Target point‐based path‐following controller for a car‐type vehicle using bounded controls

In this paper, we have studied the control problem of target point‐based path following for car‐type vehicles. This special path‐following task arises from the needs of vision‐based guidance systems, where a given target point located ahead of the vehicle, in the visual range of the camera, must follow a specified path. A solution to this problem is developed through a nonlinear transformation of the path‐following problem into a reference trajectory tracking problem, by modeling the target point as a virtual vehicle. The use of target point complicates the control problem, as the development produces a first‐order nonlinear nonglobally Lipschitz differential equation with finite escape time. This problem is solved by using small control signals. Bounded feedback laws are designed to control the real vehicle's angular acceleration and the virtual vehicle's velocity, to achieve stability. The resulting controller is globally asymptotically stable with respect to the origin, the proof of which is derived from Lyapunov‐based arguments and a bootstrap argument. It is also shown that the use of exponentially convergent observers/differentiators does not affect the stability of the closed‐loop system. The effectiveness of this controller has been illustrated through simulations. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A new fast motion estimation algorithm using fast mode decision for high-efficiency video coding standard

High-efficiency video coding is the latest standardization effort of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Telecommunication Union. This new standard adopts an exhaustive algorithm of decision based on a recursive quad-tree structured coding unit, prediction unit, and transform unit. Consequently, an important coding efficiency may be achieved. However, a significant computational complexity is resulted. To speed up the encoding process, efficient algorithms based on fast mode decision and optimized motion estimation were adopted in this paper. The aim was to reduce the complexity of the motion estimation algorithm by modifying its search pattern. Then, it was combined with a new fast mode decision algorithm to further improve the coding efficiency. Experimental results show a significant speedup in terms of encoding time and bit-rate saving with tolerable quality degradation. In fact, the proposed algorithm permits a main reduction that can reach up to 75 % in encoding time. This improvement is accompanied with an average PSNR loss of 0.12 dB and a decrease by 0.5 % in terms of bit-rate.     

Opening web applications for third-party development: a service-oriented solution

Web applications are nowadays prevalent software systems in our everyday’s life. A lot of these applications have been developed for end users only. Thus, they are not designed by considering future extensions that would be developed by third parties. One possible and interesting solution for opening these applications for such kind of extension development is to create and deploy Web services starting from these applications. In this paper, we present a method and a tool for semiautomatically creating Web service implementations from applications having Web interfaces. The proposed method generates operations that are published in Web services for each functionality provided by a Web application. In addition, it generates new operations starting from Web interfaces. Our approach goes further in the creation of services by generating executable orchestrations, as BPEL processes, starting from navigations in the Web interfaces of these applications and by providing BPMN choreography specifications starting from the collaborations between the generated Web services. We implemented and experimented our solution in the migration of three real-world Web applications toward Web service-oriented systems.     

Multi-objective topology optimization of multi-component continuum structures via a Kriging-interpolated level set approach

This paper explores a framework for topology optimization of multi-component sheet metal structures, such as those often used in the automotive industry. The primary reason for having multiple components in a structure is to reduce the manufacturing cost, which can become prohibitively expensive otherwise. Having a multi-component structure necessitates re-joining, which often comes at sacrifices in the assembly cost, weight and structural performance. The problem of designing a multi-component structure is thus posed in a multi-objective framework. Approaches to solve the problem may be classified into single and two stage approaches. Two-stage approaches start by focusing solely on structural performance in order to obtain optimal monolithic (single piece) designs, and then the decomposition into multiple components is considered without changing the base topology (identical to the monolithic design). Single-stage approaches simultaneously attempt to optimize both the base topology and its decomposition. Decomposition is an inherently discrete problem, and as such, non-gradient methods are needed for single-stage and second stage of two-stage approaches. This paper adopts an implicit formulation (level-sets) of the design variables, which significantly reduces the number of design variables needed in either single or two stage approaches. The number of design variables in the formulation is independent from the meshing size, which enables application of non-gradient methods to realistic designs. Test results of a short cantilever and an L-shaped bracket studies show reasonable success of both single and two stage approaches, with each approach having different merits.     

In situ, noninvasive characterization of superhydrophobic coatings

Light scattering was used to measure the time-dependent loss of air entrapped within a submerged microporous hydrophobic surface subjected to different environmental conditions. The loss of trapped air resulted in a measurable decrease in surface reflectivity and the kinetics of the process was determined in real time and compared to surface properties, such as porosity and morphology. The light-scattering results were compared with measurements of skin-friction drag, static contact angle, and contact-angle hysteresis. The in situ, noninvasive optical technique was shown to correlate well with the more conventional methods for quantifying surface hydrophobicity, such as flow slip and contact angle.     

A learning framework for the optimization and automation of document binarization methods

Almost all binarization methods have a few parameters that require setting. However, they do not usually achieve their upper-bound performance unless the parameters are individually set and optimized for each input document image. In this work, a learning framework for the optimization of the binarization methods is introduced, which is designed to determine the optimal parameter values for a document image. The framework, which works with any binarization method, has a standard structure, and performs three main steps: (i) extracts features, (ii) estimates optimal parameters, and (iii) learns the relationship between features and optimal parameters. First, an approach is proposed to generate numerical feature vectors from 2D data. The statistics of various maps are extracted and then combined into a final feature vector, in a nonlinear way. The optimal behavior is learned using support vector regression (SVR). Although the framework works with any binarization method, two methods are considered as typical examples in this work: the grid-based Sauvola method, and Lu’s method, which placed first in the DIBCO’09 contest. The experiments are performed on the DIBCO’09 and H-DIBCO’10 datasets, and combinations of these datasets with promising results.     

SRA-MSDU: Enhanced A-MSDU frame aggregation with selective retransmission in 802.11n wireless networks

The main goal of the IEEE 802.11n standard is to achieve more than 100 Mbps of throughput at the MAC service access point. This high throughput has been achieved via many enhancements in both the physical and MAC layers. One of the MAC enhancements is the frame aggregation in which multiple frames are concatenated into a single large frame before being transmitted. The 802.11n MAC layer defines two types of aggregation, aggregate MAC service data unit (A-MSDU) and aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU). The A-MPDU outperforms A-MSDU due to its large aggregation size and the subframes retransmission in erroneous channels. However, in error free channels and under the same aggregation size the A-MSDU performs better than the A-MPDU due to its smaller headers. Thus, adding a selective retransmission capability to the A-MSDU would improve the system performance. In this paper, we have proposed an MSDU frame aggregation scheme that enables selective retransmission at the MSDU level without altering the original MAC header. In this proposed scheme an implicit sequence control mechanism has been introduced in order to keep the frames in sequence and preserve their correct order at the receiver side. The results show that the proposed scheme improves the system performance in terms of throughput and delay even under highly erroneous channels.     

Design optimization of the quantization and a pipelined 2D-DCT for real-time applications

The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is one of the most widely used techniques for image compression. Several algorithms are proposed to implement the DCT-2D. The scaled SDCT algorithm is an optimization of the DCT-1D, which consists in gathering all the multiplications at the end. In this paper, in addition to the hardware implementation on an FPGA, an extended optimization has been performed by merging the multiplications in the quantization block without having an impact on the image quality. A simplified quantization has been performed also to keep higher the performances of the all chain. Tests using MATLAB environment have shown that our proposed approach produces images with nearly the same quality of the ones obtained using the JPEG standard. FPGA-based implementations of this proposed approach is presented and compared to other state of the art techniques. The target is an an Altera Cyclone II FPGA using the Quartus synthesis tool. Results show that our approach outperforms the other ones in terms of processing-speed, used resources and power consumption. A comparison has been done between this architecture and a distributed arithmetic based architecture.     

On line background modeling for moving object segmentation in dynamic scenes

Fast and accurate moving object segmentation in dynamic scenes is the first step in many computer vision applications. In this paper, we propose a new background modeling method for moving object segmentation based on dynamic matrix and spatio-temporal analyses of scenes. Our method copes with some challenges related to this field. A new algorithm is proposed to detect and remove cast shadow. A comparative study by quantitative evaluations shows that the proposed approach can detect foreground robustly and accurately from videos recorded by a static camera and which include several constraints. A Highway Control and Management System called RoadGuard is proposed to show the robustness of our method. In fact, our system has the ability to control highway by detecting strange events that can happen like vehicles suddenly stopped in roads, parked vehicles in emergency zones or even illegal conduct such as going out from the road. Moreover, RoadGuard is capable of managing highways by saving information about the date and time of overloaded roads.