mainly focused on segmenting liver and tumor from the abdominal CT scan images using a deep learning method and minimizing the effort and time used for a liver cancer diagnosis. The algorithm is based on the original UNet architecture. But, here in this paper, the numbers of filters on each convolutional block were reduced and new batch normalization and a dropout layer were added after each convolutional block of the contracting path. Results Using this algorithm a dice score of 0.96, 0.74, and 0.63 were obtained for liver segmentation, segmentation of tumors from the liver, and the segmentation of tumor from abdominal CT scan images respectively. The segmentation results of liver and tumor from the liver showed an improvement of 0.01 and 0.11 respectively from other works. Conclusion This work proposed a liver and a tumor segmentation method using a UNet architecture as a baseline. Modification regarding the number of filters and network layers were done on the original UNet model to reduce the network complexity and improve segmentation performance. A new class balancing method is also introduced to minimize the class imbalance problem. Through these, the algorithm attained better segmentation results and showed good improvement. However, it faced difficulty in segmenting small and irregular tumors.

Various strategies are available to construct iteratively a common fixed point of nonexpansive operators by activating only a block of operators at each iteration. In the more challenging class of composite fixed point problems involving operators that do not share common fixed points, current methods require the activation of all the operators at each iteration, and the question of maintaining convergence while updating only blocks of operators is open. We propose a method that achieves this goal and analyze its asymptotic behavior. Weak, strong, and linear convergence results are established by exploiting a connection with the theory of concentrating arrays. Applications to several nonlinear and nonsmooth analysis problems are presented, ranging from monotone inclusions and inconsistent feasibility problems, to variational inequalities and minimization problems arising in data science.

Robust encryption techniques require heavy computational capability and consume large amount of memory which are unaffordable for resource constrained IoT devices and Cyber-Physical Systems with an inclusion of general-purpose data manipulation tasks. Many encryption techniques have been introduced to address the inability of such devices, lacking in robust security provision at low cost. This article presents an encryption technique, implemented on a resource constrained IoT device (AVR ATmega2560) through utilizing fast execution and less memory consumption properties of curve25519 in a novel and efficient lightweight hash function. The hash function utilizes GMP library for multi-precision arithmetic calculations and pre-calculated curve points to devise a good cipher block using ECDH based key exchange protocols and large random prime number generator function.

Flip buckets are among one of the most common types of energy dissipaters, especially for dams. The scouring phenomenon occurs when falling jets hit the river bed, and A-Jack concrete block armors can be used as an effective way to control such a phenomenon. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the stability of sediment particles using A-Jack concrete block armors. In this regard, the general form of the incipient motion and incipient failure of A-Jack armor were extracted based on dimensional analysis and particle stability analysis. In these analyses, the dimensionless parameter of stability number denoted by SN is a function of other variables. The results of different physical models for different hydraulic conditions and sediment sizes are evaluated. Variability of SN related to each variable is considered, and linear and non-linear models for prediction of breakage conditions of the A-Jack block are derived. Using the experimental results, several empirical relations were developed to predict the incipient motion and incipient failure for different protection alternatives under different conditions of A-Jack block. By defining the bed scour as a criterion for the stability of A-Jack block, a design relation was also proposed to determine the required block size. Other topics investigated and discussed in this paper include effects of size and type of A-jacks as well as criteria for a gravel filter.

Currently, space debris represents a threat for satellites and space-based operations, both in-orbit and during the launching process. The yearly increase in space debris represents a serious concern to major space agencies leading to the development of dedicated space programs to deal with this issue. Ground-based radars can detect Earth orbiting debris down to a few square centimeters and therefore constitute a major building block of a space debris monitoring system. New radar sensors are required in Europe to enhance capabilities and availability of its small radar network capable of tracking and surveying space objects and to respond to the debris increase expected from the New Space economy activities. This article presents ATLAS, a new tracking radar system for debris detection located in Portugal. It starts by an extensive technical description of all the system components followed by a study that estimates its future performance. A section dedicated to waveform design is also presented, since the system allows the usage of several types of pulse modulation schemes such as LFM and phase coded modulations while enabling the development and testing of more advanced ones. By presenting an architecture that is highly modular with fully digital signal processing, ATLAS establishes a platform for fast and easy development, research and innovation. The system follows the use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf technologies and Open Systems which is unique among current radar systems., Comment: Reviewed; Accepted for Publication at Signals, MDPI, ISSN 2624-6120, February 2021; 16 pages, 8 Figures

Background The high variability in envelope regions of some viruses such as HIV allow the virus to establish infection and to escape subsequent immune surveillance. This variability, as well as increasing incorporation of N-linked glycosylation sites, is fundamental to this evasion. It also creates difficulties for multiple sequence alignment methods (MSA) that provide the first step in their analysis. Existing MSA tools often fail to properly align highly variable HIV envelope sequences requiring extensive manual editing that is impractical with even a moderate number of these variable sequences. Results We developed an automated library building tool NGlyAlign, that organizes similar N-linked glycosylation sites as block constraints and statistically conserved global sites as single site constraints to automatically enforce partial columns in consistency-based MSA methods such as Dialign. This combined method accurately aligns variable HIV-1 envelope sequences. We tested the method on two datasets: a set of 156 founder and chronic gp160 HIV-1 subtype B sequences as well as a set of reference sequences of gp120 in the highly variable region 1. On measures such as entropy scores, sum of pair scores, column score, and similarity heat maps, NGlyAlign+Dialign proved superior against methods such as T-Coffee, ClustalOmega, ClustalW, Praline, HIValign and Muscle. The method is scalable to large sequence sets producing accurate alignments without requiring manual editing. As well as this application to HIV, our method can be used for other highly variable glycoproteins such as hepatitis C virus envelope. Conclusions NGlyAlign is an automated tool for mapping and building glycosylation motif libraries to accurately align highly variable regions in HIV sequences. It can provide the basis for many studies reliant on single robust alignments. NGlyAlign has been developed as an open-source tool and is freely available at https://github.com/UNSW-Mathematical-Biology/NGlyAlign_v1.0 .

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the Manufacturers pallet-loading problem (MPLP), by loading identical small boxes onto a rectangle pallet to maximise the pallet utilization percentage while reducing the Complexity of loading.Design/methodology/approach: In this research a Block approach is proposed using a Mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model that generates layouts of an improved structure, which is very effective due to its properties in grouping boxes in a certain orientation along the X and Y axis. Also, a novel complexity index is introduced to compare the complexity for different pallet loading, which have the same pallet size but different box arrangements.Findings: The proposed algorithm has been tested against available data-sets in literature and the complexity measure and graphical layout results clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach compared with literature Manufacturers pallet-loading problem layouts.Originality/value: This study aids real life manufactures operations when less complex operations are essential to reduce the complexity of pallet loading.

In order to maximize the resource utilization rate, it is common to adopt one-time overall deployment of well pattern to develop shale gas, and the design of horizontal well spacing is the key to the deployment of shale gas well pattern. To determine the optimal well spacing, it is not only necessary to understand both geological characteristics and drilling fracturing technology, but also take into consideration the influences of economic factors, such as gas price and cost. At present, there is no reliable method for designing the well spacing of shale-gas horizontal wells at home and abroad. In this paper, a method for analyzing the well spacing of shale-gas horizontal wells based on the integration of geology, engineering and economy was established for the first time. Then, by means of geological modeling, numerical simulation and cash flow analysis, the well spacing of shale-gas development wells in Well Block Ning 209 in the Changning–Weiyuan National Shale Gas Demonstration Area in the Sichuan Basin was comprehensively evaluated by using estimated ultimate reserve (EUR), recovery factor and internal rate of return (IRR). And the following research results were obtained. First, under the current geological, engineering and economic conditions of Well Block Ning 209, the IRR of shale gas platform development can be kept greater than 8% if the well spacing is larger than 240 m. Second, when the well spacing is controlled between 330 m and 380 m, single well EUR, recovery rate of the platform and economic benefit can be considered simultaneously. In conclusion, the research results support the formulation of the shale gas development technology policy of Well Block Ning 209 and lay a foundation for the realization of its scale efficient development of shale gas.

The spatial distribution of neutron flux or reaction rate was calculated by cell or mesh tally in traditional Monte Carlo simulation. However, either cell or mesh tally leads to the increase of memory consumption and simulation time. In this paper, the function expansion tally (FET) method was developed in Reactor Monte Carlo code RMC to solve this problem. The FET method was applied to the tallies of neutron flux distributions of uranium block and PWR fuel rod models. Legendre polynomials were used in the axial direction, while Zernike polynomials were used in the radial direction. The results of flux, calculation time and memory consumption of different expansion orders were investigated, and compared with the mesh tally. Results showed that the continuous distribution of flux can be obtained by FET method. The flux distributions were consistent with that of mesh tally, while the memory consumption and simulation time can be effectively reduced. Finally, the convergence analysis of coefficients of polynomials were performed, and the selection strategy of FET order was proposed based on the statistics uncertainty of the coefficients. The proposed method can help to determine the order of FET, which was meaningful for the efficiency and accuracy of FET method.

In this paper, we present a parallel version of the finite-element model of the Arctic Ocean (FEMAO) configured for the White Sea and based on MPI technology. This model consists of two main parts: an ocean dynamics model and a surface ice dynamics model. These parts are very different in terms of the number of computations because the complexity of the ocean part depends on the bottom depth, while that of the sea-ice component does not. In the first step, we decided to locate both submodels on the same CPU cores with a common horizontal partition of the computational domain. The model domain is divided into small blocks, which are distributed over the CPU cores using Hilbert-curve balancing. Partitioning of the model domain is static (i.e., computed during the initialization stage). There are three baseline options: a single block per core, balancing of 2D computations, and balancing of 3D computations. After showing parallel acceleration for particular ocean and ice procedures, we construct the common partition, which minimizes joint imbalance in both submodels. Our novelty is using arrays shared by all blocks that belong to a CPU core instead of allocating separate arrays for each block, as is usually done. Computations on a CPU core are restricted by the masks of non-land grid nodes and block–core correspondence. This approach allows us to implement parallel computations into the model that are as simple as when the usual decomposition to squares is used, though with advances in load balancing. We provide parallel acceleration of up to 996 cores for the model with a resolution of 500×500×39 in the ocean component and 43 sea-ice scalars, and we carry out a detailed analysis of different partitions on the model runtime.

The automated interpretation of rock structure can improve the efficiency, accuracy, and consistency of the geological risk assessment of tunnel face. Because of the high uncertainties in the geological images as a result of different regional rock types, as well as in-situ conditions (e.g., temperature, humidity, and construction procedure), previous automated methods have limited performance in classification of rock structure of tunnel face during construction. This paper presents a framework for classifying multiple rock structures based on the geological images of tunnel face using convolutional neural networks (CNN), namely Inception-ResNet-V2 (IRV2). A prototype recognition system is implemented to classify 5 types of rock structures including mosaic, granular, layered, block, and fragmentation structures. The proposed IRV2 network is trained by over 35,000 out of 42,400 images extracted from over 150 sections of tunnel faces and tested by the remaining 7400 images. Furthermore, different hyperparameters of the CNN model are introduced to optimize the most efficient algorithm parameter. Among all the discussed models, i.e., ResNet-50, ResNet-101, and Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet-V2 exhibits the best performance in terms of various indicators, such as precision, recall, F-score, and testing time per image. Meanwhile, the model trained by a large database can obtain the object features more comprehensively, leading to higher accuracy. Compared with the original image classification method, the sub-image method is closer to the reality considering both the accuracy and the perspective of error divergence. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is optimal and efficient for automated classification of rock structure using the geological images of the tunnel face.