A Novel SAO-based Filtering Technique for Reduction in Temporal Flickering Artifacts in H.265/HEVC

This paper presents a novel filtering technique based on sample adaptive offset (SAO) in H.265/high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) for reduction in the temporal flickering artifacts and improving the coding performance. SAO is a newly introduced technique for in-loop filtering in H.265/HEVC, which derives the offsets independently for each frame in the spatial domain without considering temporal frame correlation. As a result, the temporal distortion artifacts which will have a negative effect on the subjective quality, such as flickering artifacts, cannot be effectively addressed. In this paper, the rate-distortion optimization of the newly developed SAO method, referred to as Inter-SAO, is performed on the residual samples between adjacent frames. Inter-SAO and SAO in the reference software of H.265/HEVC (i.e., the test model HM) are then combined to form the novel in-loop filter-based method, denoted as 3D-SAO filtering method, where both spatial information and temporal information are effectively utilized to reduce the overall distortion in reconstructed videos. Compared with the SAO in HM, 3D-SAO has demonstrated its advanced performance for flickering artifacts suppression. Furthermore, 3D-SAO improves the coding efficiency compared with the SAO in HM with a performance gain of up to 0.91 dB in \(\Delta PSNR\), 1.74 dB in \(\Delta PSPNR\) and 7.33 % in BD-rate reduction.     

A Jitter Injection Signal Generation and Extraction System for Embedded Test of High-Speed Data I/O

An instrument for on-chip measurement of transceiver transmission capability is described that is fully realizable in CMOS technology and embeddable within an SoC. The instrument can be used to inject and extract the timing and voltage information associated with signals in high-speed transceiver circuits that are commonly found in data communication applications. At the core of this work is the use of ΣΔ amplitude- and phase-encoding techniques to generate both the voltage and timing (phase) references, or strobes used for high-speed sampling. The same technique is also used for generating the test stimulant for the device-under-test.     

Adaptive VM Management with Two Phase Power Consumption Cost Models in Cloud Datacenter

As cloud computing models have evolved from clusters to large-scale data centers, reducing the energy consumption, which is a large part of the overall operating expense of data centers, has received much attention lately. From a cluster-level viewpoint, the most popular method for an energy efficient cloud is Dynamic Right Sizing (DRS), which turns off idle servers that do not have any virtual resources running. To maximize the energy efficiency with DRS, one of the primary adaptive resource management strategies is a Virtual Machine (VM) migration which consolidates VM instances into as few servers as possible. In this paper, we propose a Two Phase based Adaptive Resource Management (TP-ARM) scheme that migrates VM instances from under-utilized servers that are supposed to be turned off to sustainable ones based on their monitored resource utilizations in real time. In addition, we designed a Self-Adjusting Workload Prediction (SAWP) method to improve the forecasting accuracy of resource utilization even under irregular demand patterns. From the experimental results using real cloud servers, we show that our proposed schemes provide the superior performance of energy consumption, resource utilization and job completion time over existing resource allocation schemes.     

A 16 MHz, 59.2 ppm/°C CMOS DLL-Assisted VCO with Improved Frequency Stability Towards Single Chip Wireless IOT

A 16 MHz, highly stable voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) is reported in this paper. The proposed VCO consists of three cross-coupled RC stages, and is fully compatible with standard CMOS process. A positively biased PN junction with negative temperature coefficient is incorporated in the design to compensate frequency drift. In addition, a delay locked loop (DLL) directly following the VCO is utilized to further improve the output stability caused by temperature variations. The designed circuit was implemented using CMOS 0.18 μm technology, and was validated through experiments. Measurement results show that the DLL-assisted VCO output variation across the 25~120 °C temperature range is less than 0.56 %, corresponding to 59.2 ppm/°C. It also shows that the output standard deviation of the DLL-assisted VCO is only 6.816 KHz, ~ 16.6 % better compared with the same VCO without DLL’s assistance.     

Modulation of Carbon Nanotubes' Perturbation to the Metabolic Activity of CYP3A4 in the Liver

The liver plays an important role in metabolizing foreign materials, such as drugs. The high accumulation of carbon nanotubes and other hydrophobic nanoparticles in the liver has raised concerns that nanoparticles may interfere with liver metabolic function. We report here that carbon nanotubes enter hepatic cells after intravenous introduction and interact with CYP enzymes, including CYP3A4. Surface chemical modifications alter the carbon nanotubes' interactions with CYP450 enzymes in human liver microsomes. They enhance, inhibit, or have no effect on the enzymatic function of CYP3A4. Using a cheminformatics analysis, certain chemical structures are identified on the surface of the carbon nanotubes that induce an enzyme inhibitory effect or prevent disruption of CYP3A4 enzymes.     

基于能量传输模型的QCM负载效应研究

为准确、有效地区分引起石英晶体微天平(QCM)频偏的质量效应与阻尼效应,运用能量传输模型(ETM)的基本原理,推导出液体粘度和密度的乘积与石英晶体谐振器表面最大的振动幅度之间的显性函数关系式。可通过测试QCM的谐振频率与幅值信息将其负载效应分开,为QCM免疫传感器在医学中的诊断提供了一种理论基础。     

基于二维压缩感知和分层特征的图像检索算法

为了保留图像分析时的像素点位置关系及降维处理,把一维压缩感知理论推广到二维,建立了二维可稀疏信号的压缩测量模型,研究了一种二维信号的自适应梯度下降重构AGDR(Adaptive Gradient Descent Recursion)算法,由此提出了一种图像分层特征提取与检索方法.首先对图像在RGB颜色空间上进行网格离散划分,通过分层算子对图像进行分层映射,定义一种基于颜色网格空间的扩展灰度共生矩阵,采用二维测量模型获取图像的分层测量特征、纹理特征与分层颜色统计特征,图像分层测量特征综合反映出图像的颜色及像素点位置的关系,扩展灰度共生矩阵反映纹理特征.其次用AGDR算法计算检索图像之间的原始信号差量及其稀疏值.最后结合两类分层特征差量、稀疏值和颜色统计特征,融合计算图像间整体相似度度量指标.仿真实验表明,应用分层二维压缩感知测量与AGDR算法的图像检索方法在检索时间、查全率和查准率等指标上具有优越性能,为图像检索提供了新思路.