Online adaptive optimal control for continuous-time nonlinear systems with completely unknown dynamics

An online adaptive optimal control is proposed for continuous-time nonlinear systems with completely unknown dynamics, which is achieved by developing a novel identifier-critic-based approximate dynamic programming algorithm with a dual neural network (NN) approximation structure. First, an adaptive NN identifier is designed to obviate the requirement of complete knowledge of system dynamics, and a critic NN is employed to approximate the optimal value function. Then, the optimal control law is computed based on the information from the identifier NN and the critic NN, so that the actor NN is not needed. In particular, a novel adaptive law design method with the parameter estimation error is proposed to online update the weights of both identifier NN and critic NN simultaneously, which converge to small neighbourhoods around their ideal values. The closed-loop system stability and the convergence to small vicinity around the optimal solution are all proved by means of the Lyapunov theory. The proposed adaptation algorithm is also improved to achieve finite-time convergence of the NN weights. Finally, simulation results are provided to exemplify the efficacy of the proposed methods.     

Adaptive sparse coding on PCA dictionary for image denoising

Sparse coding is a popular technique in image denoising. However, owing to the ill-posedness of denoising problems, it is difficult to obtain an accurate estimation of the true code. To improve denoising performance, we collect the sparse coding errors of a dataset on a principal component analysis dictionary, make an assumption on the probability of errors and derive an energy optimization model for image denoising, called adaptive sparse coding on a principal component analysis dictionary (ASC-PCA). The new method considers two aspects. First, with a PCA dictionary-related observation of the probability distributions of sparse coding errors on different dimensions, the regularization parameter balancing the fidelity term and the nonlocal constraint can be adaptively determined, which is critical for obtaining satisfying results. Furthermore, an intuitive interpretation of the constructed model is discussed. Second, to solve the new model effectively, a filter-based iterative shrinkage algorithm containing the filter-based back-projection and shrinkage stages is proposed. The filter in the back-projection stage plays an important role in solving the model. As demonstrated by extensive experiments, the proposed method performs optimally in terms of both quantitative and visual measurements.     

Majority Clusters‐Density Ordered Weighting Averaging: A Family of New Aggregation Operators in Group Decision Making

In the process of aggregation, it is necessary, especially for group decision‐making (GDM) problems, to consider distributed characteristic hidden in aggregates. In this case, clustering has been a common way for discovering the implicit distributed structures. This paper mainly investigates the characteristic of majority clusters, rather than majority elements and develops a new class of aggregation operators denominated majority clusters density‐ordered weighting averaging (MC‐DOWA) operators. Furthermore, we discuss properties of these operators and calculate the associated weights. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the application of the MC‐DOWA operators, and the aggregations are compared with those of the other three aggregation operators: majority additive‐OWA (MA‐OWA), dependent OWA (DOWA) and cluster‐based DOWA (Clus‐DOWA) operators.     

Evaluation of visual saliency analysis algorithms in noisy images

Most existing visual saliency analysis algorithms assume that the input image is clean and does not have any disturbances. However, this situation is not always the case. In this paper, we provide an extensive evaluation of visual saliency analysis algorithms in noisy images. We analyze the noise immunity of saliency analysis algorithms by evaluating the performances of the algorithms in noisy images with increasing noise scales and by studying the effects of applying different denoising methods before performing saliency analysis. We use 10 state-of-the-art saliency analysis algorithms and 7 typical image denoising methods on 4 eye fixation datasets and 2 salient object detection datasets. Our experiments show that the performances of saliency analysis algorithms decrease with increasing image noise scales in general. An exception is that the nonlinear features (NF) integrated algorithm shows good noise immunity. We also find that image denoising methods can greatly improve the noise immunity of the algorithms. Our results show that the combination of NF and Median denoising method works best on eye fixation datasets and the combination of saliency optimization (SO) and color block-matching and 3D filtering (C-BM3D) method works best on salient object detection datasets. The combination of SO and Average denoising method works best for applications wherein time efficiency is a major concern for both types of datasets.     

Theoretical and experimental research on the in-plane comb-shaped capacitor for MEMS coriolis mass flow sensor

The Micro-Electro-Mechanical System Coriolis mass flow sensor uses a kind of in-plane comb-shaped capacitor to detect the vibration of tube containing the micro flow information. This paper takes the deflection of the micro tube caused by Coriolis force into account and models the in-plane comb-shaped capacitor of the sensor based on the electrostatic field method. Then the modulation and demodulation of the output capacitive signals are described in detail. The theoretical waveforms obtained by substituting the actual parameters into the models are consistent with the accepted conformal mapping method and match with the sampling signals, which attest the two models. According to the actual flow calibration experiment and the preliminary phase shift calculation, the measurement accuracy of the micro flow sensor reaches ±1.5 % with the repeatability of 0.75 % within 0–1.2 g/h flow range.     

Image tag recommendation based on friendships

The tagging systems have been studied by many researchers in the past decade. Tagging methods have been widely used on the web for searching and recommending images. Social tags are the keywords annotated by users to the images, which contains the information for searching and classifying the images. Tag recommendation system allows mitigating the individual preferences to annotate and recommender images. However, irrelevant and noise tags are frequently included in tags. In this paper, we propose image tag recommendation based on the friends’ relationships in social network (TRboFS) to recommender tags for a new image, both the tags assigned to the favorite images and the friendships of the users who upload the image are employed to predict the tags of the images. Empirical analyses on real datasets show that the proposed approach achieves superior performance to existing approaches.     

A fast inter-frame encoding scheme using the edge information and the spatiotemporal encoding parameters for HEVC

Multimedia Tools and Applications - High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), as a novel video coding standard, has shown a better coding efficiency than all existing standards, such as H.264/AVC. It...     

(t,n) Threshold secret image sharing scheme with adversary structure

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Secret image sharing has been researched intensively, and it has emerged as an alternative to data hiding for protecting the security and privacy of important...     

Reverse direction-based surrounder queries for mobile recommendations

This paper proposes a new spatial query called a reverse direction-based surrounder (RDBS) query, which retrieves a user who is seeing a point of interest (POI) as one of their direction-based surrounders (DBSs). According to a user, one POI can be dominated by a second POI if the POIs are directionally close and the first POI is farther from the user than the second is. Two POIs are directionally close if their included angle with respect to the user is smaller than an angular threshold ??. If a POI cannot be dominated by another POI, it is a DBS of the user. We also propose an extended query called competitor RDBS query. POIs that share the same RDBSs with another POI are defined as competitors of that POI. We design algorithms to answer the RDBS queries and competitor queries. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can answer the queries efficiently.