In this paper, a frequency domain Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based channel estimation algorithm for Space Time Block Coded-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (STBC-OFDM) systems is investigated to support higher data rate applications in wireless communications. The computational complexity of the frequency domain EM-based channel estimation is increased when higher order constellations are used because of the ascending size of the search set space. Thus, a search set reduction algorithm is proposed to decrease the complexity without sacrificing the system performance. The performance results of the proposed algorithm is obtained in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and Mean Square Error (MSE) for 16QAM and 64QAM modulation schemes.

Cloud services are often provisioned to their customers using user-friendly web browsers with flexible and rich plug-in environments. Delay is one of the fundamental performance metrics of these web-based services. Commonly-used network measurement tools usually only measure network delay and it may be difficult to infer the web-delay performance using only network layer measurement approaches. In this paper, we propose to evaluate the application layer delay in a browser-based network measurement platform using engineered scripts. We conducted a delay measurement study using instrumented scripts in the proposed browser-based measurement platform. Our investigation included a comparison study of three browser-scripting delay measurement methods, including Java applet, JSP and Flash ActionScript. We developed a browser-based delay measurement testbed over the Internet so that different delay measurement tools could be evaluated in the same real network environment including typical Internet paths and the Baidu cloud. We also decomposed the components of the end-to-end delay process of the above measurements to reveal the difference and relationship between the network-layer delay and the application-layer delay. Our measurement results characterize the stochastic properties of the application-layer delay over real Internet paths, and how these properties vary from the underlying network layer delay. This browser-scripting measurement approach can be easily deployed on different cloud service platforms to inspect their application-layer delay performance between end clients and the cloud platforms. Our measurement results may provide insights into designing new cloud services with enhanced quality-of-experience perceived by cloud users.

Traffic congestion is a severe problem in many modern cities around the world. Real-time and accurate traffic congestion identification can provide the advanced traffic management systems with a reliable basis to take measurements. The most used data sources for traffic congestion are loop detector, GPS data, and video surveillance. Video based traffic monitoring systems have gained much attention due to their enormous advantages, such as low cost, flexibility to redesign the system and providing a rich information source for human understanding. In general, most existing video based systems for monitoring road traffic rely on stationary cameras and multiple vehicle tracking method. However, most commonly used multiple vehicle tracking methods are lack of effective track initiation schemes. Based on the motion of the vehicle usually obeys constant velocity model, a novel vehicle recognition method is proposed. The state of recognized vehicle is sent to the GM-PHD filter as birth target. In this way, we relieve the insensitive of GM-PHD filter for new entering vehicle. Combining with the advanced vehicle detection and data association techniques, this multiple vehicle tracking method is used to identify traffic congestion. It can be implemented in real-time with high accuracy and robustness. The advantages of our proposed method are validated on four real traffic data.

Wireless sensors are always deployed in brutal environments, but as we know, the nodes are powered only by non-replaceable batteries with limited energy. Sending, receiving and transporting information require the supply of energy. The essential problem of wireless sensor network (WSN) is to save energy consumption and prolong network lifetime. This paper presents a new communication protocol for WSN called Dynamical Threshold Control Algorithm with three-parameter Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization based on residual energy (DPA). We first use the state of WSN to partition the region adaptively. Moreover, a three-parameter of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed and a new fitness function is obtained. The optimal path among the CHs and Base Station (BS) is obtained by the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm based on residual energy. Dynamical threshold control algorithm (DTCA) is introduced when we re-select the CHs. Compared to the results obtained by using APSO, ANT and I-LEACH protocols, our DPA protocol tremendously prolongs the lifecycle of network. We observe 48.3%, 43.0%, and 24.9% more percentages of rounds respectively performed by DPA over APSO, ANT and I-LEACH.

Measuring the similarity of given samples is a key problem of recognition, clustering, retrieval and related applications. A number of works, e.g. kernel method and metric learning, have been contributed to this problem. The challenge of similarity learning is to find a similarity robust to intra-class variance and simultaneously selective to inter-class characteristic. We observed that, the similarity measure can be improved if the data distribution and hidden semantic information are exploited in a more sophisticated way. In this paper, we propose a similarity learning approach for retrieval and recognition. The approach, termed as LDA-FEK, derives free energy kernel (FEK) from Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). First, it trains LDA and constructs kernel using the parameters and variables of the trained model. Then, the unknown kernel parameters are learned by a discriminative learning approach. The main contributions of the proposed method are twofold: (1) the method is computationally efficient and scalable since the parameters in kernel are determined in a staged way; (2) the method exploits data distribution and semantic level hidden information by means of LDA. To evaluate the performance of LDA-FEK, we apply it for image retrieval over two data sets and for text categorization on four popular data sets. The results show the competitive performance of our method.

This paper investigates an efficient transmission scheme for the remote wireless sensors to receive information which is rarely discussed in the integrated remote wireless sensor and multibeam satellite networks (IWSMSNs). The networks can be employed to exchange sensing information for emergency scenario, ocean scenario, and so on, which are isolated from available terrestrial networks. As the efficient transmission link is important to the IWSMSNs, we propose a hybrid full frequency (HFF) precoding by taking advantage of frequency reuse and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding. Considering energy efficiency and sinks fairness are crucial to transmission link, thus the HFF precoding problems are formulated as transmit power minimization (TPM) and max-min fair (MMF) received signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) problems, which can be transformed to indefinite quadratic optimization programs. Then this paper presents a semi-definite programming (SDP) algorithm to solve the problems for the IWSMSNs. The promising potential of HFF for the real IWSMSNs is demonstrated through simulations.

This paper investigates the impact of outdated channel state information (CSI) on the performance of the incremental amplify-and-forward (AF) opportunistic relaying (OR) over dual-hop Rayleigh fading channels. According to the definition of distribution function, we obtain the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the actual combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) received at the destination. Based on this CDF, the closed-form expressions of the average spectral efficiency and outage probability are derived for the incremental AF OR under outdated CSI. Numerical results show that in the low region of the average SNR of the direct link, outdated CSI deteriorates the system performance, whereas in the high region, outdated CSI has almost no impact on the system performance.

Fingerprint positioning is a main stream and key technique for seamless positioning systems. In this paper, we develop a performance evaluation testbed for fingerprint based Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) positioning system. The testbed consists of positioning server, positioning terminal, Access Point (AP) units, positioning accuracy analysis system and testing scenarios. Different from other testbeds tended to focus on testing in same situation, in the proposed testbed, a couple of scenarios are set to test the positioning system including indoor and outdoor environments. Handset-side positioning mode and network-side positioning mode are provided simultaneously. Variety of motion models, such as static model, low-speed model and high-speed model are considered as well as different positioning algorithms. Finally, some implementation cases are analyzed to verify the credibility of the testbed.

This article investigates the distributed data storage problem in the space information network (SIN) using distributed fountain codes. Since space nodes in the SIN are resource-limited, in order to reduce energy consumption while improving the storage reliability, an efficient distributed storage based on fountain codes and probabilistic broadcasting (DSFPB) strategy is proposed. In the proposed strategy, source packets are disseminated among the entire network according to probabilistic broadcasting (PBcast), and the final degree distribution is close to the desired robust soliton distribution (RSD), this is benefited from the appropriate packets encoding procedure of the proposed strategy. As presented by the analysis and simulations, the total cost of data dissemination is greatly reduced compared with existing representative strategies, while improving the decoding performance.

With the rapid growth of microblog, expert identification on microblog has been playing a crucial role in many applications. While most previous expert identification studies only assess global authoritativeness of a user, there is no way to differentiate the authoritativeness in a particular aspect of topics. In this paper, we propose a novel model, which jointly models text and following relationship in the same generative process. Furthermore, we integrate a similarity-based weight scheme into the model to address the popular bias problem, and use followee topic distribution as prior information to make user's topic distribution more precisely. Our empirical study on two large real-world datasets shows that our proposed model produces significantly higher quality results than the prior arts.

Modern mobile devices are equipped with various accelerated processing units to handle computationally intensive applications; therefore, Open Computing Language (OpenCL) has been proposed to fully take advantage of the computational power in heterogeneous systems. This article introduces a parallel software decoder of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes on an embedded heterogeneous platform using an OpenCL framework. The LDPC code is one of the most popular and strongest error correcting codes for mobile communication systems. Each step of LDPC decoding has different parallelization characteristics. In the proposed LDPC decoder, steps suitable for task-level parallelization are executed on the multi-core central processing unit (CPU), and steps suitable for data-level parallelization are processed by the graphics processing unit (GPU). To improve the performance of OpenCL kernels for LDPC decoding operations, explicit thread scheduling, vectorization, and effective data transfer techniques are applied. The proposed LDPC decoder achieves high performance and high power efficiency by using heterogeneous multi-core processors on a unified computing framework.

An efficient and effective unsupervised single moving object detection framework is presented in this paper. Given the sparsely labelled trajectory points, we adopt a coarse-to-fine strategy to detect and segment the foreground from the background. The superpixel level coarse segmentation reduces the complexity of subsequent processing, and the pixel level refinement improves the segmentation accuracy. A distance measurement is devised in the coarse segmentation stage to measure the similarities between generated superpixels, which can then be used for clustering. Moreover, a Quadmap is introduced to facilitate the refinement in the fine segmentation stage. According to the experiments, our algorithm is effective and efficient, and favorable results can be achieved compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-camera systems which integrate two or more low-cost digital cameras are adopted to reach higher ground coverage and improve the base-height ratio in low altitude remote sensing. To guarantee accurate multi-camera integration, the geometric relationship among cameras must be determined through platform calibration techniques. This paper proposed a combined two-step platform calibration method. In the first step, the static platform calibration was conducted based on the stable relative orientation constraint and convergent conditions among cameras in static environments. In the second step, a dynamic platform self-calibration approach was proposed based on not only tie points but also straight lines in order to correct the small change of the relative relationship among cameras during dynamic flight. Experiments based on the proposed two-step platform calibration method were carried out with terrestrial and aerial images from a multi-camera system combined with four consumer-grade digital cameras onboard an unmanned aerial vehicle. The experimental results have shown that the proposed platform calibration approach is able to compensate the varied relative relationship during flight, acquiring the mosaicing accuracy of virtual images smaller than 0.5pixel. The proposed approach can be extended for calibrating other low-cost multi-camera system without rigorously mechanical structure.

Representation based classification, kernel method and sparse representation have received much attention in the field of face recognition. In this paper, we proposed an improved kernel principal component analysis method based on sparse representation to improve the accuracy and robustness for face recognition. First, the distances between the test sample and all training samples in kernel space are estimated based on collaborative representation. Second, S training samples with the smallest distances are selected, and Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) is used to extract the features that are exploited for classification. The proposed method implements the sparse representation under ℓ₂ regularization and performs feature extraction twice to improve the robustness. Also, we investigate the relationship between the accuracy and the sparseness coefficient, the relationship between the accuracy and the dimensionality respectively. The comparative experiments are conducted on the ORL, the GT and the UMIST face database. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more effective and robust than several state-of-the-art methods including Sparse Representation based Classification (SRC), Collaborative Representation based Classification (CRC), KCRC and Two Phase Test samples Sparse Representation (TPTSR).

Due to the limitation of the bandwidth resource and capture resolution of depth cameras, low resolution depth maps should be up-sampled to high resolution so that they can correspond to their texture images. In this paper, a novel depth map up-sampling algorithm is proposed by exploiting the fractal internal self-referential feature. Fractal parameters which are extracted from a depth map, describe the internal self-referential feature of the depth map, do not introduce inherent scale and just retain the relational information of the depth map, i.e., fractal transforms provide a resolution-independent description for depth maps and could up-sample depth maps to an arbitrary high resolution. Then, an enhancement method is also proposed to further improve the performance of the up-sampled depth map. The experimental results demonstrate that better quality of synthesized views is achieved both on objective and subjective performance. Most important of all, arbitrary resolution depth maps can be obtained with the aid of the proposed scheme.

Compared with traditional patch-based sparse representation, recent studies have concluded that group-based sparse representation (GSR) can simultaneously enforce the intrinsic local sparsity and nonlocal self-similarity of images within a unified framework. This article investigates an accelerated split Bregman method (SBM) that is based on GSR which exploits image compressive sensing (CS). The computational efficiency of accelerated SBM for the measurement matrix of a partial Fourier matrix can be further improved by the introduction of a fast Fourier transform (FFT) to derive the enhanced algorithm. In addition, we provide convergence analysis for the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that accelerated SBM is potentially faster than some existing image CS reconstruction methods.

Video-based human-activity recognition has become increasingly popular due to the prominent corresponding applications in a variety of fields such as computer vision, image processing, smart-home healthcare, and human-computer interactions. The essential goals of a video-based activity-recognition system include the provision of behavior-based information to enable functionality that proactively assists a person with his/her tasks. The target of this work is the development of a novel approach for human-activity recognition, whereby human-body-joint features that are extracted from depth videos are used. From silhouette images taken at every depth, the direction and magnitude features are first obtained from each connected body-joint pair so that they can be augmented later with motion direction, as well as with the magnitude features of each joint in the next frame. A generalized discriminant analysis (GDA) is applied to make the spatiotemporal features more robust, followed by the feeding of the time-sequence features into a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for the training of each activity. Lastly, all of the trained-activity HMMs are used for depth-video activity recognition.

Emerging attacks aim to access proprietary assets and steal data for business or political motives, such as Operation Aurora and Operation Shady RAT. Skilled Intruders would likely remove their traces on targeted hosts, but their network movements, which are continuously recorded by network devices, cannot be easily eliminated by themselves. However, without complete knowledge about both inbound/outbound and internal traffic, it is difficult for security team to unveil hidden traces of intruders. In this paper, we propose an autonomous anomaly detection system based on behavior profiling and relation mining. The single-hop access profiling model employ a novel linear grouping algorithm PSOLGA to create behavior profiles for each individual server application discovered automatically in historical flow analysis. Besides that, the double-hop access relation model utilizes in-memory graph to mine time-sequenced access relations between different server applications. Using the behavior profiles and relation rules, this approach is able to detect possible anomalies and violations in real-time detection. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that the designed models are promising in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency.

Owing to their low scalability, weak support on big data, insufficient data collaborative analysis and inadequate situational awareness, the traditional methods fail to meet the needs of the security data analysis. This paper proposes visualization methods to fuse the multi-source security data and grasp the network situation. Firstly, data sources are classified at their collection positions, with the objects of security data taken from three different layers. Secondly, the Heatmap is adopted to show host status; the Treemap is used to visualize Netflow logs; and the radial Node-link diagram is employed to express IPS logs. Finally, the Labeled Treemap is invented to make a fusion at data-level and the Time-series features are extracted to fuse data at feature-level. The comparative analyses with the prize-winning works prove this method enjoying substantial advantages for network analysts to facilitate data feature fusion, better understand network security situation with a unified, convenient and accurate mode.

The existing reversible data hiding methods for block truncation coding (BTC) compressed images often utilize difference expansion or histogram shifting technique for data embedment. Although these methods effectively embed data into the compressed codes, the embedding operations may swap the numerical order of the higher and lower quantization levels. Since the numerical order of these two quantization levels can be exploited to carry additional data without destroying the quality of decoded image, the existing methods cannot take the advantages of this property to embed data more efficiently. In this paper, we embed data by shifting the higher and lower quantization levels in opposite direction. Because the embedment does not change numerical order of quantization levels, we exploit this property to carry additional data without further reducing the image quality. The proposed method performs no-distortion embedding if the payload is small, and performs reversible data embedding for large payload. The experimental results show that the proposed method offers better embedding performance over prior works in terms of payload and image quality.

RSA is a public key cryptosystem that is currently the most popularly used in information security. Development of RSA variants has attracted many researchers since its introduction in 1978 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. In this paper, we propose an algebraic structure for RSA and show that the proposed structure covers all known RSA variants. The usefulness of the proposed structure is then proved by showing that, following the structure we can construct a RSA variant based on the Bergman ring. We compare the original RSA and its variants from the point of view of factoring the modulus to determine why the original RSA is widely used than its variants.

Cloud storage as a service provides high scalability and availability as per need of user, without large investment on infrastructure. However, data security risks, such as confidentiality, privacy, and integrity of the outsourced data are associated with the cloud-computing model. Over the year's techniques such as, remote data checking (RDC), data integrity protection (DIP), provable data possession (PDP), proof of storage (POS), and proof of retrievability (POR) have been devised to frequently and securely check the integrity of outsourced data. In this paper, we improve the efficiency of PDP scheme, in terms of computation, storage, and communication cost for large data archives. By utilizing the capabilities of JAR and ZIP technology, the cost of searching the metadata in proof generation process is reduced from O(n) to O(1). Moreover, due to direct access to metadata, disk I/O cost is reduced and resulting in 50 to 60 time faster proof generation for large datasets. Furthermore, our proposed scheme achieved 50% reduction in storage size of data and respective metadata that result in providing storage and communication efficiency.