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Estimation of on-off timing of human skeletal muscles during movement is an ongoing issue in surface electromyography (sEMG) signal processing for relevant clinical applications. Widely used single threshold methods still rely on the experience of the operator to manually establish a threshold level. In this paper, a novel approach to address this issue is presented. Based on the generalized likelihood ratio test, the maximum likelihood (ML) method is improved with an adaptive threshold technique based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimate in the initial time before accurate sEMG analyses. The dependence of optimal threshold on SNR is determined by minimizing the onset/offset estimate error on a large set of simulated signals with well-known signal parameters. Accuracy and precision of the algorithm were assessed by using a set of simulated signals and real sEMG signals recorded from two healthy subjects during elbow flexion-extension movements with and without workload. Comparison with traditional algorithms shows that with a moderate increase in the computational effort the ML algorithm performs well even for low levels of EMG activity, while the proposed adaptive method is most robust with respect to variations in SNRs. Also, we discuss the results of analyzing the sEMG recordings from the selected proximal muscles of the upper limb in two hemiparetic subjects. The detection algorithm is automatic and user-independent, managing the detection of both onset and offset activation, and is applicable in presence of noise allowing use by skilled and unskilled operators alike.

We propose a two-dimensional modified min-sum algorithm for the LDPC codes in the fifth generation (5G) networks standard to approach the error performance of the sum-product algorithm (SPA). In the proposed decoding algorithm, we adopt a partial self-correction method followed by message amplification to improve the reliability of the variable-to-check (V2C) messages. To further approach the performance of the maximum likelihood decoding for 5G short LDPC codes, we propose an enhanced quasi-maximum likelihood (EQML) decoding method. The proposed decoding method performs multiple rounds of decoding tests once the first decoding attempt fails, where the decoder inputs of the selected unreliable variable nodes are modified in each decoding test. A novel node selection method based on the sign fluctuation of V2C messages is proposed for the EQML decoding method. We also present a partial pruning stopping (PPS) rule to reduce the decoding complexity by deactivating part of the decoding tests once a valid codeword is found. A lower bound on the error performance is also derived by using the semi-analytical method. Simulation results show that the EQML decoding method outperforms the SPA with the same decoding complexity and other QML decoding methods, and it approaches the Polyanskiy-Poor-Verdú bound within 0.4 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been shown to be of great value to the deployment of smart industrial environment. With the immense growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, dynamic spectrum sharing is introduced, envisaged as a promising solution to the spectrum shortage in IIoT. Meanwhile, cyber–physical safety issue remains to be a great concern for the reliable operation of IIoT system. In this article, we consider the dynamic spectrum access in IIoT under a received signal strength-based adversarial localization attack. We employ a practical and effective power perturbation approach to mitigate the localization threat on the IoT devices and cast the privacy-preserving spectrum sharing problem as a stochastic channel selection game. To address the randomness induced by the power perturbation approach, we develop a two-timescale distributed learning algorithm that converges almost surely to the set of correlated equilibria of the game. The numerical results show the convergence of the algorithm and corroborate that the design of two-timescale learning process effectively alleviates the network throughput degradation brought by the power perturbation procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional sparsity-driven synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery often encounters the sensitivity of nonsystematic errors and highly computational load. In this article, a cooperative multitask learning algorithm is proposed based on an autocalibrated alternating direction method of multipliers (AutoCal-ADMM) framework, by which the sparse feature of the scenes/targets-of-interests can be enhanced, and simultaneously the nonmodeled motion errors of either airborne platform or moving target can be autocalibrated in a synergistic manner. By leveraging the entropy and sparsity regularizers in the AutoCal-ADMM framework, the proposed algorithm is particularly tailored to obtain focused SAR images with enhanced sparsity. A reasonable surrogate function is designed for a convex objective function, so that an analytical proximal mapping of the entropy regularizer can be derived. Both nonsystematic range cell migration (NsRCM) and azimuthal phase errors (APEs) are concerned and coherently compensated. A linear and complex soft-thresholding operator is introduced for the sparse solution. The proposed algorithm is capable of greatly alleviating “error propagation” between multiple tasks, where an optima balance between the sparse and focusing features can be achieved. Superior performance in terms of convergence and efficiency can be guaranteed. Both raw SAR and canonical ground moving target imaging (GMTIm) data sets are processed and comparisons with conventions are performed, where the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed AutoCal-ADMM algorithm are validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the resource allocation and trajectory design for secure unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled communication systems, where multiple multi-purpose UAV base stations are dispatched to provide secure communications to multiple legitimate ground users (GUs) in the existence of multiple eavesdroppers (Eves). Specifically, by leveraging orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), active UAV base stations can communicate to their desired ground users via the assigned subcarriers while idle UAV base stations can serve as jammer simultaneously for communication security provisioning. To achieve fairness in secure communication, we maximize the average minimum secrecy rate per user by jointly optimizing the communication/jamming subcarrier allocation policy and the trajectory of UAVs, while taking into account the constraints on the minimum safety distance among multiple UAVs, the maximum cruising speed, the initial/final locations, and the existence of cylindrical no-fly zones (NFZs). The design is formulated as a mixed integer non-convex optimization problem which is generally intractable. Subsequently, a computationally-efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain a suboptimal solution. Simulation results illustrate that the performance of the proposed iterative algorithm can significantly improve the average minimum secrecy rate compared to various baseline schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we construct binary spatially coupled (SC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes based on Euclidean geometry (EG) LDPC codes for storage applications, where high error correction capability, extremely low uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER), and low decoding complexity are required. We propose a systematic way to construct the families of SC LDPC codes from (m,2^s) EG LDPC codes, which are termed EG-SC LDPC codes. In the construction method, we propose a 2-D edge-spreading process to construct the base matrix of EG-SC LDPC codes, which consists of matrix unwrapping and periodically time-varying of a protograph. A lower bound on the rank of the parity-check matrix of an EG-SC LDPC code is derived. We evaluate the error rate performance of the constructed EG-SC LDPC codes by using a weighted bit-flipping decoding algorithm for its low decoding complexity. Numerical results show that the UBER performance of the constructed EG-SC LDPC codes is superior to that of their EG LDPC code counterparts, and show no error floor compared with the constructed protograph SC LDPC codes and regular LDPC codes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Elastic partitioning of computations between mobile devices and cloud is an important and challenging research topic for mobile cloud computing. Existing works focus on the single-user computation partitioning, which aims to optimize the application completion time for one particular single user. These works assume that the cloud always has enough resources to execute the computations immediately when they are offloaded to the cloud. However, this assumption does not hold for large scale mobile cloud applications. In these applications, due to the competition for cloud resources among a large number of users, the offloaded computations may be executed with certain scheduling delay on the cloud. Single user partitioning that does not take into account the scheduling delay on the cloud may yield significant performance degradation. In this paper, we study, for the first time, multi-user computation partitioning problem (MCPP), which considers the partitioning of multiple users’ computations together with the scheduling of offloaded computations on the cloud resources. Instead of pursuing the minimum application completion time for every single user, we aim to achieve minimum average completion time for all the users, based on the number of provisioned resources on the cloud. We show that MCPP is different from and more difficult than the classical job scheduling problems. We design an offline heuristic algorithm, namely SearchAdjust, to solve MCPP. We demonstrate through benchmarks that SearchAdjust outperforms both the single user partitioning approaches and classical job scheduling approaches by 10 percent on average in terms of application delay. Based on SearchAdjust, we also design an online algorithm for MCPP that can be easily deployed in practical systems. We validate the effectiveness of our online algorithm using real world load traces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linearly constrained tensor n-rank minimization problem is an extension of matrix rank minimization. It is applicable in many fields which use the multi-way data, such as data mining, machine learning and computer vision. In this paper, we adapt operator splitting technique and convex relaxation technique to transform the original problem into a convex, unconstrained optimization problem and propose a fixed point iterative method to solve it. We also prove the convergence of the method under some assumptions. By using a continuation technique, we propose a fast and robust algorithm for solving the tensor completion problem, which is called FP-LRTC (Fixed Point for Low n-Rank Tensor Completion). Our numerical results on randomly generated and real tensor completion problems demonstrate that this algorithm is effective, especially for “easy” problems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]