A Comparative Study of Non-traditional Methods for Vehicle Crashworthiness and NVH Optimization

In this paper, metamodeling and five well-known metaheuristic optimization algorithms were used to reduce the weight and improve crash and NVH attributes of a vehicle simultaneously. A high-fidelity full vehicle model is used to analyze peak acceleration, intrusion and component’s internal-energy under Full-Frontal, Offset-Frontal, and Side crash scenarios as well as vehicle natural frequencies. The radial basis functions method is used to approximate the structural responses. A nonlinear surrogate-based mass minimization was formulated and solved by five different optimization algorithms under crash-vibration constraints. The performance of these algorithms is investigated and discussed.     

Exponential Stability of Switched Time-varying Delayed Neural Networks with All Modes Being Unstable

This paper aims to design an appropriate switching law to stabilize the switched neural networks with time-varying delays when all subsystems are unstable. By using the discretized Lyapunov function approach and the extended comparison principle for impulsive systems, the stability of switched delayed neural networks composed full of unstable subsystems is analyzed and a computable sufficient condition is derived in the framework of dwell time. The effectiveness of the proposed results is illustrated by a numerical example.     

Dispersion Constraint Based Non-negative Sparse Coding Model

Based on advantages of basic non-negative sparse coding (NNSC) model, and considered the prior class constraint of image features, a novel NNSC model is discussed here. In this NNSC model, the sparseness criteria is selected as a two-parameter density estimation model and the dispersion ratio of within-class and between-class is used as the class constraint. Utilizing this NNSC model, image features can be extracted successfully. Further, the feature recognition task by using different classifiers can be implemented well. Simulation results prove that our NNSC model proposed is indeed effective in extracting image features and recognition task in application.     

A New and Fast Implementation of Orthogonal LDA Algorithm and Its Incremental Extension

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is one of the most popular dimension reduction methods and has been widely used in many applications. In the last decades many LDA-based dimension reduction algorithms have been reported. Among these methods, orthogonal LDA (OLDA) is a famous one and several different implementations of OLDA have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new and fast implementation of OLDA. Compared with the other OLDA implementations, our proposed implementation of OLDA is the fastest one when the dimensionality d is larger than the sample size n. Then, based on our proposed implementation of OLDA, we present an incremental OLDA algorithm which can accurately update the projection matrix of OLDA when new samples are added into the training set. The effectiveness of our proposed new OLDA algorithm and its incremental version are demonstrated by some real-world data sets.     

Strong Convergence Analysis of Batch Gradient-Based Learning Algorithm for Training Pi-Sigma Network Based on TSK Fuzzy Models

By combining of the benefits of high-order network and TSK (Tagaki-Sugeno-Kang) inference system, Pi-Sigma network is capable to dispose with the nonlinear problems much more effectively, which means it has a compacter construction, and quicker computational speed. The aim of this paper is to present a gradient-based learning method for Pi-Sigma network to train TSK fuzzy inference system. Moreover, some strong convergence results are established based on the weak convergence outcomes, which indicates that the sequence of weighted fuzzy parameters gets to a fixed point. Simulation results show the modified learning algorithm is effective to support the theoretical results.     

An SNN-Based Semantic Role Labeling Model with Its Network Parameters Optimized Using an Improved PSO Algorithm

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a fundamental task in natural language processing to find a sentence-level semantic representation. The semantic role labeling procedure can be viewed as a process of competition between many order parameters, in which the strongest order parameter will win by competition and the desired pattern will be recognized. To realize the above-mentioned integrative SRL, we use synergetic neural network (SNN). Since the network parameters of SNN directly influence the synergetic recognition performance, it is important to optimize the parameters. In this paper, we propose an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm based on log-linear model and use it to effectively determine the network parameters. Our contributions are two-folds: firstly, a log-linear model is introduced to PSO algorithm which can effectively make use of the advantages of a variety of different knowledge sources, and enhance the decision making ability of the model. Secondly, we propose an improved SNN model based on the improved PSO and show its effectiveness in the SRL task. The experimental results show that the proposed model has a higher performance for semantic role labeling with more powerful global exploration ability and faster convergence speed, and indicate that the proposed model has a promising future for other natural language processing tasks.     

Neural Networks Based PID Control of Bidirectional Inductive Power Transfer System

Inductive power transfer (IPT) systems facilitate contactless power transfer between two sides and across an air-gap, through weak magnetic coupling. However, IPT systems constitute a high order resonant circuit and, as such, are difficult to design and control. Aiming at the control problems for bidirectional IPT system, a neural networks based proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control strategy is proposed in this paper. In the proposed neural PID method, the PID gains, \(K_{P}\), \(K_{I}\) and \(K_{D}\) are treated as Gaussian potential function networks (GPFN) weights and they are adjusted using online learning algorithm. In this manner, the neural PID controller has more flexibility and capability than conventional PID controller with fixed gains. The convergence of the GPFN weights learning is guaranteed using Lyapunov method. Simulations are used to test the effective performance of the proposed controller.     

3D Surface Reconstruction of Noisy Point Clouds Using Growing Neural Gas: 3D Object/Scene Reconstruction

With the advent of low-cost 3D sensors and 3D printers, scene and object 3D surface reconstruction has become an important research topic in the last years. In this work, we propose an automatic (unsupervised) method for 3D surface reconstruction from raw unorganized point clouds acquired using low-cost 3D sensors. We have modified the growing neural gas network, which is a suitable model because of its flexibility, rapid adaptation and excellent quality of representation, to perform 3D surface reconstruction of different real-world objects and scenes. Some improvements have been made on the original algorithm considering colour and surface normal information of input data during the learning stage and creating complete triangular meshes instead of basic wire-frame representations. The proposed method is able to successfully create 3D faces online, whereas existing 3D reconstruction methods based on self-organizing maps required post-processing steps to close gaps and holes produced during the 3D reconstruction process. A set of quantitative and qualitative experiments were carried out to validate the proposed method. The method has been implemented and tested on real data, and has been found to be effective at reconstructing noisy point clouds obtained using low-cost 3D sensors.     

DCT statistics-based digital dropout detection in degraded archived media

With the rapid development of visual digital media, the demand for better quality of service has increased the pressure on broadcasters to automate their error detection and restoration activities for preserving their archives. Digital dropout is one of the defects that affect archived visual materials and tends to occur in block by block basis (size of 8 × 8). It is well established that human visual system (HVS) is highly adapted to the statistics of its visual natural environment. Consequently, in this paper, we have formulated digital dropout detection as a classification problem which predicts block label based on statistical features. These statistical features are indicative of perceptual quality relevant to human visual perception, and allow pristine images to be distinguished from distorted ones. Here, the idea is to extract discriminant block statistical features based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients and determine an optimal neighborhood sampling strategy to enhance the discrimination ability of block representation. Since this spatial frame based approach is free from any motion computation dependency, it works perfectly in the presence of fast moving objects. Experiments are performed on video archives to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed technique.