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The cooperative control in complex multitasks using unmanned aerial vehicle and unmanned ground vehicle (UAV/UGV) is an important and challenging issue in the multirobot cooperative field. The main goal of the task studied in this paper is to minimize the time and energy consumed by the system to complete the assigned tasks. In this paper, a complex multitask problem using the hybrid UAV/UGV system is studied, which is divided into three stages, namely, the stage of finding the optimal locations of the relay stations for the UGV; the stage of solving the path planning problem for the UGV; and the stage of the task assignment for multi-UAVs. Furthermore, an improved integrated method is proposed to deal with the cooperative control problems in these three stages. Firstly, an adaptive clustering method is proposed to determine the locations of the UGV relay stations, and then an improved cuckoo search algorithm is used to find the shortest path for the UGV. Finally, a grouping method is presented to solve the multitask allocation problem of UAVs, based on an improved dynamic programming algorithm. In addition, some simulations are carried out and the results show that the proposed method has better performance when it comes to the time and energy consumption and can effectively guide the hybrid UAV/UGV system to carry out the complex multitasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: With the rapidly increasing population of elderly people, dental extraction in elderly individuals with cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) has become quite common. The issue of how to assure the safety of elderly patients with CVDs undergoing dental extraction has perplexed dentists and internists for many years. And it is important to derive an appropriate risk prediction tool for this population.Objectives: The aim of this retrospective, observational study was to establish and validate a prediction model based on the random forest (RF) algorithm for the risk of cardiac complications of dental extraction in elderly patients with CVDs.Methods: Between August 2017 and May 2018, a total of 603 patients who fulfilled the inclusion criteria were used to create a training set. An independent test set contained 230 patients between June 2018 and July 2018. Data regarding clinical parameters, laboratory tests, clinical examinations before dental extraction, and 1-week follow-up were retrieved. Predictors were identified by using logistic regression (LR) with penalized LASSO (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) variable selection. Then, a prediction model was constructed based on the RF algorithm by using a 5-fold cross-validation method.Results: The training set, based on 603 participants, including 282 men and 321 women, had an average participant age of 72.38 ± 8.31 years. Using feature selection methods, 11 predictors for risk of cardiac complications were screened out. When the RF model was constructed, its overall classification accuracy was 0.82 at the optimal cutoff value of 18.5%. In comparison to the LR model, the RF model showed a superior predictive performance. The AUROC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) scores of the RF and LR models were 0.83 and 0.80, respectively, in the independent test set. The AUPRC (area under the precision-recall curve) scores of the RF and LR models were 0.56 and 0.35, respectively, in the independent test set.Conclusion: The RF-based prediction model is expected to be applicable for preoperative clinical assessment for preventing cardiac complications in elderly patients with CVDs undergoing dental extraction. The findings may aid physicians and dentists in making more informed recommendations to prevent cardiac complications in this patient population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an accurate and robust algorithm for self-collision detection in deformable models. Our method is based on the normal cone test and is suitable for both discrete and continuous collision queries on triangular meshes. We propose a novel means of employing surface normal cones and binormal cones to perform the normal cone test. Moreover, we combine our culling criteria with bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) and present a hierarchical traversal scheme. Unlike the previous BVH-based dual-cone method, our method can reliably detect all self-collisions, and it achieves appreciable speedup over other high-level culling methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An efficient algorithm based on the contour integral method (CIM) is presented in this letter for the modeling of lossy multiconductor transmission lines. Different from the volume integral equation, the CIM only discretizes the contour of the cross section of each conductor, which significantly reduces the number of unknowns in the resultant system equations. The solution of the CIM is accelerated by the hierarchical-matrix ( \mathcal H-matrix) algorithm for the extraction of the per-unit-length resistance and inductance parameters of massively coupled transmission lines. The procedures for the \mathcal H-matrix-based solution are optimized to keep its optimal computational complexity. The numerical results from the proposed method agree well with those from the commercial software. The complexities of CPU time and memory cost for the construction of the \mathcal H-matrices are both $O(N\log {}N)$, and the complexity of the solution for parameter extraction is $O(N\log ^2{}N)$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reliable and efficient identification of spectrum access opportunities is crucial for cognitive radio ad hoc networks (CRAHNs). A promising method to improve sensing reliability is CSS, where sensing data from multiple secondary users is combined to facilitate decision making. However, the performance of CSS algorithms in CRAHNs is limited by two challenges. First, the spectrum occupancy status in CRAHNs is spatially heterogeneous. Second, malfunctioning nodes or malicious attackers may falsify the true sensing results. To handle both these challenges, inspired by image segmentation in computer vision, we propose a novel graph-cut CSS algorithm. This algorithm is robust in the presence of false sensing data reports, computationally efficient (with polynomial worst case time complexity), and can be implemented distributively. Theoretically, it can be regarded as a new data fusion scheme that is generalized from classical likelihood ratio tests when sensing information is fully exploited, or from the majority fusion rule, when thresholded sensing information is utilized. Introduction [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A novel method is proposed for facial expression recognition combined curvelet transform with improved support vector machine (SVM) based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). The whole process is as follows. Firstly, as wavelet transform in two-dimension is good at isolating the discontinuities at edge points and only captures limited directional information, the curvelet transform is applied to extract facial expression feature substitutively. However, the amount of curvelet coefficients obtained in the first stage is too huge to be classified, therefore, all of the coefficients are sorted descendantly and the former larger 5 or 10% are remained while the others abandoned to reduce the dimension. Finally, PSO algorithm is employed to search for the reasonable parameters of SVM to increase classification accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can form effective and reasonable facial expression feature, and achieve good recognition accuracy and robustness, which is competent for spirit states detection of operators to decrease defect rate of production. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents a robust algorithm to recover high-frequency information from compressed low-resolution (LR) video sequences. Previous super-resolution (SR) approaches have succeeded in resolution enhancement when the motion in the LR sequence is simple. However, when the motion is complex, new artifacts will be introduced in the SR processing. To solve this problem, we develop a robust Bayesian SR algorithm with two steps. We first isolate the frames individually to get their corresponding initial SR solutions within the Bayesian framework. Secondly, with a robust cost function to reject outliers and noise, final SR images are achieved with multiple LR frames. In the mean time, we impose the constraint that the distribution of high-resolution (HR) image gradient should be equal to one of the corresponding decompressed LR images to sharpen the edges of the results. As a result of these steps, we are able to produce high-quality deblurred results, which show a suppressing of high-frequency artifacts and less ringing artifacts, with a higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We present a hybrid algorithm to compute the convex hull of points in three or higher dimensional spaces. Our formulation uses a GPU-based interior point filter to cull away many of the points that do not lie on the boundary. The convex hull of remaining points is computed on a CPU. The GPU-based filter proceeds in an incremental manner and computes a pseudo-hull that is contained inside the convex hull of the original points. The pseudo-hull computation involves only localized operations and maps well to GPU architectures. Furthermore, the underlying approach extends to high dimensional point sets and deforming points. In practice, our culling filter can reduce the number of candidate points by two orders of magnitude. We have implemented the hybrid algorithm on commodity GPUs, and evaluated its performance on several large point sets. In practice, the GPU-based filtering algorithm can cull up to 85M interior points per second on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 and the hybrid algorithm improves the overall performance of convex hull computation by 10–27 times (for static point sets) and 22–46 times (for deforming point sets). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Based on the analysis of feature modeling activities in a collaborative environment, a definition and a classification of concurrency conflicts have been presented. A feature adjustment method is proposed to solve the conflicts, an enhanced naming mechanism for the collaborative feature modeling to preserve the design intentions, and a process for the non-locked multi-client collaborative design. The algorithms have been implemented in a prototype system integrating C++, Java3D and VRML, and CORBA technologies. Flexibility and efficiency in collaborative feature modeling environment have been achieved in our system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

With the continuing advancements in technologies (such as machine to machine, wireless telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis), the Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect everything for information sharing and intelligent decision-making. Swarm intelligence (SI) provides the possibility of SI behavior through collaboration in individuals that have limited or no intelligence. Its potential parallelism and distribution characteristics can be used to realize global optimization and solve nonlinear complex problems. This paper reviews representative SI algorithms and summarizes their applications in the IoT. The main focus consists in the analysis of SI-enabled applications to wireless sensor network (WSN) and discussion of related research problems in the WSN. Also, we concluded SI-based applications in other IoT fields, such as SI in UAV-aided wireless network. Finally, possible research prospects and future trends are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In practical applications, the assumption of omnidirectional elements is not effective in general, which leads to the direction-dependent mutual coupling (MC). Under this condition, the performance of traditional calibration algorithms suffers. This paper proposes a new self-calibration method based on the time-frequency distributions (TFDs) in the presence of direction-dependent MC. Firstly, the time-frequency (TF) transformation is used to calculate the space-time-frequency distributions (STFDs) matrix of received signals. After that, the estimated steering vector and corresponding noise subspace are estimated by the steps of noise removing, single-source TF points extracting and clustering. Then according to the transformation relationship between the MC coefficients, steering vector and MC matrix, we deduce a set of linear equations. Finally, with two-step alternating iteration, the equations are solved by least square method in order to estimate DOA and MC coefficients. Simulations results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve direction-dependent MC self-calibration and outperforms the existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon excitation by a surface magnetic current, a power/ground plate-pair supports only $\mathrm{TM}^{z}$ modes. This means that the magnetic field has only azimuthal components permitting a simple but effective domain decomposition method (DDM) to be used. In the proximity of an antipad, field interactions are rigorously modeled by a quasi-two-dimensional (Q-2D) finite element method (FEM) making use of three-dimensional (3D) triangular prism mesh elements. Since high-order $\mathrm{TM}^{z}$ modes are confined in the close proximity of the antipad, field interactions in the region away from the antipad only involve the fundamental mode and are rigorously modeled by a 2D FEM. This approach reduces 3D computation domain into a hybrid 2D/Q-2D domain. The discretization of this hybrid domain results in a global matrix system consisting of two globally coupled matrix equations pertinent to 2D and Q-2D domains. In this article, these two matrix equations are “decoupled” using a Riemann solver and the information exchange between the two domains is facilitated using numerical flux. The resulting decoupled two matrix equations are iteratively solved using the Gauss–Seidel algorithm. The accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed DDM are verified by four representative examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common chronic joint disease and how ferroptosis contributes to OA has garnered much attention recently. Bioinformatics promoted the discovery of ferroptosis-related biomarkers for OA. But since OA is a whole-joint disease, sensitive biomarkers for OA are still limited. We herein focused on subchondral bone, a joint component often-ignored by existing bioinformatic reports, to identify ferroptosis-related diagnostic biomarkers for OA. Method: Microarray datasets GSE51588 and GSE55457 were downloaded from Gene Expression Omnibus database. Ferroptosis-related differential expression genes (Ferr-DEGs) between OA and normal samples were identified and their functional enrichment was analyzed. Common genes for OA diagnosis were selected from Ferr-DEGs using the combination of SVM-RFE, LASSO regression, and RandomForest machine learning algorithms. Common genes' diagnostic value was verified by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and their association with immune infiltration was analyzed by CIBERSORT. Finally, candidate gene's expression was verified in chondrocytes from OA patients and in an in vitro IL-1β-induced OA model, by RT-PCR. Results: Two ferroptosis-related genes, LPCAT3 and PGD, were identified as OA diagnostic biomarkers and confirmed by ROC diagnostic test. The association of LPCAT3 and PGD with the infiltration of several types of immune cells was identified. The decreased expression of LPCAT3 and PGD was both confirmed in OA chondrocytes and IL-1β-induced OA condition. Conclusions: We identified ferroptosis-related genes LPCAT3 and PGD as potential diagnostic biomarkers for OA, which may offer insight into the role of ferroptosis in OA and provides useful information for the diagnosis and treatment of OA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]