Description:
In recent years, the drive for the Healthcare Monitoring Application (HMA) aims to provide continuous remote monitoring of a patient's health. For this to happen, the sensors in the monitoring component of the Body Area Wireless Sensor Networks (BAWSN) need to continuously send data to a Healthcare Application. We show that to provide continuous health data, the BAWSN depends on the collective data delivered by all the sensor nodes and not on a single sensor because medical diagnosis is rarely performed from a single data point. In addition, the arrival time of data should occur within the expected time to be indicative of the actual health of the patient. In this paper, we characterize the HMA as a time-critical application because the BAWSN has stringent timing requirements concerning the arrival of data from the sensor nodes within the defined critical time. Thereby, we formulate the critical time parameters to evaluate the BAWSN operations.
Description:
Malware analysts, besides being tasked to create signatures, are also called upon to generate indicators of compromise, to disrupt botnets, to attribute an attack to an actor, and to understand the adversary's intent. This requires extracting from malware a variety of secrets, aka threat intelligence. After studying a few samples from a malware family and locating where its secrets are embedded, analysts create rules that may be used to automatically extract threat intelligence from malware variants in the future. Rules to extract secrets from malware are today written as regular expressions over bytecodes, such as using Yara. These rules are easily invalidated by polymorphic variants or evolutionary versions. Keeping the rules updated is a maintenance challenge for malware analysts. Instead of using bytecode, we present the use of code semantics to create rules to extract malware secrets. The semantics of code captures the effect of instructions on the registers and memory. Rules written using the structure of the symbolic content of registers and memory, instead of bytecode, are more resilient to code transformation and evolutionary changes, and are thus less brittle and easier to maintain.
Description:
One of the most challenging issues in cognitive radio networks is to dynamically access the radio frequency spectrum in an uninterrupted manner. To achieve this, omniscient allocation of spectrum bands among cognitive radio users is crucial. Most of the existing spectrum allocation methods select a band from a pool according to the service requirements of a single user, neglecting the demand of multiple users. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative framework for allocating multiple bands among multiple secondary users. The proposed method defines a capacity of service metric based on the optimal sensing parameters and utilizes this metric to assign distinct bands to all or highest possible number of contending users. Performance evaluation suggests that the proposed method exhibits significant superiority over conventional approaches in terms of improved throughput and spectrum utilization, reduced interference loss and collision, and hence, enhances dynamic spectrum access and sharing capabilities.
Description:
This paper presents an investigative study in which data were gathered and used in underground mining to improve the planned maintenance program and reliability of the shearer loader in the underground mining. A cost effective maintenance and operation strategy and practices is mandatory to meet the production demand and the required level of service of this critical asset of the plant. The study conducted and presented in this paper includes a detailed review of failure history data and the use of analytical technique available to understand failure characteristics and its effect on the throughput and the overall performance of the longwall operation. This is to achieve further productivity increases to meet business goals. Analytical tools such as Failure Mode and Effect and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) and Weibull analysis were used in this investigation. The study has highlighted the criticality of some failures and the actions needed in this industrial case to improve the reliability and planned maintenance for a better mining productivity.
Description:
Contextual information is important for interpreting human actions especially when actions exhibit interactive relationship with their context. Contextual clues become even more crucial when videos are captured in unfavorable conditions like extreme low light nighttime scenarios. These conditions encourage the use of multi-senor imagery and context enhancement. In this paper, we explore the importance of contextual knowledge for recognizing human actions in multi-sensor nighttime videos. Information fusion is utilized for encapsulating visual information about actions and their context. Space-time action information is contained using 3D fourier transform of fused action silhouette volume. In parallel, SIFT context images are extracted and fused using principal component analysis based feature fusion for each action class. Contextual dissimilarity is penalized by minimizing context SIFT flow energy. The action dataset comprises multi-sensor night vision video data from infra-red and visible spectrum. Experimental results show that fused contextual action information boost action recognition performance as compared to the baseline action recognition approac
Description:
Automatic music genre classification is an important component in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). It has gained lot of attention lately due to the rapid growth in the use of digital music. Past work in this area has already produced a number of audio features and classification techniques; however, genre classification still remains an unsolved problem. In this paper we explore a hybrid unsupervised/supervised top-down hierarchical classification approach. Most existing work on hierarchical music genre classification relies on human built trees and taxonomies; however these hierarchies may not always translate well into machine classification problems. Therefore, we explore an automatic approach to construct a classification tree through subspace cluster analysis. Experimental results validate the tree building algorithm and provide a new research direction for automatic genre classification. We also addressed the issue of scarcity in publicly available music datasets, by introducing a new dataset containing genre, artist and album labels.
Description:
With the development of comprehensive transportation system, the competition among various harbors becomes more intense. The paper proposes the evaluation method of container harbor's competition based on the discrete mutation-topsis matter element and establishes a model against the actual harbor's presentation and gives a solution. By using this method to build the port competitiveness evaluation method which serves as reference for the objective a proper understanding and evaluation of port competitiveness, the port can find out the weak links and promote its improvement correspondingly.
Description:
Efficient target tracking applications require active sensor nodes to track a cluster of moving targets. Clustering could lead to significant cost improvement as compared to tracking individual targets. This paper presents accurate clustering of targets for both coherent and incoherent movement patterns. We propose a novel clustering algorithm that utilises an implicit dynamic time frame to assess the relational history of targets in creating a weighted graph of connected components. The proposed algorithm employs key features of localisation algorithms in target tracking, namely, estimated current and predicted locations to determine the relational directions and distances of moving targets. Our simulation results show a significant improvement on the clustering accuracy and computation time by dynamically adjusting the history-window size and predicting the relationships among targets.
Description:
In passive localization, sensors try to locate an event without any knowledge of event's emitted power. So, this is a more challenging problem compared to active localization. Existing passive localization schemes use expensive and noise-vulnerable range-based techniques. In this paper, we propose, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, a cost-effective range-free passive localization scheme exploiting hybrid sensor network model where mobile sensors are deployed on demand once an event is sensed by a static sensor. Efficient use of mobile sensors leads to two concomitant optimization problems: (1) positioning the mobile sensors so that the expected possible event location area is minimized; and (2) minimizing their overall traversed distance. To solve the first problem, we have developed a novel arc-coding based range-free localization technique that can accurately define the area of possible event location from the feedback of arbitrarily placed sensors without relying on expensive hardware to estimate range of signals. We have achieved significantly high localization accuracy with a low number of mobile sensors even after considering significant environmental noise. To solve the second problem, three alternative deployment strategies for the mobile sensors were simulated to recommend the best.
Description:
The problem of recognizing human actions is characterized by complex dynamics and strong variations in their executions. Despite this inconvenience, space-time correlations provide valuable clues for their discrimination. Therefore, space-time correlators like emph{Maximum Average Correlation Height} (MACH) filters have successfully been used for action recognition with encouraging results. However, their utility is challenged due to number of factors: (i) these filters are trained only for one class at a time and separate filters are required for each class increasing computational overhead, (ii) these filters simply take average of similar action instances and behave no better than average filters and (iii) misaligned action datasets create problems for these filters as they are not shift-invariant. In this paper, we address these issues by posing action recognition as a multi-class discrimination problem and propose a emph{single} 3D frequency domain filter, named Action ST-DCCF for multiple action classes that mitigates inherent discrepancies of correlation filters. It presents a different interpretation of correlation filters as a method of applying spatio-temporal transformation to the data rather than simply minimizing correlation energy across all possible shifts. Experiments on a variety of action datasets are performed to evaluate our approach. Experimental results are comparable to the existing action recognition approaches.
Description:
The problem of recognizing human actions is characterized by complex dynamics and strong variations in their executions. Despite this inconvenience, space-time correlations provide valuable clues for their discrimination. Therefore, space-time correlators like \emph{Maximum Average Correlation Height} (MACH) filters have successfully been used for action recognition with encouraging results. However, their utility is challenged due to number of factors: (i) these filters are trained only for one class at a time and separate filters are required for each class increasing computational overhead, (ii) these filters simply take average of similar action instances and behave no better than average filters and (iii) misaligned action datasets create problems for these filters as they are not shift-invariant. In this paper, we address these issues by posing action recognition as a multi-class discrimination problem and propose a \emph{single} 3D frequency domain filter, named Action ST-DCCF for multiple action classes that mitigates inherent discrepancies of correlation filters. It presents a different interpretation of correlation filters as a method of applying spatio-temporal transformation to the data rather than simply minimizing correlation energy across all possible shifts. Experiments on a variety of action datasets are performed to evaluate our approach. Experimental results are comparable to the existing action recognition approaches.
Description:
We develop a realistic pricing modeling for dynamic spectrum access network considering a number of factors that influence real world trading. Our model incorporates the reputation of sellers, incentive mechanism to attract buyers, timing requirement of the contract, signal quality along with bandwidth size and price of the spectrum resources. Reputation information is accumulated from self experience and/or from the recommendations of other users. Trustworthiness of the recommending SUs is also modeled in this paper. An incentive mechanism is applied to encourage in dissemination of recommendations and to attract the buyers by providing discounts. A utility function for the spectrum trading is modeled such that a buyer can trade with the seller which maximizes its utility based on the above factors and the pricing solution is obtained using the market equilibrium model. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated using simulation results which show that our model benefits both the sellers and the buyers in terms of profit and throughput, respectively.
Description:
Features extraction has always been crucial in rotary machines for Condition based machine health monitoring. Time-domain-segmentation being among the preliminary steps for further classification process plays a momentous role. Vibration signals from bearing are quasistationary in nature therefore calculation of constituent frequencies amplitudes in the vibration signal is dependent upon time-segmentation-window size. The proposed research confers the effects of time-segmentation window size on spectral features amplitudes calculation and its impacts on classification accuracy of the Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Using multi-size time-segmentation-window, for comprehensive spectral features calculation, ANN pattern classifier has been trained for enhanced classification. ANN learning assigns importance based relative weights to the links using supervised learning. Experimental results have shown that multi-size-window spectral features for ANN fault classifier perform efficiently for quasi-stationary bearing vibrations.
Description:
A Hyperspectral (HS) image provides observational powers beyond human vision capability but represents more than 100 times data compared to a traditional image. To transmit and store the huge volume of an HS image, we argue that a fundamental shift is required from the existing "original pixel intensity"based coding approaches using traditional image coders (e.g. JPEG) to the "residual" based approaches using a predictive coder exploiting band-wise correlation for better compression performance. Moreover, as HS images are used in detection or classification they need to be in original form; lossy schemes can trim off uninteresting data along with compression, which can be important to specific analysis purposes. A modified lossless HS coder is required to exploit spatial- spectral redundancy using predictive residual coding. Every spectral band of an HS image can be treated like they are the individual frame of a video to impose inter band prediction. In this paper, we propose a binary tree based lossless predictive HS coding scheme that arranges the residual frame into integer residual bitmap. High spatial correlation in HS residual frame is exploited by creating large homogeneous blocks of adaptive size, which are then coded as a unit using context based arithmetic coding. On the standard HS data set, the proposed lossless predictive coding has achieved compression ratio in the range of 1.92 to 7.94. In this paper, we compare the proposed method with mainstream lossless coders (JPEG-LS and lossless HEVC). For JPEG-LS, HEVCIntra and HEVCMain, proposed technique has reduced bit-rate by 35%, 40% and 6.79% respectively by exploiting spatial correlation in predicted HS residuals.
Description:
A Hyperspectral (HS) image provides observational powers beyond human vision capability but represents more than 100 times data compared to a traditional image. To transmit and store the huge volume of an HS image, we argue that a fundamental shift is required from the existing "original pixel intensity"based coding approaches using traditional image coders (e.g. JPEG) to the "residual" based approaches using a predictive coder exploiting band-wise correlation for better compression performance. Moreover, as HS images are used in detection or classification they need to be in original form; lossy schemes can trim off uninteresting data along with compression, which can be important to specific analysis purposes. A modified lossless HS coder is required to exploit spatial- spectral redundancy using predictive residual coding. Every spectral band of an HS image can be treated like they are the individual frame of a video to impose inter band prediction. In this paper, we propose a binary tree based lossless predictive HS coding scheme that arranges the residual frame into integer residual bitmap. High spatial correlation in HS residual frame is exploited by creating large homogeneous blocks of adaptive size, which are then coded as a unit using context based arithmetic coding. On the standard HS data set, the proposed lossless predictive coding has achieved compression ratio in the range of 1.92 to 7.94. In this paper, we compare the proposed method with mainstream lossless coders (JPEG-LS and lossless HEVC). For JPEG-LS, HEVCIntra and HEVCMain, proposed technique has reduced bit-rate by 35%, 40% and 6.79% respectively by exploiting spatial correlation in predicted HS residuals.
Description:
The striking feature of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard is emphasized by 50% bit-rate reduction compared to its predecessor H.264/AVC while keeping the same perceptual image quality. The time complexity - a congenital issue of HEVC has also increased to intensify the compression ratio. However, it is really a demanding task for the researchers to reduce the encoding time while preserving expected quality of the video sequences. Our contribution is to trim down the computational time by efficient selection of appropriate block-partitioning modes in HEVC using motion features based on phase-correlation. In this paper, we use phase-correlation between current and reference blocks to extract three motion features and combine them to determine binary motion pattern of the current block. The motion pattern is then matched against a codebook of predefined pattern templates to determine a subset of the inter-modes. Only the selected modes are exhaustively motion estimated and compensated for a coding unit. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that the average computational time can be down scaled by 30% of the HEVC while providing improved rate-distortion performance.
Description:
In this work we investigate decentralized content exchange among tourists who are mostly strangers, depicts irregular movement patterns and most likely not to have any prior social relationship or difficult to establish any in a tourist spot. We incorporate user's interest, trustworthy online recommendations, and place-centric information to facilitate content exchange in such tourist destinations. The proposed administrator selection policy considers stay probability in activities, connectivity among nodes and their available resources. We have done extensive simulation using network simulator NS3 on a popular tourist spot in Australia that provides a number of activities. Our proposed approach shows promising results in exchanging contents among users measured in terms of content hit and delivery success rate as well as latency. The success rate is comparable to those reported in the literature for cases where social relationship exist and nodes follow regular predictable movement patterns.
Description:
The transmission, storage and analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) data in real-time is essential for remote patient monitoring with wearable ECG devices and mobile ECG contexts. However, this remains a challenge to achieve within the processing power and the storage capacity of mobile devices. ECG reduction algorithms have an important role to play in reducing the processing requirements for mobile devices, however many existing ECG reduction and compression algorithms are computationally expensive to execute in mobile devices and have not been designed for real-time computation and incremental data arrival. In this paper, we describe a computationally naive, yet effective, algorithm that achieves high ECG reduction rates while maintaining key diagnostic features including PR, QRS, ST, QT and RR intervals. While reduction does not enable ECG waves to be reproduced, the ability to transmit key indicators (diagnostic features) using minimal computational resources, is particularly useful in mobile health contexts involving power constrained sensors and devices. Results of the proposed reduction algorithm indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other ECG reduction algorithms at a reduction/compression ratio (CR) of 5:1. If power or processing capacity is low, the algorithm can readily switch to a compression ratio of up to 10: 1 while still maintaining an error rate below 10%.
Description:
The transmission, storage and analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) data in real-time is essential for remote patient monitoring with wearable ECG devices and mobile ECG contexts. However, this remains a challenge to achieve within the processing power and the storage capacity of mobile devices. ECG reduction algorithms have an important role to play in reducing the processing requirements for mobile devices, however many existing ECG reduction and compression algorithms are computationally expensive to execute in mobile devices and have not been designed for real-time computation and incremental data arrival. In this paper, we describe a computationally naive, yet effective, algorithm that achieves high ECG reduction rates while maintaining key diagnostic features including PR, QRS, ST, QT and RR intervals. While reduction does not enable ECG waves to be reproduced, the ability to transmit key indicators (diagnostic features) using minimal computational resources, is particularly useful in mobile health contexts involving power constrained sensors and devices. Results of the proposed reduction algorithm indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other ECG reduction algorithms at a reduction/compression ratio (CR) of 5:1. If power or processing capacity is low, the algorithm can readily switch to a compression ratio of up to 10: 1 while still maintaining an error rate below 10%.
Description:
Frequency Response Analysis (FRA) has become a reliable tool to detect mechanical deformation within power transformers. Many researchers have investigated the impact of various mechanical winding and core deformations on transformer FRA signature using either simulation analysis or practical testing to establish a standard code for FRA signature interpretation. None of them however, have given attention to the impact of power transformer insulating oil degradation on the transformer FRA signature. This paper investigates the effect of insulating mineral oil degradation on power transformer FRA signature. In this regard, the physical geometrical dimension of a single-phase transformer filled with insulating mineral oil is simulated using three dimensional finite element analysis to emulate the real transformer operation. Transformer FRA signature is measured and analysed with various health conditions of the insulating oil. Results show that, insulating oil degradation has a significant impact on the transformer FRA signature.
Description:
This paper presents a newly developed parallel gripper prototype capable of sensing grasp force, tangential force and slippage. In this design the gripper itself is used as part of the sensing strategy rather than just being simply a structural support for other sensors. The sensing capability of this gripper is simple in design and reliable. The sensing strategy can be customised to specific applications such as the ability to handle large loads while maintaining its ability to detect slippage as reliably as when handling lighter loads.
Description:
Secondary service providers can buy spectrum resources from primary service providers for a short or long period of time and exploit it to solve the problem of spectrum scarcity. This buying decision of spectrum buyers can depend on several factors including pricing of the spectrum, reputation of a seller, and duration of the contract and spectrum quality. However, existing pricing models for dynamic spectrum access consider mainly bandwidth which makes them unsuitable for real-world trading. In this paper, we consider these issues related to the pricing of spectrum sale in terms of microeconomic theories. First, we consider reputation of spectrum sellers and update it dynamically by considering a buyer's own trading experience with the sellers and collecting recommendations on sellers from other buyers. Second, trustworthiness of recommenders as well as incentive to encourage recommendations are modeled. Third, contract duration and spectrum quality are incorporated such that a buyer's utility is formulated as a function of buyer's resource requirement, reputation of seller and trustworthiness of recommenders. Fourth, the model is analyzed using dynamic pricing of the market and the solution is obtained using market equilibrium. Results demonstrate the superiority of our model over the existing microeconomic models for dynamic spectrum trading.
Description:
Reliability-redundancy allocation problems (RRAPs) are optimization models that try to find the optimal number of redundant components and their reliability levels simultaneously. Many studies have been developed to solve RRAPs in recent years. There are some specific RRAP models for various system structures to maximize system reliability subject to cost, volume and weight constraints. Different meta-heuristic algorithms have been used in order to reach the best objective function value. In this study, an investigation is done on imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) to maximize models for series and bridge systems. ICA is used by adjusting different values to algorithm's parameters. This investigation recognizes which combination is the most suitable for solving the RRAPs by ICA. Each combination has been run for 35 times. Therefore, the combinations are compared by descriptive statistics' measures and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Furthermore, the best obtained solution is compared with the previous studies.