A comprehensive method applying a nonlinear frequency compression (FC) as complementary to multi-band loudness compensation is proposed, which is able to improve loudness compensation and simultaneously increase high-frequency speech intelligibility for digital hearing aids. The proposed nonlinear FC (NLFC) improves the conventional methods in the aspect that the compression ratio (CR) is adjusted based on the speech intelligibility percentage in different frequency ranges. Then, an adaptive wide dynamic range compression (AWDRC) with a time-varying CR is applied to achieve adaptive loudness compensation. The experimental test results show that the mean speech identification is improved in comparison with the state-of-art methods.

This paper first reviews the state-of-the-art noise reduction methods and points out their vulnerability in noise reduction performance and speech quality, especially under the low signal-noise ratios (SNR) environments. Then this paper presents an improved perceptual multiband spectral subtraction (MBSS) noise reduction algorithm (NRA) and a novel robust voice activity detection (VAD) based on the amended sub-band SNR. The proposed SNR-based VAD can considerably increase the accuracy of discrimination between noise and speech frame. The simulation results show that the proposed NRA has better segmental SNR (segSNR) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) performance than other noise reduction algorithms especially under low SNR environments. In addition, a fully operational digital hearing aid chip is designed and fabricated in the 0.13 µm CMOS process based on the proposed NRA. The final chip implementation shows that the whole chip dissipates 1.3 mA at the 1.2 V operation. The acoustic test result shows that the maximum output sound pressure level (OSPL) is 114.6 dB SPL, the equivalent input noise is 5.9 dB SPL, and the total harmonic distortion is 2.5%. So the proposed digital hearing aid chip is a promising candidate for high performance hearing-aid systems.

A low complexity channel estimation scheme using data-dependent superimposed training (DDST) is proposed in this paper, where the pilots are inserted in more than one block, rather than the single block of the original DDST. Comparing with the original DDST (which improves the performance of channel estimation at the cost of huge computational overheads), the proposed DDST scheme improves the performance of channel estimation with only a slight increase in the consumption of computation resources. The optimal precoder is designed to minimize the data distortion caused by the rank-deficient precoding. The optimal pilots and placement are also provided to improve the performance of channel estimation. In addition, the impact of power allocation between the data and pilots on symbol detection is analyzed, the optimal power allocation scheme is derived to maximize the effective signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver. Simulation results are presented to show the computational advantage of the proposed scheme, and the advantages of the optimal pilots and power allocation scheme.

The development of the electricity market enables us to provide electricity of varied quality and price in order to fulfill power consumers' needs. Such customers choices should influence the process of adjusting power generation and spinning reserve, and, as a result, change the structure of a unit commitment optimization problem (UCP). To build a unit commitment model that considers customer choices, we employ fuzzy variables in this study to better characterize customer requirements and forecasted future power loads. To measure system reliability and determine the schedule of real power generation and spinning reserve, fuzzy Value-at-Risk (VaR) is utilized in building the model, which evaluates the peak values of power demands under given confidence levels. Based on the information obtained using fuzzy VaR, we proposed a heuristic algorithm called local convergence-averse binary particle swarm optimization (LCA-PSO) to solve the UCP. The proposed model and algorithm are used to analyze several test systems. Comparisons between the proposed algorithm and the conventional approaches show that the LCA-PSO performs better in finding the optimal solutions.

Context awareness is viewed as one of the most important goals in the pervasive computing paradigm. As one kind of context awareness, danger awareness describes and detects dangerous situations around a user, and provides services such as warning to protect the user from dangers. One important problem arising in danger-aware systems is that the description/definition of dangerous situations becomes more and more complex, since many factors have to be considered in such description, which brings a big burden to the developers/users and thereby reduces the reliability of the system. It is necessary to develop a flexible reasoning method, which can ease the description/definition of dangerous situations by reasoning dangers using limited specified/predefined contexts/rules, and increase system reliability by detecting unspecified dangerous situations. Some reasoning mechanisms based on context similarity were proposed to address the above problems. However, the current mechanisms are not so accurate in some cases, since the similarity is computed from only basic knowledge, e.g. nature property, such as material, size etc, and category information, i.e. they may cause false positive and false negative problems. To solve the above problems, in this paper we propose a new flexible and accurate method from feature point of view. Firstly, a new ontology explicitly integrating basic knowledge and danger feature is designed for computing similarity in danger-aware systems. Then a new method is proposed to compute object similarity from both basic knowledge and danger feature point of views when calculating context similarity. The method is implemented in an indoor ubiquitous test bed and evaluated through experiments. The experiment result shows that the accuracy of system can be effectively increased based on the comparison between system decision and estimation of human observers, comparing with the existing methods. And the burden of defining dangerous situations can be decreased by evaluating trade-off between the system's accuracy and burden of defining dangerous situations.

Indoor fingerprint location based on WiFi in large-scale indoor parking lots is more and more widely employed for vehicle lookup. However, the challenge is to ensure the location functionality because of the particularity and complexities of the indoor parking lot environment. To reduce the need to deploy of reference points (RPs) and the offline sampling workload, a partition-fitting fingerprint algorithm (P-FP) is proposed. To improve the location accuracy of the target, the PS-FP algorithm, a sampling importance resampling (SIR) particle filter with threshold based on P-FP, is further proposed. Firstly, the entire indoor parking lot is partitioned and the environmental coefficients of each partitioned section are gained by using the polynomial fitting model. To improve the quality of the offline fingerprint database, an error characteristic matrix is established using the difference between the fitting values and the actual measured values. Thus, the virtual RPs are deployed and C-means clustering is utilized to reduce the amount of online computation. To decrease the fluctuation of location coordinates, the SIR particle filter with a threshold setting is adopted to optimize the location coordinates. Finally, the optimal threshold value is obtained by comparing the mean location error. Test results demonstrated that PS-FP could achieve high location accuracy with few RPs and the mean location error is only about 0.7m. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) show that, using PS-FP, 98% of location errors are within 2m. Compared with the weighted K-nearest neighbors (WKNN) algorithm, the location accuracy by PS-FP exhibit an 84% improvement.

Self-updating encryption (SUE) is a new cryptographic scheme produced in the recent work of Lee, Choi, Lee, Park and Yung (Asiacrypt 2013) to achieve a time-updating mechanism for revocation. In SUE, a ciphetext and a private key are associated with the time and a user can decrypt a ciphertext only if its time is earlier than that of his private key. But one drawback is the encryption computational overhead scales with the size of the time which makes it a possible bottleneck for some applications. To address this problem, we provide a new technique for the SUE that splits the encryption algorithm into two phases: an offline phase and an online phase. In the offline phase, an intermediate ciphertext header is generated before it knows the concrete encryption time. Then an online phase is implemented to rapidly generate an SUE ciphertext header when the time becomes known by making use of the intermediate ciphertext header. In addition, two different online encryption constructions are proposed in view of different time level taking 50% as the boundary. At last, we prove the security of our scheme and provide the performance analysis which shows that the vast majority of computational overhead can be moved to the offline phase. One motivating application for this technique is resource-constrained mobile devices: the preparation work can be done when the mobile devices are plugged into a power source, then they can later rapidly perform SUE operations on the move without significantly consuming the battery.

In the field of action recognition, Spatio-Temporal Interest Points (STIPs)-based features have shown high efficiency and robustness. However, most of state-of-the-art work to describe STIPs, they typically focus on 2-dimensions (2D) images, which ignore information in 3D spatio-temporal space. Besides, the compact representation of descriptors should be considered due to the costs of storage and computational time. In this paper, a novel local descriptor named 3D Gradient LBP is proposed, which extends the traditional descriptor Local Binary Patterns (LBP) into 3D spatio-temporal space. The proposed descriptor takes advantage of the neighbourhood information of cuboids in three dimensions, which accounts for its excellent descriptive power for the distribution of grey-level space. Experiments on three challenging datasets (KTH, Weizmann and UT Interaction) validate the effectiveness of our approach in the recognition of human actions.

In this paper, the problem on secure communication based on chaos synchronization is investigated. The dual channel information transmitting technology is proposed to increase the security of secure communication system. Based on chaos synchronization, a new digital secure communication scheme is presented for a class of master-slave systems. Finally some numerical simulation examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the given results.

The complexity and scale of Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are growing as more processing elements and memory devices are implemented on chips. However, under strict power budgets, it is also critical to lower the power consumption of NoCs for the sake of energy efficiency. In this paper, we therefore present three novel input unit designs for on-chip routers attempting to shrink their power consumption while still conserving the network performance. The key idea behind our designs is to organize buffers in the input units with characteristics of the network traffic in mind; as in our observations, only a small portion of the network traffic are long packets (composed of multiple flits), which means, it is fair to implement hybrid, asymmetric and reconfigurable buffers so that they are mainly targeting at short packets (only having a single flit), hence the smaller power consumption and area overhead. Evaluations show that our hybrid, asymmetric and reconfigurable input unit designs can achieve an average reduction of energy consumption per flit by 45%, 52.3% and 56.2% under 93.6% (for hybrid designs) and 66.3% (for asymmetric and reconfigurable designs) of the original router area, respectively. Meanwhile, we only observe minor degradation in network latency (ranging from 18.4% to 1.5%, on average) with our proposals.

The image-to-image translation aims to learn a mapping between the source and target domains. For improving visual quality, the majority of previous works adopt multi-stage techniques to refine coarse results in a progressive manner. In this work, we present a novel approach for generating plausible details by only introducing a group of intermediate supervisions without cascading multiple stages. Specifically, we propose a Laplacian Pyramid Transformation Generative Adversarial Network (LapTransGAN) to simultaneously transform components in different frequencies from the source domain to the target domain within only one stage. Hierarchical perceptual and gradient penalization are utilized for learning consistent semantic structures and details at each pyramid level. The proposed model is evaluated based on various metrics, including the similarity in feature maps, reconstruction quality, segmentation accuracy, similarity in details, and qualitative appearances. Our experiments show that LapTransGAN can achieve a much better quantitative performance than both the supervised pix2pix model and the unsupervised CycleGAN model. Comprehensive ablation experiments are conducted to study the contribution of each component.

We describe a novel idea to improve machine translation by combining multiple candidate translations and extra translations. Without manual work, extra translations can be generated by identifying and hybridizing the syntactic equivalents in candidate translations. Candidate and extra translations are then combined on sentence level for better general translation performance.

Dynamic spectrum access is the key approach in cognitive wireless regional area networks, and it is adopted by secondary users to access the licensed radio spectrum opportunistically. In order to realize real-time secondary spectrum usage, a dynamic spectrum access model based on stochastic differential games is proposed to realize dynamic spectrum allocation; a Nash equilibrium solution to the model is given and analyzed in this paper. From an overall perspective, the relationships between available spectrum percentage and the spectrum access rate are studied. Changes in the available spectrum percentage of the cognitive wireless regional area networks involve a deterministic component and a stochastic component which depends upon an r-dimensional Wiener process. The Wiener process represents an accumulation of random influences over the interval, and it reflects stochastic and time-varying properties of the available spectrum percentage. Simulation results show that the dynamic spectrum access model is efficient, and it reflects the time-varying radio frequency environment. Differential games are useful tools for the spectrum access and management in the time-varying radio environment.

For flight simulators, it is crucial to create three-dimensional terrain using clear remote sensing images. However, due to haze and other contributing variables, the obtained remote sensing images typically have low contrast and blurry features. In order to build a flight simulator visual system, we propose a deep learning-based dehaze model for remote sensing images dehazing. An encoder-decoder architecture is proposed that consists of a multiscale fusion module and a gated large kernel convolutional attention module. This architecture can fuse multi-resolution global and local semantic features and can adaptively extract image features under complex terrain. The experimental results demonstrate that, with good generality and application, the model outperforms existing comparison techniques and achieves high-confidence dehazing in remote sensing images with a variety of haze concentrations, multi-complex terrains, and multi-spatial resolutions.

In this paper, the outage probability and diversity order of opportunistic decode-and-forward (DF) cooperation are analyzed under Rayleigh fading channels, where the impacts of channel estimation error, relay selection feedback delay and the availability of the direct link between the source and the destination are considered comprehensively. The closed-form expressions of outage probability in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region are derived as well as the diversity order. The theoretical results demonstrate that the achievable diversity order is zero when channel estimation error exists, and this conclusion holds no matter whether the direct link is available, even if the relay selection feedback is delay-free. For the perfect channel estimation scenario, the achievable diversity order is related to the potential relay number K, the channel delay correlation coefficient ρd and the availability of the direct link. If relay selection feedback is not delayed, i.e., ρd = 1, the diversity order is K when the direct link is blocked, and it becomes K+1 when the direct link is available. For delayed relay selection feedback, i.e., ρd < 1, the diversity order achievable is only related to the availability of the direct link. In this case, if the direct link does not exist, the diversity order is 1, otherwise the diversity order of 2 can be obtained. Simulation results verify the analytical results of outage probability and diversity order.

This paper considers the proportional fair (PF) based subcarrier allocation problem in a multihop orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) broadcast system with decode-and-forward (DF) relays. The problem is formulated as a mixed binary integer programming problem with the objective to achieve proportional fairness among users and exploit the diversity provided by the independent frequency selective fading among hops. Since it is prohibitive to find the optimal solution, two efficient heuristic schemes are proposed. Simulation results indicate that with the same fairness performance, the proposed schemes achieve considerable capacity gain over the conventional PF scheduling method.

By taking advantages of deep learning and reinforcement learning, ADNet (Action Decision Network) outperforms other approaches. However, its speed and performance are still limited by factors such as unreliable confidence score estimation and redundant historical actions. To address the above limitations, a faster and more accurate approach named Faster-ADNet is proposed in this paper. By optimizing the tracking process via a status re-identification network, the proposed approach is more efficient and 6 times faster than ADNet. At the same time, the accuracy and stability are enhanced by historical actions removal. Experiments demonstrate the advantages of Faster-ADNet.

With the progress of ubiquitous technology, ubiquitous learning presents new opportunities to learners. Situations of a learner can be grasped through analyzing the learner's actions collected by sensors, RF-IDs, or cameras in order to provide support at proper time, proper place, and proper situation. Training for acquiring skills and enhancing physical abilities through exercise and experience in the real world is an important domain in u-learning. A training program may last for several days and has one or more training units (exercises) for a day. A learner's performance in a unit is considered as short term state. The performance in a series of units may change with patterns: progress, plateau, and decline. Long term state in a series of units is accumulatively computed based on short term states. In a learning/training program, it is necessary to apply different support strategies to adapt to different states of the learner. Adaptation in learning support is significant, because a learner loses his/her interests easily without adaptation. Systems with the adaptive support usually provide stimulators to a learner, and a learner can have a great motivation in learning at beginning. However, when the stimulators reach some levels, the learner may lose his/her motivation, because the long term state of the learner changes dynamically, which means a progress state may change to a plateau state or a decline state. In different long term learning states, different types of stimulators are needed. However, the stimulators and advice provided by the existing systems are monotonic without changeable support strategies. We propose a mutual adaptive support. The mutual adaptation means each of the system and the learner has their own states. On one hand, the system tries to change its state to adapt to the learner's state for providing adaptive support. On the other hand, the learner can change its performance following the advice given based on the state of the system. We create a ubiquitous pet (u-pet) as a metaphor of our system. A u-pet is always with the learner and encourage the leaner to start training at proper time and to do training smoothly. The u-pet can perform actions with the learner in training, change its own attributes based on the learner's attributes, and adjust its own learning rate by a learning function. The u-pet grasps the state of the learner and adopts different training support strategies to the learner's training based on the learner's short and long term states.

Recently, broadcast services are introduced in cellular networks and macro diversity is an effective way to combat fading. In this paper, we propose a kind of distributed space-time block codes (STBCs) for macro diversity which is constructed from the total antennas of multiple cooperating base stations, and all the antennas form an equivalent multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system. This code is termed High-Dimension-Full-Rate-Quasi-Orthogonal STBC (HDFR-QOSTBC) which can be characterized as: (1) It can be applied with any number of transmit antennas especially when the number of transmit antennas is large; (2) The code is with full transmit rate of one; (3) The Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding complexity of this code is controllable and limited to Nt/2-symbol-decodable for total Nt transmit antennas. Then, we completely analyze the structure of the equivalent channel for the kind of codes and reveal a property that the eigenvectors of the equivalent channel are constant and independent from the channel realization, and this characteristic can be exploited for a new transmission structure with single-symbol linear decoder. Furthermore, we analyze different macro diversity schemes and give a performance comparison. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is practical for the broadcast systems with significant performance improvement comparing with soft-combination and cyclic delay diversity (CDD) methods.

This paper concerned the research on a memristive chaotic system and the generated random sequence; by constructing a piecewise-linear memristor model, a kind of chaotic system is constructed, and corresponding numerical simulation and dynamical analysis are carried out to show the dynamics of the new memristive chaotic system. Finally the proposed memristive chaotic system is used to generate random sequence for the possible application in encryption field.