Finite‐time asynchronous filtering for discrete‐time Markov jump systems over a lossy network

This paper is concerned with the problem of finite‐time asynchronous filtering for a class of discrete‐time Markov jump systems. The communication links between the system and filter are assumed to be unreliable, which lead to the simultaneous occurrences of packet dropouts, time delays, sensor nonlinearity and nonsynchronous modes. The objective is to design a filter that ensures not only the mean‐square stochastic finite‐time bounded but also a prescribed level of performance for the underlying error system over a lossy network. With the help of the Lyapunov–Krasovskii approach and stochastic analysis theory, sufficient conditions are established for the existence of an admissible filter. By using a novel simple matrix decoupling approach, a desired asynchronous filter can be constructed. Finally, a numerical example is presented and a pulse‐width‐modulation‐driven boost converter model is employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Efficient near-duplicate image detection with a local-based binary representation

Efficient near-duplicate image detection is important for several applications that feature extraction and matching need to be taken online. Most image representations targeting at conventional image retrieval problems are either computationally expensive to extract and match, or limited in robustness. Aiming at this problem, in this paper, we propose an effective and efficient local-based representation method to encode an image as a binary vector, which is called Local-based Binary Representation (LBR). Local regions are extracted densely from the image, and each region is converted to a simple and effective feature describing its texture. A statistical histogram can be calculated over all the local features, and then it is encoded to a binary vector as the holistic image representation. The proposed binary representation jointly utilizes the local region texture and global visual distribution of the image, based on which a similarity measure can be applied to detect near-duplicate image effectively. The binary encoding scheme can not only greatly speed up the online computation, but also reduce memory cost in real applications. In experiments the precision and recall, as well as computational time of the proposed method are compared with other state-of-the-art image representations and LBR shows clear advantages on online near-duplicate image detection and video keyframe detection tasks.     

SONIC: streaming overlapping community detection

A community within a graph can be broadly defined as a set of vertices that exhibit high cohesiveness (relatively high number of edges within the set) and low conductance (relatively low number of edges leaving the set). Community detection is a fundamental graph processing analytic that can be applied to several application domains, including social networks. In this context, communities are often overlapping, as a person can be involved in more than one community (e.g., friends, and family); and evolving, since the structure of the network changes. We address the problem of streaming overlapping community detection, where the goal is to maintain communities in the presence of streaming updates. This way, the communities can be updated more efficiently. To this end, we introduce SONIC—a find-and-merge type of community detection algorithm that can efficiently handle streaming updates. SONIC first detects when graph updates yield significant community changes. Upon the detection, it updates the communities via an incremental merge procedure. The SONIC algorithm incorporates two additional techniques to speed-up the incremental merge; min-hashing and inverted indexes. Results show that SONIC can provide high quality overlapping communities, while handling streaming updates several orders of magnitude faster than the alternatives performing from-scratch computation.     

Extended minimum-squared error algorithm for robust face recognition via auxiliary mirror samples

The changes of face images with poses and polarized illuminations increase data uncertainty in face recognition. In fact, synthesized mirror samples can be recognized as representations of the left–right deflection of poses or illuminations of the face. Symmetrical face images generated from the original face images also provide more observations of the face which is useful for improving the accuracy of face recognition. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the well-known minimum squared error classification (MSEC) algorithm is used to perform face recognition on an extended face database using synthesized mirror training samples, which is titled as extended minimum squared error classification (EMSEC). By modifying the MSE classification rule, we append the mirror samples to the training set for gaining better classification performance. First, we merge original training samples and mirror samples synthesized from original training samples per subject as mixed training samples. Second, EMSEC algorithm exploits mixed training samples to obtain the projection matrix that can best transform the mixed training samples into predefined class labels. Third, the projection matrix is exploited to simultaneously obtain transform results of the test sample and its nearest neighbor from the mixed training sample set. Finally, we ultimately classify the test sample by combining the transform results of the test sample and the nearest neighbor. As an extension of MSEC, EMSEC reduces the uncertainty of the face observation by auxiliary mirror samples, so that it has better robustness classification performance than traditional MSEC. Experimental results on the ORL, GT, and FERET databases show that EMSEC has better generalization ability than traditional MSEC.     

Protection of quantum correlations against decoherence

The protection of different quantum correlations, such as Bell nonlocality, quantum discord, and geometric quantum discord as trace distance against noise, is explored. By weak measurement and quantum measurement reversal, we show that the mentioned quantum correlations can be effectively preserved probabilistically from the decoherence due to amplitude damping. The results will play an important role in the experiments using the quantum correlations as resource.     

Integrated Co-evolution Model of Land Use and Traffic Network Design

An integrated co-evolution model with the consideration of land use and traffic network design is proposed in this paper. In the suggested model, two kinds of economic agents are considered. On the one hand, the government makes the investment decision for the traffic network improvement based on the current traffic condition under the limited budget. On the other hand, households and companies will choose their locations according to the attraction of each traffic zone related to the road network accessibility and the housing price. Therefore, the land use is indicated by the population and employment distributions through the evolution process. Besides, the improvement of road capacity is modeled by a general bi-level programming of traffic network design. Simulation experiments show that the city will be more efficient and will have higher average accessibility for employment and population in the evolution process.     

Angular velocity observer for attitude tracking on SO(3) with the separation property

This paper studies a rigid body attitude tracking control problem with attitude measurements only, when angular velocity measurements are not available. An angular velocity observer is constructed such that the estimated angular velocity is guaranteed to converge to the true angular velocity asymptotically from almost all initial estimates. As it is developed directly on the special orthogonal group, which completely avoids singularities, complexities, or discontinuities caused by minimal attitude representations or quaternions. Then, the presented observer is integrated with a proportional-derivative attitude tracking controller to show a separation type property, where exponential stability is guaranteed for the combined observer and attitude control system.     

Design of microfluidic channels for magnetic separation of malaria-infected red blood cells

This study is motivated by the development of a blood cell filtration device for removal of malaria-infected, parasitized red blood cells (pRBCs). The blood was modeled as a multi-component fluid using the computational fluid dynamics discrete element method (CFD-DEM), wherein plasma was treated as a Newtonian fluid and the red blood cells (RBCs) were modeled as soft-sphere solid particles which move under the influence of drag, collisions with other RBCs, and a magnetic force. The CFD-DEM model was first validated by a comparison with experimental data from Han and Frazier (Lab Chip 6:265–273, 2006) involving a microfluidic magnetophoretic separator for paramagnetic deoxygenated blood cells. The computational model was then applied to a parametric study of a parallel-plate separator having hematocrit of 40 % with 10 % of the RBCs as pRBCs. Specifically, we investigated the hypothesis of introducing an upstream constriction to the channel to divert the magnetic cells within the near-wall layer where the magnetic force is greatest. Simulations compared the efficacy of various geometries upon the stratification efficiency of the pRBCs. For a channel with nominal height of 100 µm, the addition of an upstream constriction of 80 % improved the proportion of pRBCs retained adjacent to the magnetic wall (separation efficiency) by almost twofold, from 26 to 49 %. Further addition of a downstream diffuser reduced remixing and hence improved separation efficiency to 72 %. The constriction introduced a greater pressure drop (from 17 to 495 Pa), which should be considered when scaling up this design for a clinical-sized system. Overall, the advantages of this design include its ability to accommodate physiological hematocrit and high throughput, which is critical for clinical implementation as a blood-filtration system.