Generating strictly binary trees at random based on convex polygon triangulations

A set of maximal non-intersecting diagonals can decompose a polygon into triangles, and the edges and diagonals can be converted into the external and internal nodes of a strictly binary tree. This paper gives algorithms to generate all types of triangulations and triangulations at random. Based on that, this paper gives an algorithm to generate strictly binary trees at random. The experimental results show that the numbers of various shapes of strictly binary trees generated are nearly equal. The algorithm to generate strictly binary trees at random can be transformed to the algorithm to randomly generate binary trees.     

Adaptive neural control for an uncertain robotic manipulator with joint space constraints

In this paper, adaptive neural tracking control is proposed for a robotic manipulator with uncertainties in both manipulator dynamics and joint actuator dynamics. The manipulator joints are subject to inequality constraints, i.e., the joint angles are required to remain in some compact sets. Integral barrier Lyapunov functionals (iBLFs) are employed to address the joint space constraints directly without performing an additional mapping to the error space. Neural networks (NNs) are utilised to compensate for the unknown robot dynamics and external force. Adapting parameters are developed to estimate the unknown bounds on NN approximations. By the Lyapunov synthesis, the proposed control can guarantee the semi-global uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system, and the practical tracking of joint reference trajectory is achieved without the violation of predefined joint space constraints. Simulation results are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.     

Depth incorporating with color improves salient object detection

Detecting salient objects in challenging images attracts increasing attention as many applications require more robust method to deal with complex images from the Internet. Prior methods produce poor saliency maps in challenging cases mainly due to the complex patterns in the background and internal color edges in the foreground. The former problem may introduce noises into saliency maps and the later forms the difficulty in determining object boundaries. Observing that depth map can supply layering information and more reliable boundary, we improve salient object detection by integrating two features: color information and depth information which are calculated from stereo images. The two features collaborate in a two-stage framework. In the object location stage, depth mainly helps to produce a noise-filtered salient patch, which indicates the location of the object. In the object boundary inference stage, boundary information is encoded in a graph using both depth and color information, and then we employ the random walk to infer more reliable boundaries and obtain the final saliency map. We also build a data set containing 100+ stereo pairs to test the effectiveness of our method. Experiments show that our depth-plus-color based method significantly improves salient object detection compared with previous color-based methods.     

Fast fractal prediction of surge over underwater vehicle

In order to realize accurate control of underwater vehicles, this paper proposed a fractal prediction model of surge. Firstly, we introduce the current state-of-the-art of fractal prediction; secondly, we complete a fractal analysis with the R_S method, calculating the fractal dimension of surge using the short-time dimension method; thirdly, we correct the vertical scaling factor of the Iterated Function System (IFS) using the fractal dimension. Then the predictive value can be calculated through anti-iteration according to the statistical significantly IFS and proposing a fractal prediction model. Finally, we complete a simulation analysis based on the actual data and a comparison to another prediction algorithm. The result shows that the fractal prediction algorithm of this article has better comprehensive performance.     

3D Body Shapes Estimation from Dressed‐Human Silhouettes

Estimation of 3D body shapes from dressed‐human photos is an important but challenging problem in virtual fitting. We propose a novel automatic framework to efficiently estimate 3D body shapes under clothes. We construct a database of 3D naked and dressed body pairs, based on which we learn how to predict 3D positions of body landmarks (which further constrain a parametric human body model) automatically according to dressed‐human silhouettes. Critical vertices are selected on 3D registered human bodies as landmarks to represent body shapes, so as to avoid the time‐consuming vertices correspondences finding process for parametric body reconstruction. Our method can estimate 3D body shapes from dressed‐human silhouettes within 4 seconds, while the fastest method reported previously need 1 minute. In addition, our estimation error is within the size tolerance for clothing industry. We dress 6042 naked bodies with 3 sets of common clothes by physically based cloth simulation technique. To the best of our knowledge, We are the first to construct such a database containing 3D naked and dressed body pairs and our database may contribute to the areas of human body shapes estimation and cloth simulation.     

Multi‐Unit Bayesian Auction with Demand or Budget Constraints

We consider the problem of revenue maximization on multi‐unit auctions where items are distinguished by their relative values; any pair of items has the same ratio of values to all buyers. As is common in the study of revenue maximizing problems, we assume that buyers' valuations are drawn from public known distributions and they have additive valuations for multiple items. Our problem is well motivated by sponsored search auctions, which made money for Google and Yahoo! in practice. In this auction, each advertiser bids an amount b_i to compete for ad slots on a web page. The value of each ad slot corresponds to its click‐through‐rate, and each buyer has her own per‐click valuations, which is her private information. Obviously, a strategic bidder may bid an amount that is different with her true valuation to improve her utility. Our goal is to design truthful mechanisms avoiding this misreporting. We develop the optimal (with maximum revenue) truthful auction for a relaxed demand model (where each buyer i wants at most d_i items) and a sharp demand model (where buyer i wants exactly d_i items). We also find an auction that always guarantees at least half of the revenue of the optimal auction when the buyers are budget constrained. Moreover, all of the auctions we design can be computed efficiently, that is, in polynomial time.     

Modeling of the hot metal silicon content in blast furnace using support vector machine optimized by an improved particle swarm optimizer

As a highly complex multi-input and multi-output system, blast furnace plays an important role in industrial development. Although much research has been done in the past few decades, there still exist many problems to be solved, such as the modeling problem. This paper adopts support vector regression (SVR) to construct the prediction model of blast furnace silicon content. To ensure a good generalization performance for the given datasets, it is important to select proper parameters for SVR. In view of this problem, a new particle swarm optimizer called DMS-PSO-CLS is presented to optimize the parameters of SVR. In DMS-PSO-CLS, a new cooperative learning strategy is hybridized with DMS-PSO, which makes particle information be used more effectively for generating better-quality solutions. DMS-PSO-CLS takes merits of the DMS-PSO and the cooperative learning strategy so that both the convergence speed and the convergence precision can be improved. Experimental results show that DMS-PSO-CLS can find the optimal parameters of SVR with high speed and the SVR model optimized by DMS-PSO-CLS can achieve a good regression precision on the predictive problem of blast furnace.     

Machining activity extraction and energy attributes inheritance method to support intelligent energy estimation of machining process

An energy-efficient intelligent manufacturing system could significantly save energy compared to traditional intelligent manufacturing systems that do not consider energy issues. Intelligent energy estimation of machining processes is the foundation of the energy-efficient intelligent manufacturing system. This paper proposes a method for machining activity extraction and energy attributes inheritance to support the intelligent energy estimation of machining processes. Fifteen machining activities and their energy attributes are defined according to their operating and energy consumption characteristics. Activities and energy attributes are extracted mainly from NC program supplemented with blank dimensional information. An effective extraction method of activities and energy attributes is the basis for the intelligent energy calculating of machining process. Based on an investigation on the extraction procedure of activities and energy attributes, energy attributes inheritance method is further discussed. Four types of energy attribute inheritance rules are summarized according to the different inheritance characteristics. Based on these four types of inheritance rules, the energy attributes can be transmitted from activity to Therblig as effective inputs of Therblig-based energy model of machining processes. The proposed methodology is finally demonstrated through two machining cases.