This paper describes a new system for extracting and classifying bibliography regions from the color image of a book cover. The same as all the color image processing, the segmentation of color space is an essential and important step in our system; and here HSI color space is adopted rather than RGB color space. The color space is segmented into achromatic and chromatic regions first; and the segmentation is completed after thresholding the intensity histogram of the achromatic region and the hue histogram of the chromatic region. Then text region extraction and classification follows. After detecting fundamental features (stroke width and local label width) text regions are determined by comparing smeared blocks to the original candidate image. Based on the general cover design model, text regions are classified into author region, title region, and publisher region furthermore, and a bibliography image is obtained as a result, without applying OCR. The appearance of the book is 3D reconstructed as well. In this paper, two examples are presented.

One fundamental issue in multiagent reinforcement learning is how to deal with the limited local knowledge of an agent in order to achieve effective learning. In this paper, we argue that this issue can be more effectively solved if agents are equipped with a consistent global view. We achieve this by requiring agents to follow an interacting protocol. The properties of the protocol are derived and theoretically analyzed. A distributed protocol that satisfies these properties is presented. The experimental evaluations are conducted for a well-known test-case (i.e., pursuit game) in the context of two learning algorithms. The results show that the protocol is effective and the reinforcement learning algorithms using it perform much better.

A class of multimodulus algorithms (MMA(p)) optimized by an optimal step-size (OS) for blind equalization are firstly investigated in this letter. The multimodulus (MM) criterion is essentially a split cost function that separately implements the real and imaginary part of the signal, hence the phase can be recovered jointly with equalization. More importantly, the step-size leading to the minimum of the MM criterion along the search direction can be obtained algebraically among the roots of a higher-order polynomial at each iteration, thus a robust optimal step-size multimodulus algorithm (OS-MMA(p)) is developed. Experimental results demonstrate improved performance of the proposed algorithm in mitigating the inter-symbol interference (ISI) compared with the OS constant modulus algorithm (OS-CMA). Besides, the computational complexity can be reduced by the proposed OS-MMA(2) algorithm.

Minutiae pattern extraction plays a crucial role in fingerprint registration and identification for electronic applications. However, the extraction accuracy is seriously compromised by the presence of contaminated ridge lines and complex background scenarios. General image processing-based methods, which rely on many prior hypotheses, fail to effectively handle minutiae extraction in complex scenarios. Previous works have shown that CNN-based methods can perform well in object detection tasks. However, the deep neural networks (DNNs)-based methods are restricted by the limitation of public labeled datasets due to legitimate privacy concerns. To address these challenges comprehensively, this paper presents a fully automated minutiae extraction method leveraging DNNs. Firstly, we create a fingerprint minutiae dataset using a semi-automated minutiae annotation algorithm. Subsequently, we propose a minutiae extraction model based on Residual Networks (Resnet) that enables end-to-end prediction of minutiae. Moreover, we introduce a novel non-maximal suppression (NMS) procedure, guided by the Generalized Intersection over Union (GIoU) metric, during the inference phase to effectively handle outliers. Experimental evaluations conducted on the NIST SD4 and FVC 2004 databases demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing state-of-the-art minutiae extraction approaches.

This paper studies using price incentives to shift bandwidth demand from peak to non-peak periods. In particular, cost discounts decrease as peak monthly usage increases. We take into account the delay sensitivity of different apps: during peak hours, the usage of hard real-time applications (HRAS) is not counted in the user's monthly data cap, while the usage of other applications (OAS) is counted in the user's monthly data cap. As a result, users may voluntarily delay or abandon OAS in order to get a higher fee discount. Then, a new data rate control algorithm is proposed. The algorithm allocates the data rate according to the priority of the source, which is determined by two factors: (I) the allocated data rate; and (II) the waiting time.