Graph-based video fingerprinting using double optimal projection

A double optimal projection method that involves projections for intra-cluster and inter-cluster dimensionality reduction are proposed for video fingerprinting. The video is initially set as a graph with frames as its vertices in a high-dimensional space. A similarity measure that can compute the weights of the edges is then proposed. Subsequently, the video frames are partitioned into different clusters based on the graph model. Double optimal projection is used to explore the optimal mapping points in a low-dimensional space to reduce the video dimensions. The statistics and geometrical fingerprints are generated to determine whether a query video is copied from one of the videos in the database. During matching, the video can be roughly matched by utilizing the statistics fingerprint. Further matching is thereafter performed in the corresponding group using geometrical fingerprints. Experimental results show the good performance of the proposed video fingerprinting method in robustness and discrimination.     

Catalytic oxidation of naphthalene using a Pt/Al2O3 catalyst

Polycylic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are listed as carcinogenic and mutagenic priority pollutants, belonging to the environmental endocrine disrupters. Most PAHs in the environment stem from the atmospheric deposition and diesel emission. Consequently, the elimination of PAHs in the off-gases is one of the priority and emerging challenges. Catalytic oxidation has been widely used in the destruction of organic compounds due to its high efficiency (or conversion of reactants), its economic benefits and good applicability.

This study investigates the application of the catalytic oxidation using Pt/γ-Al₂O₃ catalysts to decompose PAHs and taking naphthalene (the simplest and least toxic PAH) as a target compound. It studies the relationships between conversion, operating parameters and relevant factors such as treatment temperatures, catalyst sizes and space velocities. Also, a related reaction kinetic expression is proposed to provide a simplified expression of the relevant kinetic parameters.

The results indicate that the Pt/γ-Al₂O₃ catalyst used accelerates the reaction rate of the decomposition of naphthalene and decreases the reaction temperature. A high conversion (over 95%) can be achieved at a moderate reaction temperature of 480 K and space velocity below 35,000 h⁻¹. Non-catalytic (thermal) oxidation achieves the same conversion at a temperature beyond 1000 K. The results also indicate that Rideal–Eley mechanism and Arrhenius equation can be reasonably applied to describe the data by using the pseudo-first-order reaction kinetic equation with activation energy of 149.97 kJ/mol and frequency factor equal to 3.26 × 10¹⁷ s⁻¹.     

Garbage collection of multi-version indexed data on flash memory

Maintaining a multi-version index on flash memory could generate a lot of updates and invalid pages. It is important to have an efficient garbage collection mechanism to ensure the flash memory has sufficient number of free blocks for storing new data versions and their index structures. In this paper, we study the important performance issues in using the purging-range query to reclaim the blocks, which are storing old data versions and invalid index entries, to be free blocks. To reduce the cost for processing the purging-range query, we propose the physical block labeling (PBL) scheme to provide a better estimation on the purging version number to be used for purging old data versions. To further enhance the performance of the garbage collection process, and at the same time to maximize the deadspans of data versions and balance the wear levels of the blocks, we propose two schemes called, the sequential placement (SQ) and frequency-based placement (FBP), for placing new data versions into free pages. As illustrated in the performance studies, both SQ and FBP can effectively balance the wear levels of the blocks. The deadspans of data versions are longer under FBP than both SQ and RR, and the page reallocation cost is also lower under FBP especially when the size of flash memory allocated for the database is limited. The experimental results also illustrate that PBL can effectively minimize the number of invocations of the purging-range query to be one to reclaim the required number of blocks in each garbage collection.     

Phase separation in segmented polyurethanes derived from mixtures of polyether polyols with different functionality

A series of segmented polyurethanes containing 60 wt° of hard segments (HS) was prepared from MDI (4,4-diphenylmethane diisocyanate) ethylene glycol and mixtures of a polyoxyethylene end-capped polyoxypropylene triol and a polyoxyethylene end-capped polyoxypropylene diol. The effects of the content of polyether diol in polyether polyols on phase separation and properties was investigated by dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and investigation of tensile properties. The DSC and DMA results indicate that the polyurethane derived from only polyether triol exhibits obvious phase separation and that the HS is immiscible with the SS, but that the HS is compatible with the HS for the polyurethane derived from polyether diol. As the content of polyether diol increases, the compatibility between HS and SS increases. As the content of polyether diol increases, the tensile strength. elongation. toughness and tear resistance of the polyurethanes increases. but their moduli decrease. The modulus-temperature dependence in the temperature region of –30 to 65 °C increases as the polyether diol content increases.     

Experimentation and performance analysis of multi-interfaced mobile router scheme

Network mobility (NEMO) aims providing seamless Internet connectivity of the whole mobile network that consists of mobile routers (MRs) and mobile network nodes (MNNs). The network moves around along with vehicles as a whole. According to NEMO basic support protocol (NEMO BSP), only one primary care of address (CoA) of MR can be registered with home agent, which will affect the handover performance. As an extension of NEMO BSP, multiple care of addresses (MCoA) registration scheme was proposed as Internet-draft and has received extensive researches.This paper studies the Internet connectivity of mobile router (MR) on the basis stated above; MR is equipped with WLAN, CDMA and GPRS interfaces simultaneously. Concretely, a smooth handover algorithm is proposed and experimented on our platform successfully; round trip time (RTT) of each link and the handover process between different interfaces are analyzed, respectively. Furthermore, the service disruption time and packet loss ratio performances are also compared between uni-interfaced MR scheme of NEMO BSP and scheme proposed in this paper, and the results indicate that multi-interfaced scheme not only supports large area movement across heterogeneous networks of MR, it also provides a seamless handover with no packet loss and little service disruption time.     

Design and implementation of light-weight mobile multicast for fast MIPv6

Mobile multicast is a research hotspot and can provide many applications. Some mobile multicast schemes have been proposed, but most of them introduce new entities and study construction algorithms of the dynamic multicast delivery structure which is heavyweight for wireless devices. In this paper, we propose a light-weight mobile multicast (LMM) scheme for Fast Mobile IPv6 which reduces the redundant operational overhead by simplifying multicast listener discovery (MLD) proxying. The LMM scheme implements simplified MLD proxying function on home agent to reduce the complicated multicast routing protocol and modifies MLD host part function on mobile node to reduce the multicast membership messages interaction. In order to solve the tunnel convergence problem, LMM also introduces a multicast tunnel combination and reconstruction algorithm. We set up a test-bed to evaluate the performance of LMM, and compare it with other mobile multicast schemes. The experimental results show that LMM reduces the multicast disruption time at handover. Based on the experimental results, we analyze the cost of LMM, and the results show that it has lower protocol cost than other schemes.     

Pressure-assisted self-assembly technique for fabricating composite membranes consisting of highly ordered selective laminate layers of amphiphilic graphene oxide

We prepare highly ordered flexible layers of graphene oxide (GO) on modified polyacrylonitrile substrates by the pressure-assisted self-assembly technique. This composite membrane shows excellent performance during the pervaporation separation of a 70 wt.% isopropyl alcohol (IPA)/water mixture: 99.5 wt% water in permeate and 2047 g m⁻² h⁻¹ permeation flux. Despite the specific GO deposition increase from 4.3 to 43.3 × 10⁻⁵ g cm⁻² (ninefold layer thickness growth), its effect on the permeation flux is not significant, as manifested by only a little decrease in the flux. At 70 °C feed temperature, the permeate water concentration remains 99.5 wt% and the permeation flux reaches 4137 g m⁻² h⁻¹. The high selectivity may be due to the dense GO film consisting of highly ordered and packed laminates, allowing water but inhibiting IPA molecules to pass through. GO is demonstrated to be amphiphilic: water molecules adsorb first at the hydrophilic edge (hydroxides) and then rapidly diffuse through the hydrophobic core (mainly carbon), forming a water passage channel that promotes high permeation flux. When water molecules permeate through the GO layers, they accumulate and form a monolayer structure that pushes the successive layers away from each other, leading to widening of the d-spacing.     

Carbon molecular sieve membranes derived from Matrimid® polyimide for nitrogen/methane separation

A commercial polyimide, Matrimid® 5218, was pyrolyzed under an inert argon atmosphere to produce carbon molecular sieve (CMS) dense film membranes for nitrogen/methane separation. The resulting CMS dense film separation performance was evaluated using both pure and mixed N₂/CH₄ permeation tests. The effects of final pyrolysis temperature on N₂/CH₄ separation are reported. The separation performance of all CMS dense films significantly exceeds the polymer precursor dense film. The CMS dense film pyrolyzed at 800 °C shows very attractive separation performance that surpasses the polymer membrane upper bound line, with N₂ permeability of 6.8 Barrers and N₂/CH₄ permselectivity of 7.7 from pure gas permeation, and N₂ permeability of 5.2 Barrers and N₂/CH₄ permselectivity of 6.0 from mixed gas permeation. The temperature dependences of permeabilities, sorption coefficients, and diffusion coefficients of the membrane were studied, and the activation energy for permeation and diffusion, as well as the apparent heats of sorption are reported. The high permselectivity of this dense film is shown to arise from a significant entropic contribution in the diffusion selectivity. The study shows that the rigid ‘slit-shaped’ CMS pore structure can enable a strong molecular sieving effect to effectively distinguish the size and shape difference between N₂ and CH₄.     

Variable-dimensional vector modulation for perceptual-based DWT blind audio watermarking with adjustable payload capacity

A variable-dimensional vector modulation (VDVM) scheme is introduced to maximize the efficiency of the norm-space DWT-based blind audio watermarking technique. This flexible scheme allows the watermarking algorithm to reach a balance between robustness and capacity, while the imperceptivity is always ensured. The imperfection of applying quantization index modulation in the open-loop case has been rectified. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is proven using the perceptual evaluation of audio quality (PEAQ) and bit error rates of recovered watermarks under various signal processing attacks. Experimental results show that the proposed VDVM scheme is comparable to other recently developed methods in robustness and imperceptivity even at a capacity as high as 301.46 bps. Such a capacity can be further doubled by halving the dimension of the involved DWT vector, while the robustness is still maintained at a satisfactory level.