Longitudinal quantification of brain changes due to development, aging or disease plays an important role in the filed of personalized-medicine applications. However, due to the temporal variability in shape and different imaging equipment and parameters, estimating anatomical changes in longitudinal studies is significantly challenging. In this paper, a longitudinal Magnetic Resonance(MR) brain image segmentation algorithm proposed by combining intensity information and anisotropic smoothness term which contain a spatial smoothness constraint and longitudinal consistent constraint into a variational framework. The minimization of the proposed energy functional is strictly and effectively derived from a fast optimization algorithm. A large number of experimental results show that the proposed method can guarantee segmentation accuracy and longitudinal consistency in both simulated and real longitudinal MR brain images for analysis of anatomical changes over time.

In the field of scene segmentation, the precise segmentation of object boundaries in sports movement scene images is a great challenge. The geometric information and spatial information of the image are very important, but in many models, they are usually easy to be lost, which has a big influence on the performance of the model. To alleviate this problem, a parallel dense dilated convolution merging Network (termed PDDCM-Net) was proposed. The proposed PDDCMNet consists of a feature extractor, parallel dilated convolutions, and dense dilated convolutions merged with different dilation rates. We utilize different combinations of dilated convolutions that expand the receptive field of the model with fewer parameters than other advanced methods. Importantly, PDDCM-Net fuses both low-level and high-level information, in effect alleviating the problem of accurately segmenting the edge of the object and positioning the object position accurately. Experimental results validate that the proposed PDDCM-Net achieves a great improvement compared to several representative models on the COCO-Stuff data set.

Model pruning methods have attracted huge attention owing to the increasing demand of deploying models on low-resource devices recently. Most existing methods use the weight norm of filters to represent their importance, and discard the ones with small value directly to achieve the pruning target, which ignores the contribution of the small norm filters. This is not only results in filter contribution waste, but also gives comparable performance to training with the random initialized weights [1]. In this paper, we point out that the small norm filters can harm the performance of the pruned model greatly, if they are discarded directly. Therefore, we propose a novel filter contribution recycle (FCR) method for structured model pruning to resolve the fore-mentioned problem. FCR collects and reassembles contribution from the small norm filters to obtain a mixed contribution collector, and then assigns the reassembled contribution to other filters with higher probability to be preserved. To achieve the target FLOPs, FCR also adopts a weight decay strategy for the small norm filters. To explore the effectiveness of our approach, extensive experiments are conducted on ImageNet2012 and CIFAR-10 datasets, and superior results are reported when comparing with other methods under the same or even more FLOPs reduction. In addition, our method is flexible to be combined with other different pruning criterions.

Autonomous vehicles are gradually being regarded as the mainstream trend of future development of the automobile industry. Autonomous driving networks generate many intensive and delay-sensitive computing tasks. The storage space, computing power, and battery capacity of autonomous vehicle terminals cannot meet the resource requirements of the tasks. In this paper, we focus on the task scheduling problem of autonomous driving in software-defined edge networks. By analyzing the intensive and delay-sensitive computing tasks of autonomous vehicles, we propose an emotion model that is related to task urgency and changes with execution time and propose an optimal base station (BS) task scheduling (OBSTS) algorithm. Task sentiment is an important factor that changes with the length of time that computing tasks with different urgency levels remain in the queue. The algorithm uses task sentiment as a performance indicator to measure task scheduling. Experimental results show that the OBSTS algorithm can more effectively meet the intensive and delay-sensitive requirements of vehicle terminals for network resources and improve user service experience.

With the development of the NB-IoT (Narrow band Internet of Things) and smart cities, coupled with the emergence of smart smoke sensors, new requirements and issues have been introduced to study on the deployment of sensors in large spaces. Previous research mainly focuses on the optimization of wireless sensors in some monitoring environments, including three-dimensional terrain or underwater space. There are relatively few studies on the optimization deployment problem of smart smoke sensors, and leaving large spaces with obstacles such as libraries out of consideration. This paper mainly studies the deployment issue of smart smoke sensors in large spaces by considering the fire probability of fire areas and the obstacles in a monitoring area. To cope with the problems of coverage blind areas and coverage redundancy when sensors are deployed randomly in large spaces, we proposed an optimized deployment strategy of smart smoke sensors based on the PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) algorithm. The deployment problem is transformed into a multi-objective optimization problem with many constraints of fire probability and barriers, while minimizing the deployment cost and maximizing the coverage accuracy. In this regard, we describe the structure model in large space and a coverage model firstly, then a mathematical model containing two objective functions is established. Finally, a deployment strategy based on PSO algorithm is designed, and the performance of the deployment strategy is verified by a number of simulation experiments. The obtained experimental and numerical results demonstrates that our proposed strategy can obtain better performance than uniform deployment strategies in terms of all the objectives concerned, further demonstrates the effectiveness of our strategy. Additionally, the strategy we proposed also provides theoretical guidance and a practical basis for fire emergency management and other departments to better deploy smart smoke sensors in a large space.

The task scheduling problem has received a lot of attention in recent years as a crucial area for research in the cloud environment. However, due to the difference in objectives considered by service providers and users, it has become a major challenge to resolve the conflicting interests of service providers and users while both can still take into account their respective objectives. Therefore, the task scheduling problem as a bi-objective game problem is formulated first, and then a task scheduling model based on the bi-objective game (TSBOG) is constructed. In this model, energy consumption and resource utilization, which are of concern to the service provider, and cost and task completion rate, which are of concern to the user, are calculated simultaneously. Furthermore, a many-objective evolutionary algorithm based on a partitioned collaborative selection strategy (MaOEA-PCS) has been developed to solve the TSBOG. The MaOEA-PCS can find a balance between population convergence and diversity by partitioning the objective space and selecting the best converging individuals from each region into the next generation. To balance the players' multiple objectives, a crossover and mutation operator based on dynamic games is proposed and applied to MaPEA-PCS as a player's strategy update mechanism. Finally, through a series of experiments, not only the effectiveness of the model compared to a normal many-objective model is demonstrated, but also the performance of MaOEA-PCS and the validity of DGame.

NFV realizes flexible and rapid software deployment and management of network functions in the cloud network, and provides network services in the form of chained virtual network functions (VNFs). However, using VNFs to provide quality guaranteed services is still a challenge because of the inherent difficulty in intelligently scaling VNFs to handle traffic fluctuations. Most existing works scale VNFs with fixed-capacity instances, that is they take instances of the same size and determine a suitable deployment location without considering the cloud network resource distribution. This paper proposes a traffic forecasted assisted proactive VNF scaling approach, and it adopts the instance capacity adaptive to the node resource. We first model the VNF scaling as integer quadratic programming and then propose a proactive adaptive VNF scaling (PAVS) approach. The approach employs an efficient traffic forecasting method based on LSTM to predict the upcoming traffic demands. With the obtained traffic demands, we design a resource-aware new VNF instance deployment algorithm to scale out under-provisioning VNFs and a redundant VNF instance management mechanism to scale in over-provisioning VNFs. Trace-driven simulation demonstrates that our proposed approach can respond to traffic fluctuation in advance and reduce the total cost significantly.

The offloading method is important when there are multiple mobile nodes and multiple edge servers. In the environment, those mobile nodes connect with edge servers with different bandwidths, thus taking different time and energy for offloading tasks. Considering the system load of edge servers and the attributes (the number of instructions, the size of files, deadlines, and so on) of tasks, the energy-aware offloading problem becomes difficult under our mobile edge environment (MCE). Most of the past work mainly offloads tasks by judging where the job consumes less energy. But sometimes, one task needs more energy because the preferred edge servers have been overloaded. Those methods always do not pay attention to the influence of the scheduling on the future tasks. In this paper, first, we try to execute the job locally when the job costs a lower energy consumption executed on the MD. We suppose that every task is submitted to the mobile server which has the highest bandwidth efficiency. Bandwidth efficiency is defined by the sending ratio, the receiving ratio, and their related power consumption. We sort the task in the descending order of the ratio between the energy consumption executed on the mobile server node and on the MD. Then, we give a "suffrage" definition for the energy consumption executed on different mobile servers for offloading tasks. The task selects the mobile server with the largest suffrage. Simulations show that our method reduces the execution time and the related energy consumption, while keeping a lower value in the number of uncompleted tasks.

Big data analytics offers endless opportunities for operational enhancement by extracting valuable insights from complex voluminous data. Hadoop is a comprehensive technological suite which offers solutions for the large scale storage and computing needs of Big data. The performance of Hadoop is closely tied with its configuration settings which depends on the cluster capacity and the application profile. Since Hadoop has over 190 configuration parameters, tuning them to gain optimal application performance is a daunting challenge. Our approach is to extract a subset of impactful parameters from which the performance enhancing sub-optimal configuration is then narrowed down. This paper presents a statistical model to analyze the significance of the effect of Hadoop parameters on a variety of performance metrics. Our model decomposes the total observed performance variation and ascribes them to the main parameters, their interaction effects and noise factors. The method clearly segregates impactful parameters from the rest. The configuration setting determined by our methodology has reduced the Job completion time by 22%, resource utilization in terms of memory and CPU by 15% and 12% respectively, the number of killed Maps by 50% and Disk spillage by 23%. The proposed technique can be leveraged to ease the configuration tuning task of any Hadoop cluster despite the differences in the underlying infrastructure and the application running on it.

In urban vehicular edge computing (VEC) environments, one edge server always serves many task requests in its coverage which results in the resource-constrained problem. To resolve the problem and improve system utilization, we first design a general hierarchical resource management framework based on typical VEC network structures. Following the framework, a specific interacting protocol is also designed for our decision algorithm. Secondly, a greedy bidding-based multi-hop task scheduling decision algorithm is proposed to realize effective task scheduling in resource-constrained VEC environments. In this algorithm, the goal of maximizing system utility is modeled as an optimization problem with the constraints of task deadlines and available computing resources. Then, an auction mechanism named greedy bidding is used to match task requests to edge servers in the case of multiple hops to maximize the system utility. Simulation results show that our proposal can maximize the number of tasks served in resource constrained VEC networks and improve the system utility.

Classification of persons wearing and not wearing face masks in images has emerged as a new computer vision problem during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to address this problem and scale up the research in this domain, in this paper a hybrid technique by employing ResNet-101 and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifier has been proposed. The proposed technique is tested and validated on a self-created face masks classification dataset and a standard dataset. On self-created dataset, the proposed technique achieved a classification accuracy of 97.3%. To embrace the proposed technique, six other state-of-the-art CNN feature extractors with six other classical machine learning classifiers have been tested and compared with the proposed technique. The proposed technique achieved better classification accuracy and 1-6% higher precision, recall, and F1 score as compared to other tested deep feature extractors and machine learning classifiers.

The handover procedure of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) introduces significant delay, which can degrade the quality of service (QoS) especially for delay-sensitive applications. Although studies have been conducted to support handover in SDN-based WLAN, there is no research to reduce the channel scanning procedure that takes up the most delay time in the handover process. The channel scanning procedure is essential to determine the appropriate access point (AP). To mitigate this problem, this paper proposes a SWITCH: SDN-WLAN integrated handover scheme for QoS-Guaranteed mobile service. In SWITCH, each AP periodically broadcasts beacon frames through different channels in a predetermined order that includes the operating channel information of the AP. This allows mobile stations (MSs) to receive the beacon frames of nearby APs, and therefore they can determine the appropriate APs for handover without the channel scanning procedure. By reporting the information of the newly moved AP to the SDN controller, a flow rule is installed in advance to provide fast handover, and packet loss is reduced by buffering data destined for MS. In addition, the proposed scheme can adaptively operate SWITCH to consider the user location and QoS requirement of flow to save radio resource overhead. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that SWITCH can reduce the handover delays, flow table utilization ratio and radio resource overhead while improving the network throughput.

In today's globalized world, there is no transparency in exchanging data and information between producers and consumers. However, these tasks experience many challenges, such as administrative barriers, confidential data leakage, and extensive time delays. To overcome these challenges, we propose a decentralized, secured, and verified smart chain framework using Ethereum Smart Contract which employs Inter Planetary File Systems (IPFS) and MongoDB as storage systems to automate the process and exchange information into blocks using the Tendermint algorithm. The proposed work promotes complete traceability of the product, ensures data integrity and transparency in addition to providing security to their personal information using the Lelantos mode of shipping. The Tendermint algorithm helps to speed up the process of validating and authenticating the transaction quickly. More so in this time of pandemic, it is easier to meet the needs of customers through the Ethermint Smart Chain, which increases customer satisfaction, thus boosting their confidence. Moreover, Smart contracts help to exploit more international transaction services and provide an instant block time finality of around 5 sec using Ethermint. The paper concludes with a description of product storage and distribution adopting the Ethermint technique. The proposed system was executed based on the Ethereum-Tendermint Smart chain. Experiments were conducted on variable block sizes and the number of transactions. The experimental results indicate that the proposed system seems to perform better than existing blockchain-based systems. Two configuration files were used, the first one was to describe the storage part, including its topology. The second one was a modified file to include the test rounds that Caliper should execute, including the running time and the workload content. Our findings indicate this is a promising technology for food supply chain storage and distribution.

Google Play is one of the largest Android phone app markets and it contains both free and paid apps. It provides a variety of categories for every target user who has different needs and purposes. The customer's rate every product based on their experience of apps and based on the average rating the position of an app in these arch varies. Fraudulent behaviors emerge in those apps which incorporate search rank maltreatment and malware proliferation. To distinguish the fraudulent behavior, a novel framework is structured that finds and uses follows left behind by fraudsters, to identify both malware and applications exposed to the search rank fraud method. This strategy correlates survey exercises and remarkably joins identified review relations with semantic and behavioral signals produced from Google Play application information, to distinguish dubious applications. The proposed model accomplishes 90% precision in grouping gathered informational indexes of malware, fakes, and authentic apps. It finds many fraudulent applications that right now avoid Google Bouncers recognition technology. It also helped the discovery of fake reviews using the reviewer relationship amount of reviews which are forced as positive reviews for each reviewed Google play the android app.

Due to increasing spectrum demand for new wireless devices applications, cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) paradigm is the most promising solution to alleviate the spectrum shortage problem. However, in the interweave cognitive radio (CR) system, the inherent nature of CSS opens a hole to Byzantine attack, thereby resulting in a significant drop of the CSS security and efficiency. In view of this, a weighted differential sequential single symbol (WD3S) algorithm based on MATLAB platform is developed to accurately identify malicious users (MUs) and benefit useful sensing information from their malicious reports in this paper. In order to achieve this, a dynamic Byzantine attack model is proposed to describe malicious behaviors for MUs in an interweave CR system. On the basis of this, a method of data transmission consistency verification is formulated to evaluate the global decision's correctness and update the trust value (TrV) of secondary users (SUs), thereby accurately identifying MUs. Then, we innovatively reuse malicious sensing information from MUs by the weight allocation scheme. In addition, considering a high spectrum usage of primary network, a sequential and differential reporting way based on a single symbol is also proposed in the process of the sensing information submission. Finally, under various Byzantine attack types, we provide in-depth simulations to demonstrate the efficiency and security of the proposed WD3S.

The performance of existing recognition algorithms for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signals degrade under conditions of low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). Hence, a novel recognition algorithm based on features in the graph domain is proposed in this study. First, the power spectrum of the squared candidate signal is truncated by a rectangular window. Thereafter, the graph representation of the truncated spectrum is obtained via normalization, quantization, and edge construction. Based on the analysis of the connectivity difference of the graphs under different hypotheses, the sum of degree (SD) of the graphs is utilized as a discriminate feature to classify BPSK and QPSK signals. Moreover, we prove that the SD is a Schur-concave function with respect to the probability vector of the vertices (PVV). Extensive simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and its superiority to the listed model-driven-based (MDB) algorithms in terms of recognition performance under low SNRs and computational complexity. As it is confirmed that the proposed method reduces the computational complexity of existing graph-based algorithms, it can be applied in modulation recognition of radar or communication signals in real-time processing, and does not require any prior knowledge about the training sets, channel coefficients, or noise power.

The estimation of radio map (RM) is a fundamental and critical task for the network planning and optimization performance of mobile communication. In this paper, a RM estimation method is proposed based on a deep dual learning structure. This method can simultaneously and accurately reconstruct the urban building map (UBM) and estimate the RM of the whole cell by only part of the measured reference signal receiving power (RSRP). Our proposed method implements UBM reconstruction task and RM estimation task by constructing a dual U-Net-based structure, which is named RadioCycle. RadioCycle jointly trains two symmetric generators of the dual structure. Further, to solve the problem of interference negative transfer in generators trained jointly for two different tasks, RadioCycle introduces a dynamic weighted averaging method to dynamically balance the learning rate of these two generators in the joint training. Eventually, the experiments demonstrate that on the UBM reconstruction task, RadioCycle achieves an F1 score of 0.950, and on the RM estimation task, RadioCycle achieves a root mean square error of 0.069. Therefore, RadioCycle can estimate both the RM and the UBM in a cell with measured RSRP for only 20% of the whole cell.