Collision-based computing implemented by soldier crab swarms

Collision-based computing schemes are implemented using propagating and interacting localisations. When two or more travelling localisations collide, they may reflect or merge into a new localisation. Presence/absence of a localisation in a specified site of a physical space represents True/False values of Boolean variables. Incoming trajectories symbolise inputs and outgoing trajectories are outputs. Logical gates are implemented by collisions between the localisations. We demonstrate how primitives of the collision-based computing can be implemented using swarms of soldier crabs in laboratory experiments. Soldier crabs, Mictyris guinotae, exhibit coherent collective behaviour on an intertidal flat at a daytime low-tide period. The soldier crabs' swarm often moves as a single entity with definite yet dynamically changing boundary. We utilise swarms of soldier crabs to implement a Boolean logic gate. The gate has two inputs and three outputs. Values of the inputs and outputs are represented by crab swarm size or a proportion of crabs in the input and output channels. We demonstrate that the gate performs logical conjunction and negation.     

A distance-based parameter free algorithm for curve reconstruction

In this paper, a simple, efficient, and parameter free algorithm, DISCUR, is proposed to reconstruct curves from unorganized sample points. The proposed algorithm can reconstruct multiple simple curves that may be open, closed, and/or with sharp corners. The criteria for the curve reconstruction are based on two observations we have made concerning the human visual system: (1) two closest neighbors tend to be connected, and (2) sampling points tend to be connected into a smooth curve. To simulate these two observations, we use the neighborhood feature to connect the nearest neighbors and we present a statistical criterion to determine when two sample points should not be connected even if they are the nearest neighbors. Finally, a necessary and sufficient condition is proposed for the sampling of curves so that they can be reconstructed by using the present algorithm. Numerous examples show that this algorithm is effective.     

Ergonomic interventions for commercial crab fishermen

Work tasks in the commercial fishing industry require strength, endurance and coordination and these tasks expose fishermen to many of the recognized risk factors for the development of work-related musculoskeletal disorders. The focus of the current study was the design, development and testing of two simple ergonomic interventions to reduce exposure to these risk factors in small-scale commercial crab fishermen. In a laboratory study of these interventions, EMG and motion analysis systems were used to quantify changes in muscle force and body postures. The results of laboratory evaluation of the intervention designed to reduce the low back stress associated with hoisting the crab pots onboard showed significant reductions in muscle force requirements (erector spinae activity reduced by 25%) and peak sagittal trunk angle (reduced by 34%), while the results of the intervention designed to reduce shoulder stress during the process of shaking the crabs from the pots showed significant reductions in peak deltoid activity (reduced by 24%). A field test of these interventions provided a more subjective “usability” evaluation of the interventions. These responses were cautiously positive, providing insights into when these interventions would be most appropriate and under what conditions they would be more of a hindrance than a help.

Relevance to industry

Engineering controls are recognized as the most effective methods of reducing exposure to risk factors for musculoskeletal injury. Engineering controls were developed for small-scale commercial crab fishermen and these interventions were tested in the laboratory and in the field.     

Use of the CABS methodology to assess biomechanical stress in commercial crab fishermen

Commercial fishing is a job characterized by long hours in an unpredictable, dynamic natural environment and variable demands placed on the musculoskeletal system, requiring strength, coordination, and endurance. The focus of this project was in the quantification of the biomechanical stresses placed on the lumbar spine during the work activities of commercial crab fishermen. The continuous assessment of back stress (CABS) methodology was used to develop distributions describing the amount of time that each of the crew members on a two- or three-man crabbing crew spend at various levels of low back stress. The results of this analysis, expressed in terms of time-weighted histograms, show significant inter and intra-crewmember variability in the stress measures during regular daily work activities. For the three man crew, the captain has relatively low stress levels throughout the work day, while the mate performs high force (up to 30 kg), dynamic exertions while pulling the crab pots from the water up into the boat and high loads (20-40 kg) during the loading and unloading of the boat in the morning and evening, respectively. The third man of the crew experiences static awkward postures (forward flexed postures held for up to 5 min at a time) as he sorts and packs the crabs. For the two-man crew, the results show a more even distribution of the high stress activities between the crewmembers. The application of the results of this analysis for prioritization of work tasks for ergonomic intervention is discussed.     

Competitive facility location: the Voronoi game

We consider a competitive facility location problem with two players. Players alternate placing points, one at a time, into the playing arena, until each of them has placed n points. The arena is then subdivided according to the nearest-neighbor rule, and the player whose points control the larger area wins. We present a winning strategy for the second player, where the arena is a circle or a line segment. We permit variations where players can play more than one point at a time, and show that the first player can ensure that the second player wins by an arbitrarily small margin.     

Compliant activity rather than difficulty accelerates thought probe responsiveness and inhibits deliberate mind wandering

ABSTRACT

Mind wandering is a commonly intruding cognitive state that leads to diminished performance and increased error risk during a primary task. A controversy over whether easier or more difficult tasks increase mind wandering has led to mind wandering being proposed as two different states: deliberate and spontaneous. We hypothesise that forced engagement via persistent compliant activity may both increase responsiveness and inhibit non-instrumental activities including deliberate mind wandering. Twenty-eight healthy adults interacted with 2 pairs of stimuli, each pair having one low-interactivity version and a high-interactivity version requiring compliant activity. Mind wandering was assessed by thought probes, and subjective responses were rated using visual analogue scales. Reaction times were measured using Superlab. Compliant activity decreased the prevalence of deliberate mind wandering episodes but not of overall mind wandering. Thought probe durations were accelerated significantly by compliant activity, near-significantly by thinking on-task thoughts, and additively by the combination of both. Deliberate and spontaneous mind wandering elicited equivalent thought probe durations. We conclude that compliant activity works synergistically with lack of mind wandering to accelerate the difficult task of thought probe response but not simple reaction times. These results fit with an arousal model but not the attentional resources model.     

Visual multiple secret sharing based upon turning and flipping

The secret sharing schemes in conventional visual cryptography are capable of sharing one secret image into a set of random transparencies (called shares) in the form of rectangles, which reveal the secret image to the human visual system when they are superimposed. Recently, visual secret sharing schemes involving multiple secrets have attracted much attention. By adopting rotations on one of the two encoded circle shares, more than two secrets could be shared. Yet, the encoding and decoding processes of circle shares need more sophisticated mechanisms than those of rectangular or square ones. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of visual multiple secret sharing using simply two rectangular or square shares. Specifically, we define some operations onto a transparency based upon turning over or flipping around. Then we propose visual cryptographic schemes that are able to encode two or four secrets into two rectangular shares and up to eight secrets into two square shares such that the secrets cannot be obtained from any single share, whereas they are revealed by stacking the two shares under various combinations of turning or flipping operations. The proposed schemes, which solidly elaborate the relationship between the encoded shares and the shared secrets, broaden the research scope and enrich the flexibility and applicability of visual cryptography or image encryption theoretically and practically.     

Information transfer in a swarm of soldier crabs

Collective behavior is broadly observed in animal groups such as insect swarm, bird flock, and fish school. Both theoretical studies and field observations have investigated possible underlying principles based on local interaction among individuals in a group without global information via conductors or leaders. Information transferred among individuals would play a key role to understand it. In this study, to investigate how individual in a swarm uses information of its own past behavior or swarm mates’ behavior, we analyzed behavior of soldier crabs Mictyris guinotae in terms of local active information storage and local transfer entropy.     

Markerless visual servo control of a servosphere for behavior observation of a variety of wandering animals

ABSTRACT

Servospheres are robotized observation equipments that produce endless fields for behavior observation of wandering animals. This paper first proposes a markerless visual tracking technique for estimation of the position and the heading direction of wandering animals, since existing techniques for servospheres require special markers or do not estimate the heading direction. The proposed markerless visual tracking technique is then integrated with a visual servo controller for a servosphere. The integrated markerless visual servo controller is available for wandering animals whose shapes in the image plane are represented by long bodies and thinner parts than their bodies. This paper demonstrates that the proposed controller is available for ants, crickets, mantises and spiders, while the shapes of their bodies and legs are different from each other.     

Coupled Oscillator Control of Autonomous Mobile Robots

This paper introduces a nonlinear oscillator scheme to control autonomous mobile robots. The method is based on observations of a successful control mechanism used in nature, the Central Pattern Generator. Simulations were used to assess the performance of oscillator controller when used to implement several behaviors in an autonomous robot operating in a closed arena. A sequence of basic behaviors (random wandering, obstacle avoidance and light following) was coordinated in the robot to produce the higher behavior of foraging for light. The controller is explored in simulations and tests on physical robots. It is shown that the oscillator—based controller outperforms a reactive controller in the tasks of exploring an arena with irregular walls and in searching for light.     

Irrelevance reduction with locality-sensitive hash learning for efficient cross-media retrieval

Cross-media retrieval is an imperative approach to handle the explosive growth of multimodal data on the web. However, existing approaches to cross-media retrieval are computationally expensive due to high dimensionality. To efficiently retrieve in multimodal data, it is essential to reduce the proportion of irrelevant documents. In this paper, we propose a fast cross-media retrieval approach (FCMR) based on locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) and neural networks. One modality of multimodal information is projected by LSH algorithm to cluster similar objects into the same hash bucket and dissimilar objects into different ones and then another modality is mapped into these hash buckets using hash functions learned through neural networks. Once given a textual or visual query, it can be efficiently mapped to a hash bucket in which objects stored can be near neighbors of this query. Experimental results show that, in the set of the queries’ near neighbors obtained by the proposed method, the proportions of relevant documents can be much boosted, and it indicates that the retrieval based on near neighbors can be effectively conducted. Further evaluations on two public datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed retrieval method compared to the baselines.     

Where is my puppy? Retrieving lost dogs by facial features

A pet that goes missing is among many people’s worst fears: a moment of distraction is enough for a dog or a cat wandering off from home. Some measures help matching lost animals to their owners; but automated visual recognition is one that — although convenient, highly available, and low-cost — is surprisingly overlooked. In this paper, we inaugurate that promising avenue by pursuing face recognition for dogs. We contrast four ready-to-use human facial recognizers (EigenFaces, FisherFaces, LBPH, and a Sparse method) to two original solutions based upon convolutional neural networks: BARK (inspired in architecture-optimized networks employed for human facial recognition) and WOOF (based upon off-the-shelf OverFeat features). Human facial recognizers perform poorly for dogs (up to 60.5 % accuracy), showing that dog facial recognition is not a trivial extension of human facial recognition. The convolutional network solutions work much better, with BARK attaining up to 81.1 % accuracy, and WOOF, 89.4 %. The tests were conducted in two datasets: Flickr-dog, with 42 dogs of two breeds (pugs and huskies); and Snoopybook, with 18 mongrel dogs.     

Early cortical processing of vection-inducing visual stimulation as measured by event-related brain potentials (ERP)

Visual motion stimuli can induce the perception of self-motion in stationary observers (known as vection). In the present study, we investigated the sensory processing underlying vection by measuring the human event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by the movement onset of a visual stimulus. We presented participants a visual stimulus consisting of alternating black-and-white vertical bars that moved in horizontal direction, creating the sensation of vection. The stimulus was presented on a screen that was divided into a central and a surrounding peripheral visual area. Both areas moved independently from each other, resulting in four different movement patterns: the peripheral and the central stimulus moved in the same or opposite direction, or one of the two visual areas of the stimulus moved while the other remained stable. In addition, two different stimulus types varying with respect to the bars’ width (narrow vs. wide) were used. Participants were presented with these stimuli in two phases of the experiment: During EEG-recording, only short phases (2.5–3.5 ms) of visual motion were applied. In a separate rating phase, visual motion was presented for 45 s. In this phase, vection onset, intensity, and duration were verbally recorded. Overall, the visual stimulation generated vection with different intensities (i.e., weakest vection with sole central stimulus movement). Stimulus type did not affect vection. In the ERPs, stimulus onset elicited parieto-occipital P2 and N2 components. The amplitudes of the ERP components differed significantly between the four movement patterns (irrespective of stimulus type), however, they did not fully align with the subjective vection ratings. Since the ERPs are associated with early sensory processing preceding vection, we argue that the ERPs mirror the contribution of sensory cortical processes to vection rather than the subjective sensation of vection per se.     

虚拟实景空间的实时漫游

文中讨论了在基于实景图象的虚拟信息空间进行漫游需要解决的图象处理问题及相关算法,进而设计实现了一种满足实时要求的高效多线程漫游机制。     

Impacts of anger on driving performance: A comparison to texting and conversation while driving

Traditionally, driver distraction has been categorized into four types: visual, biomechanical, auditory, and cognitive. However, the place of emotion in driving research is largely undefined. The present study investigates the specific influences of anger – representative emotion arisen while driving, on driving performance, compared to those of traditional distraction tasks. In total, seventy-eight participants were recruited and placed into one of four driving conditions: physical (visual-biomechanical) distraction, cognitive (cognitive-auditory) distraction, emotional (anger), and control conditions. The results demonstrated that anger degrades driving performance as much as or more than other distraction types, specifically, in a yellow traffic signal situation. The causes for these results, underlying mechanisms, and other considerations are discussed with implications for future research.     

Using visual and auditory cues to locate out-of-view objects in head-mounted augmented reality

When looking for an object in a complex visual scene, Augmented Reality (AR) can assist search with visual cues persistently pointing in the target’s direction. The effectiveness of these visual cues can be reduced if they are placed at a different visual depth plane to the target they are indicating. To overcome this visual-depth problem, we test the effectiveness of adding simultaneous spatialized auditory cues that are fixed at the target’s location. In an experiment we manipulated which cue(s) were available (visual-only vs. visual + auditory), and which disparity plane relative to the target the visual cue was displayed on. Results show that participants were slower at finding targets when the visual cue was placed on a different disparity plane to the target. However, this slowdown in search performance could be substantially reduced with auditory cueing. These results demonstrate the importance of AR cross-modal cueing under conditions of visual uncertainty and show that designers should consider augmenting visual cues with auditory ones.     

Adaptive reversible data hiding based on a local smoothness estimator

A novel reversible watermarking (RW) scheme based on a local smoothness estimator and multi-step embedding strategy is proposed in this paper. All the pixels are divided into four equal parts. Correspondingly, the watermark embedding process is separated into four independent steps. Thus each step is performed to embed watermark information into its corresponding image part. In each step, for each to-be-embedded pixel, a local smoothness estimator defined as the variance of its total neighbors is presented to estimate its local smoothness. An obvious advantage of introducing this estimator is that it can determine those pixels in smooth regions accurately. In fact, accurate determination means the decrease in embedding distortion. At the low embedding rate (ER), modifications induced by difference expansion (DE) are done only to those pixels located in smooth regions. Hence, the proposed method can obtain high embedding capacity while maintaining good visual quality. With ER gradually increased, adaptive embedding is employed. In adaptive embedding, for one to-be-embedded pixel, 1 or 2 bits are adaptively embedded according to the strength of relationship among all the pixels surrounding it. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective.     

融合深度特征和语义邻域的自动图像标注*

传统图像标注方法中人工选取特征费时费力,传统标签传播算法忽视语义近邻,导致视觉相似而语义不相似,影响标注效果.针对上述问题,文中提出融合深度特征和语义邻域的自动图像标注方法.首先构建基于深度卷积神经网络的统一、自适应深度特征提取框架,然后对训练集划分语义组并建立待标注图像的邻域图像集,最后根据视觉距离计算邻域图像各标签的贡献值并排序得到标注关键词.在基准数据集上实验表明,相比传统人工综合特征,文中提出的深度特征维数更低,效果更好.文中方法改善传统视觉近邻标注方法中的视觉相似而语义不相似的问题,有效提升准确率和准确预测的标签总数.     

Dummies for crash testing motor cars

The paper describes the design and development of the Ogle-MIRA anthropomorphic dummies over the past five years. In the motor industry these dummies are used in safety testing of vehicles and the design of restraint systems. The work started at MIRA in 1969 to produce a dummy which was sufficiently realistic to test steering columns and safety belts for vehicle occupants. The first dummies were manufactured by David Ogle Ltd in 1972 and an advanced dummy (the OPAT Dummy) has now been designed in collaboration with the Transport aand Road Research Laboratory.     

移动社交网络中基于网络中心度的链路预测方法*

移动社交网络中的链路预测是指通过已知的网络节点以及移动社交网络结构等信息预测网络中尚未产生连边的两个节点之间产生链接的可能性。基于网络中心度的思想,提出一种适用于移动社交网络的链路预测算法。在该算法中,根据节点网络中心度和共同邻居数来计算两个节点的相似性指标,两个节点的共同邻居数越多、共同邻居的网络中心度越高,则两个节点的相似度越高。另外,由于移动社交网络的动态性特征,还将考虑时间因素对预测结果的影响。将该方法与其他4种常用的链路预测方法进行比较,实验结果显示所提方法要优于其他方法。