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Researchers from academia and the corporate-sector rely on scholarly digital libraries to access articles. Attackers take advantage of innocent users who consider the articles' files safe and thus open PDF-files with little concern. In addition, researchers consider scholarly libraries a reliable, trusted, and untainted corpus of papers. For these reasons, scholarly digital libraries are an attractive-target and inadvertently support the proliferation of cyber-attacks launched via malicious PDF-files. In this study, we present related vulnerabilities and malware distribution approaches that exploit the vulnerabilities of scholarly digital libraries. We evaluated over two-million scholarly papers in the CiteSeerX library and found the library to be contaminated with a surprisingly large number (0.3-2%) of malicious PDF documents (over 55% were crawled from the IPs of US-universities). We developed a two layered detection framework aimed at enhancing the detection of malicious PDF documents, Sec-Lib, which offers a security solution for large digital libraries. Sec-Lib includes a deterministic layer for detecting known malware, and a machine learning based layer for detecting unknown malware. Our evaluation showed that scholarly digital libraries can detect 96.9% of malware with Sec-Lib, while minimizing the number of PDF-files requiring labeling, and thus reducing the manual inspection efforts of security-experts by 98%.

© 2013 IEEE. With the rapid growth of scientific publications, it is hard for researchers to acquire appropriate papers that meet their expectations. Recommendation system for scientific articles is an essential technology to overcome this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank and sparse matrix factorization-based paper recommendation (LSMFPRec) method for authors. The proposed method seamlessly combines low-rank and sparse matrix factorization method with fine-grained paper and author affinity matrixes that are extracted from heterogeneous scientific network. Thus, it can effectively alleviate the sparsity and cold start problems that exist in traditional matrix factorization based collaborative filtering methods. Moreover, LSMFPRec can significantly reduce the error propagated from intermediate outputs. In addition, the proposed method essentially captures the low-rank and sparse characteristics that exist in scientific rating activities; therefore, it can generate more reasonable predicted ratings for influential and uninfluential papers. The effectiveness of the proposed LSMFPRec is demonstrated by the recommendation evaluation conducted on the AAN and CiteULike data sets.

With the rapid growth of scientific publications, research paper recommendation which suggests relevant research papers to users can bring great benefits to researchers. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recommending conference papers to the conference attendees. While most of the related existing methods depend on the content-based filtering, we propose a unified conference paper recommendation method named $CPRec$ , which exploits both the contents and the authorship information of the papers. In particular, besides the contents, we exploit the relationships between a user and the authors of a paper for recommendation. In our method, we extract several features for a user-paper pair from the citation network, the coauthor network, and the contents, respectively. In addition, we derive a user’s pairwise preference towards the conference papers from the user’s bookmarked papers in each conference. Furthermore, we employ a pairwise learning to rank model which exploits the pairwise user preference to learn a function that predicts a user’s preference towards a paper based on the extracted features. We conduct a recommendation performance evaluation using real-world data and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

To improve the accuracy of user implicit rating prediction, we combine the traditional latent factor model (LFM) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural network (BiGRU) model to propose a hybrid model that deeply mines the latent semantics in the unstructured content of the text and generates a more accurate rating matrix. First, we utilize the user’s historical behavior (favorites records) to build a user rating matrix and decompose the matrix to obtain the latent factor vectors of users and literature. We also apply the BERT model for word embedding of the research papers to obtain the sequence of word vectors. Then, we apply the BiGRU with the user attention mechanism to mine the research paper textual content and to generate the new literature latent feature vectors that are used to replace the original literature latent factor vectors decomposed from the rating matrix. Finally, a new rating matrix is generated to obtain users’ ratings of noninteractive research papers and to generate the recommendation list according to the user latent factor vector. We design experiments on the real datasets and verify that the research paper recommendation model is superior to traditional recommendation models in terms of precision, recall, F1-value, coverage, popularity and diversity.

Most existing studies and public datasets for handwritten Chinese text recognition are based on the regular documents with clean and blank background, lacking research reports for handwritten text recognition on challenging areas such as educational documents and financial bills. In this paper, we focus on examination paper text recognition and construct a challenging dataset named examination paper text (SCUT-EPT) dataset, which contains 50 000 text line images (40 000 for training and 10 000 for testing) selected from the examination papers of 2 986 volunteers. The proposed SCUT-EPT dataset presents numerous novel challenges, including character erasure, text line supplement, character/phrase switching, noised background, nonuniform word size, and unbalanced text length. In our experiments, the current advanced text recognition methods, such as convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) exhibits poor performance on the proposed SCUT-EPT dataset, proving the challenge and significance of the dataset. Nevertheless, through visualizing and error analysis, we observe that humans can avoid vast majority of the error predictions, which reveal the limitations and drawbacks of the current methods for handwritten Chinese text recognition (HCTR). Finally, three popular sequence transcription methods, connectionist temporal classification (CTC), attention mechanism, and cascaded attention-CTC are investigated for HCTR problem. It is interesting to observe that although the attention mechanism has been proved to be very effective in English scene text recognition, its performance is far inferior to the CTC method in the case of HCTR with large-scale character set.

Citations play an important role in ranking of authors, journals, institutions, and organizations. Sometimes, citing documents cite a reference many times in their full-text, which is further used in many application scenarios, such as: 1) finding relationship between cited and citing papers; 2) identifying influential cited paper from set of references in citing paper; 3) identification of suitable citation functions; and 4) study of in-text citations in different logical sections of papers to conclude different findings. The accurate identification of in-text citations remained an open area of research. Recently, the complexities involving automatic identification of in-text citations have been reported with an accuracy rate of 58%. This is due to many issues as highlighted by the state-of-the-art research. This paper investigates such issues in further details: 1) by taking benefits from the previous research; 2) by analyzing different referencing formats; and 3) by experimenting on a comprehensive data set. Based on the investigation, this paper proposes a taxonomy and workable system, which utilizes a set of heuristics build from detailed study. The proposed model is then applied on unseen diversified data set taken from the Journal of Universal Computer Science and CiteSeer. The proposed model was able to achieve an average F-score of 0.97 as compared with the baseline 0.58.

The fade-in and fade-out algorithm based on the Bernstein polynomial has certain limitations in image fusion. Therefore, this article proposes a new image fusion algorithm. First, the SIFT algorithm is used to register the images. Second, for the disjointed case of overlapping regions, a progressive image mosaic fusion algorithm in the form of a sine function is proposed. Finally, in order to make the progressive image mosaic fusion algorithm suitable for a variety of overlapping regions, this paper adds segmentation technology. The simulation experiment results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper is in good agreement with the spatial details and texture details of a high-resolution panchromatic image, and the time is shorter, which meets the real-time requirements. In addition, the algorithm proposed in this paper is effective in applications such as virtual reality and art image fusion.

In the process of power transmission and distribution, non-technical losses are usually caused by users’ abnormal power consumption behavior. It will not only affect the dispatch and operation of the distribution network, bring hidden dangers to the security of the power grid, but also damage the operating costs of power companies and disrupt the operation of the power market. Aiming at users’ abnormal electricity consumption behavior, this paper proposes a model based on particle swarm optimization and long-short term memory with the attention mechanism (PSO-Attention-LSTM). Firstly, according to the actual electricity theft behavior, six typical electricity theft modes are summarized, and 4 composite modes are obtained by combining them, so as to comprehensively test the detection performance of the model for various electricity theft behaviors. Secondly, a detection model based on PSO-Attention-LSTM is proposed, and the model is built using the TensorFlow framework. The model uses the attention mechanism to give different weights to the hidden state of LSTM, which reduces the loss of historical information, strengthens important information and suppresses useless information. Use PSO to solve the difficult problem of model parameter selection, and optimize the hyperparameters to improve the model performance. Finally, the data set of the University of Massachusetts was used for simulation and compared with convolutional neural network-long short term memory (CNN-LSTM), attention mechanism-based long short term memory (Attention-LSTM), LSTM, gated recurrent unit (GRU), support vector regression (SVR), random forest (RF) and linear regression (LR) to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the method used in this article. In this paper, Matlab software is used to analyze and visualize the detection result data.

Parafoil systems are strongly nonlinear due to the flexibility of the canopy and suspension lines, and this characteristic cannot be simulated accurately by existing dynamic models. Hence, model-independent control methods are necessary for parafoil systems. This paper introduces a model-free adaptive control method based on the iterative feedback tuning (IFT-MFAC) method for parafoil systems that is a data-driven control method in which only input/output (I/O) data are needed during construction. In this paper, the MFAC construction process and stability analysis are explained, and then the IFT method is used to tune the two stepping factors of the MFAC method. A six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) dynamic parafoil system model is built to assess the performance of the method in a simulation with disturbances added to imitate real flights. A series of simulations and hardware-in-loop (HIL) tests are designed to verify the performance of the IFT-MFAC controller, and it is compared with the PID control method, the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) method, and the MFAC method.

The key to an accurate understanding of terrain is to extract the informative features from the multi-modal data obtained from different devices. Sensors, such as RGB cameras, depth sensors, vibration sensors, and microphones, are used as the multi-modal data. Many studies have explored ways to use them, especially in the robotics field. Some papers have successfully introduced single-modal or multi-modal methods. However, in practice, robots can be faced with extreme conditions; microphones do not work well in crowded scenes, and an RGB camera cannot capture terrains well in the dark. In this paper, we present a novel framework using the multi-modal variational autoencoder and the Gaussian mixture model clustering algorithm on image data and audio data for terrain type clustering by forcing the features to be closer together in the feature space. Our method enables the terrain type clustering even if one of the modalities (either image or audio) is missing at the test-time. We evaluated the clustering accuracy with a conventional multi-modal terrain type clustering method and we conducted ablation studies to show the effectiveness of our approach.

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have attracted extensive attention in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image target detection. However, there is usually a lack of labeled data in SAR images which results in difficulties to improve the detection performance with DCNN based methods. Transfer learning borrows generic knowledge from other tasks for the target task and can be an effective solution to the small sample problem, but the features’ generality and specificity across various models are not discussed in target detection. In addition, conventional DCNN based models have too many parameters related to the prior information of the targets which increase the difficulty of transfer learning between different tasks. In this paper, we mainly conduct research in three folds to address these mentioned issues. First, the generality and specificity of features in different network models are analyzed in the field of SAR target detection. Second, a transitive transfer framework is developed for detection under small sample condition. Third, an anchor free rotatable detector with flexible structure is designed for SAR images detection to suit the transfer detection framework proposed in this paper and a reasonable explanation is given for its upper hand with small samples. Experimental results demonstrate that: 1) transitive transfer framework is valid in SAR target detection; 2) the anchor free detector in this framework is superior to the anchor based one; 3) the proposed detector achieves better performance under small sample condition by comparison with state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, a novel Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy controller based on eigenstructure assignment (EA) and optimized by differential evolution algorithm (DE) is proposed, and the application of this control strategy in the hydro-turbine governing system (HTGS) is studied. Based on the non-linear model of HTGS, the corresponding state-space equations (SSE) are obtained by linearization through multiple equilibrium points. Combining with the principle of T-S fuzzy control, a T-S fuzzy model of HTGS integrating multiple SSE with generator power angle as a prerequisite is established. This paper adopts the EA method to design the fitness function in the optimization process and uses DE to complete the optimization operation to improve the performance of T-S fuzzy control in HTGS. Which makes each Linear-Quadratic-Regulator (LQR) controller gain in the fuzzy control reach the optimal under the constraint conditions. The simulation results show that compared with the standard fitness functions IAE (integral absolute error), ITAE (integral time absolute error) and ISE (integral square error), the fitness function designed using the EA method can expand the angle between the left and right eigenvectors of the T-S closed-loop system, and push the closed-loop pole from the imaginary axis to the left. That will make the adjustment time of the system shorter and the robustness against external interferences enhanced. The results also show that the proposed control strategy has better dynamic performance during the non-linear motion of HTGS and is superior to the existing control strategy.

With the rapid development of hardware and software technology, modern industry has produced a large amount of high-dimensional unlabeled data, such as pictures and videos. As clusters of these data sets may exist in some subspaces, traditional algorithms are no longer applicable. The related algorithms based on sparse subspace can find clusters in the subspace, which solves the problem of high data dimension. However, their clustering process based on only one single feature, which results in their performance being particularly sensitive to this single view. Affected by the integrated algorithm, a large number of multi-view methods began to emerge. These methods improve the clustering performance by integrating the subspace expressions of multiple views, but the problem is that the complementary information of multiple views cannot be fully considered. In addition, the problem of non-uniform distribution in clusters also exists in high-dimensional data sets. In this paper, based on the multi-view subspace clustering method, a clustering algorithm based on tensor low rank expression is proposed to solve the clustering problem of high-dimensional datasets. On the one hand, this paper solves the problem of noise and data corruption by combining the method of $\ell _{2,1} $ norms, which transform the optimization problem of solving multi-view subspace expression into a low-rank expression problem of tensor to fully consider the complementarities between views. On the other hand, the proposed scheme solves the problem of non- uniform distribution in clusters in high-dimensional data by combining with the density peak algorithm based on hierarchical strategy. Experiment results show the effectiveness of the algorithm.

The working life evaluation of metal oxide varistor (MOV) is always expected by MOV manufacturers and users. In Oct. 2019, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) SC37B established a project team PT 61643–333 led by the author of this paper to draft a technical report about MOV life assessment. As an early researching achievement of PT 61643-333, this paper provides an evaluation method for the impulse life of MOV with the median rank regression (MRR) method based on the Weibull distribution, which provides an effective means for evaluating the impulse life of MOV. Firstly, the theory of Weibull distribution and impulse life characteristics of MOV are introduced. Then the evaluation method and procedure of MOV impulse life is derived from the combination of the MRR method and the impulse characteristics of MOV. Finally, an application example of the proposed evaluation method is given with the test results from real MOV samples. By establishing three basic impulse life characteristics equations, the life evaluation of MOV under arbitrary impulse current can be achieved. In addition, the fitting validity of six groups of samples is checked to prove the effectiveness of the proposed parameter model. And further sensitivity analysis of the variables has been done to examine the effect of changes in the values of the parameters on the propose model.

Vision-based localization systems, namely visual odometry (VO) and visual inertial odometry (VIO), have attracted great attention recently. They are regarded as critical modules for building fully autonomous systems. The simplicity of visual and inertial state estimators, along with their applicability in resource-constrained platforms motivated robotic community to research and develop novel approaches that maximize their robustness and reliability. In this paper, we surveyed state-of-the-art VO and VIO approaches. In addition, studies related to localization in visually degraded environments are also reviewed. The reviewed VO techniques and related studies have been analyzed in terms of key design aspects including appearance, feature, and learning based approaches. On the other hand, research studies related to VIO have been categorized based on the degree and type of fusion process into loosely-coupled, semi-tightly coupled, or tightly-coupled approaches and filtering or optimization-based paradigms. This paper provides an overview of the main components of visual localization, key design aspects highlighting the pros and cons of each approach, and compares the latest research works in this field. Finally, a detailed discussion of the challenges associated with the reviewed approaches and future research considerations are formulated.

With the growing demand for information security, finger-vein recognition has become widespread. However, the robustness of the recognition process becomes a major problem. When identifying unseen categories with traditional finger-vein recognition systems, a few issues remain, such as recognition interference and low efficiency. This paper proposes a Deep Generalized Label Finger-Vein (DGLFV) model to extract feature maps and achieve high-accuracy recognition. The largest rectangular finger-vein region is extracted through image semantic segmentation and the advanced bidirectional traversing and center diffusion method for the known categories. Then we generalize all the unseen categories actively as Class $C+1$ to reduce interference from unregistered users. Furthermore, an adaptive threshold acquisition algorithm is proposed for Label Receiver Operating Characteristic (LROC), so that the procedures of classification, recognition, and verification are unified. Apart from Shandong University Homologous Multi-modal Traits (SDUMLA-HMT), we have conducted additional experiments on our self-built database, Finger Veins of Signal and Information Processing Laboratory (FV-SIPL). The recognition accuracy of the approach proposed in this paper has reached 99.25% and 99.08% testing on FV-SIPL and SDUMLA-HMT, with a low error rate at 1.481% and 2.228% and little time consumption of 0.157s for a single image, which is better than most state-of-the-art finger-vein recognition methods.

This paper presents a lightweight Multi-task Semantic Attention Network (MTSAN) to collectively deal with object detection as well as semantic segmentation aiding real-time applications of the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). This paper proposes a Semantic Attention Module (SAM) that introduces the semantic contextual clues from a segmentation subnet to guide a detection subnet. The SAM significantly boosts up the detection performance and computational cost by considerably decreasing the false alarm rate and it is completely independent of any other parameters. The experimental results show the effectiveness of each component of the network and demonstrate that the proposed MTSAN yields a better balance between accuracy and speed. Following the post-processing methods, the proposed module is tested and proved for its accuracy in the Lane Departure Warning System (LDWS) and Forward Collision Warning System (FCWS). In addition, the proposed lightweight network is deployable on low-power embedded devices to meet the requirements of the real-time applications yielding 10FPS @ 512 X 256 on NVIDIA Jetson Xavier and 15FPS @ 512 X 256 on Texas Instrument’s TDA2x.

This paper is concerned with the optimal state estimation problem for linear discrete-time systems with both multiplicative and cross-correlated noises. The measurement outputs for state estimation are collected from multiple sensors whose sampling rates are different that provide asynchronous data. In addition, the noises that affect the measurement information are correlated among different sensors and also coupled with the process noises as well. The aim of the addressed problem is to propose an optimal state estimation algorithm such that the estimation error is minimized in the mean-square sense with the existence of asynchronous data, possible sensor faults and correlated noises. In order to mitigate the impact of measurement missing, this paper utilizes neural networks to compensate the state estimation when measurement packets are dropping. Then, a fault detection mechanism that utilizes normalized innovation test is adopted to ensure that the abnormal data would be detected and removed. By resorting to the projection theorem and mathematical induction approach, sufficient conditions are derived for the existence of the desired optimal state estimator where the optimized estimation gains are formulated and can be computed iteratively at each time step. The proposed theoretical results are demonstrated via an illustrative numerical example.

Multimedia sensors have recently become a significant data source in the Internet of Things (IoT), giving rise to the Internet of Media Things (IoMT). Since multimedia applications are usually latency-sensitive, data processing in the cloud is not always suitable. A strategy to minimize delay is processing multimedia streams closer to data sources, exploiting resources at the network edge. Moreover, virtualization is widely used to reduce complexity arising from heterogeneity in IoT environments. In this paper, we propose an edge-based architecture and platform to manage virtual multimedia sensors (VMS), enabling IoMT applications to be easily deployed. Our proposal encompasses V-PRISM, a software architecture tailored for IoMT, and ALFA, a distributed implementation of the architecture. V-PRISM components were designed to be deployed and executed in multiple edge nodes. VMSs are in charge of processing multimedia streams and provide an abstraction layer between IoMT applications and physical devices that produce those streams. This paper describes the proposal and the results of experiments showing that the proposed approach can successfully perform multimedia stream processing for applications that requires low-latency.

This paper presents a bio-inspired intelligent controller to enhance the performance of a nonlinear system. The controller is designed by capturing the emotional intelligence of mammalian brain mediated by the limbic system in which certain parts are responsible for generating emotions and these can be combined together as brain affective system inspired control architecture (BASIC). This controller has been used to cope with nonlinearities present in control applications. In this paper brain inspired control architecture is proposed while incorporating the sensory cortex explicitly in the architecture and the computational equations of various modules are suitably developed. The performance of the proposed controller is analyzed on a typical nonlinear system, namely, Permanent magnet synchronous motor for speed control, harmonics in stator phase currents and ripples produced in electromagnetic torque at different operating conditions. Its performance is compared with the existing control techniques in offline simulations as well as in real-time Hardware-in-loop environment. The results establish the computational efficiency, accuracy and robustness of the proposed controller.

Anomaly detection has become an indispensable tool for modern society, applied in a wide range of applications, from detecting fraudulent transactions to malignant brain tumours. Over time, many anomaly detection techniques have been introduced. However, in general, they all suffer from the same problem: a lack of data that represents anomalous behaviour. As anomalous behaviour is usually costly (or dangerous) for a system, it is difficult to gather enough data that represents such behaviour. This, in turn, makes it difficult to develop and evaluate anomaly detection techniques. Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have attracted a great deal of attention in anomaly detection research, due to their unique ability to generate new data. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of the applications of GANs in anomaly detection, covering 128 papers on the subject. The goal of this review paper is to analyze and summarize: (1) which anomaly detection techniques can benefit from certain types of GANs, and how, (2) in which application domains GAN-assisted anomaly detection techniques have been applied, and (3) which datasets and performance metrics have been used to evaluate these techniques. Our study helps researchers and practitioners to find the most suitable GAN-assisted anomaly detection technique for their application. In addition, we present a research roadmap for future studies in this area., Comment: 34 pages,5 figures

This paper presents the application of different approaches of intelligent controllers based on LAMDA (Learning Algorithm for Multivariate Data Analysis) to perform the trajectory tracking task of a mobile robot Pioneer 3-DX simulated in the Virtual Robot Experimentation Platform V-REP environment. The paper proposes the design of a cascade control strategy composed of two controllers, the external controller based on a feedback linearization for the robot kinematics and the internal controller applied to the robot dynamics where the LAMDA approaches are applied. In this work, it is considered an uncertain dynamic model. Thus, its identification and control are based on a reduced-order model for designing purposes. Finally, the dynamic controller is designed using different controllers based on LAMDA, such as LAMDA-PID, LAMDA-Sliding Mode Control, and Adaptive LAMDA. To perform a comparative analysis between them that includes a conventional PID, SMC, and Fuzzy-PID, different trajectories are examined to evaluate the methods. The obtained results are compared qualitatively and quantitatively to determine which proposal performs the most accurate control and presents the best results in terms of performance.

With the commercialization of 5G, in order to recognize QAM signals, one of the main modulation modes in 5G communication systems, this paper put forward the BP-BSA network model based on bird swarm algorithm (BSA) and BP neural network. Firstly, the instantaneous features and high-order cumulants were selected as the appropriate feature statistics by analyzing the characteristics of MQAM signals. After that, the structure of the BP neural network model was determined, and the initial parameters of the BP neural network were optimized using BSA to accelerate the convergence speed of the network. Finally, the features processed with signal to noise ratio (SNR) disorder were used to train and test the BP neural network model. The BP-BSA network model proposed in this paper applies the bird swarm algorithm to the field of modulation recognition for the first time. And the simulation results show that the recognition accuracies of 16, 32, 64, 128, 256QAM signals in the SNR range of −5 dB to 20 dB all reach above 98%. Compared with the same type algorithms, the algorithm proposed in this paper has good recognition performance.

The new coronavirus, which has become a global pandemic, has confirmed more than 88 million cases worldwide since the first case was recorded in December 2019, causing over 1.9 million deaths. Since COIVD-19 lesions have clear imaging features on CT images, it is suitable for the auxiliary diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19. Deep learning can be used to segment the lesions areas of COVID-19 in CT images to help monitor the epidemic situation. In this paper, we propose a multi-point supervision network (MPS-Net) for segmentation of COVID-19 lung infection CT image lesions to solve the problem of a variety of lesion shapes and areas. A multi-scale feature extraction structure, a sieve connection structure (SC), a multi-scale input structure and a multi-point supervised training structure were implemented into MPS-Net. In order to increase the ability to segment various lesion areas of different sizes, the multi-scale feature extraction structure and the sieve connection structure will use different sizes of receptive fields to extract feature maps of various scales. The multi-scale input structure is used to minimize the edge loss caused by the convolution process. In order to improve the accuracy of segmentation, we propose a multi-point supervision training structure to extract supervision signals from different up-sampling points on the network. Experimental results showed that the dice similarity coefficient (DSC), sensitivity, specificity and IOU of the segmentation results of our model are 0.8325, 0.8406, 09988 and 0.742, respectively. The experimental results demonstrated that the network proposed in this paper can effectively segment COVID-19 infection on CT images. It can be used to assist the diagnosis and treatment of new coronary pneumonia.

As is the case in many big data mining scenarios with a large scale of samples, the heavy computation cost hinders the application of machine learning, which has to iteratively compute by passing over the whole dataset without considering the roles of different samples in training computation. However, we argue that most of the samples dominating computation resources contribute little to the gradient-based model update, particularly when the model is close to convergence. We define this observation as the Sample Contribution Pattern (SCP) in machine learning. This paper proposes two approaches to exploit SCP by detecting gradient characteristics and triggering the reuse of outdated gradients. In particular, this paper reports research results in (1) the definition and description of SCP to reveal an intrinsic gradient contribution pattern of different samples; (2) a novel SCP-based optimizing algorithm (SCPOA) that outperforms alternative tested algorithms in terms of computation overhead; (3) a variant of SCPOA that incorporates discarding-recovering mechanisms to carefully tradeoff between model accuracy and computation cost; (4) the implementation and evaluation of two algorithms based on popular distributed big data mining platforms running typical sample-sets; (5) intuitive convergence proof of the algorithms. Our experimental results illustrate that the proposed approaches can significantly reduce the computation cost with competitive accuracy.

In recent years, a variety of supervised manifold learning techniques have been proposed to outperform their unsupervised alternative versions in terms of classification accuracy and data structure capturing. Some dissimilarity measures have been used in these techniques to guide the dimensionality reduction process. Their good performance was empirically demonstrated; however, the relevant analysis is still missing. This paper contributes to a theoretical analysis on a) how dissimilarity measures affect maintaining manifold neighbourhood structure and b) how supervised manifold learning techniques could contribute to the reduction of classification error. This paper also provides a cross-comparison between supervised and unsupervised manifold learning approaches in terms of structure capturing using Kendall’s Tau coefficients and co-ranking matrices. Four different metrics (including three dissimilarity measures and Euclidean distance) have been considered along with manifold learning methods such as Isomap, ${t}$ -Stochastic Neighbour Embedding ( ${t}$ -SNE), and Laplacian Eigenmaps (LE), in two datasets: Breast Cancer and Swiss-Roll. This paper concludes that although the dissimilarity measures used in the manifold learning techniques can reduce classification error, they do not learn well or preserve the structure of the hidden manifold in the high dimensional space, but instead, they destroy the structure of the data. Based on the findings of this paper, it is advisable to use supervised manifold learning techniques as a pre-processing step in classification. In addition, it is not advisable to apply supervised manifold learning for visualization purposes since the two-dimensional representation using supervised manifold learning does not improve the preservation of data structure.

This paper is concerned with stability problems of stochastic delay differential systems with variable impulses due to logic choice. Firstly, a class of variable impulses due to logic choice is introduced in this paper which is more general than the logic impulses established by (Suo and Sun, 2015) and (Zhang et al., 2018). Then, by establishing a connection between the stochastic delay differential system with logic impulses and a corresponding stochastic delay differential system without logic impulses, some sufficient conditions for stability of the systems are obtained. Finally, the application in a class of linear stochastic delay differential systems with logic impulses is discussed, and several stability criteria together with two numerical examples are given.

The epidemic increase in online reviews’ growth made the sentiment classification a fascinating domain in academic and industrial research. The reviews assist several domains, which is complicated to gather annotated training data. Several sentiment classification methodologies are devised for performing the sentiment analysis, but retrieval of information is not accurately performed, less effective, and less convergence speed. In this paper, we propose a sentiment paper proposes a sentiment classification model, namely Spider Monkey Crow Optimization algorithm (SMCA), for training the deep recurrent neural network (DeepRNN). In this method, the telecom review is employed to remove stop words and stemming to eliminate inappropriate data to minimize user’s seeking time. Meanwhile, the feature extraction is performed using SentiWordNet to derive the sentiments from the reviews. The extracted SentiWordNet features and other features, like elongated words, punctuation, hashtag, and numerical values, are employed in the DeepRNN for classifying sentiments. To retrieve the required review, the Fuzzy K-Nearest neighbor (Fuzzy-KNN) is employed to retrieve the review based on a distance measure. With rigorous assessments and experimentation, it is observed that the proposed SMCA-based DeepRNN performs better in terms of accuracy of 97.7%, precision of 95.5%, recall of 94.6%, and F1-score 96.7%, respectively.

Accident causal scenario can describe the process logic of the accident clearly and concretely from the perspective of the control mechanism. Only by improving the quality of the causal scenario can the effective control measures be taken. Combining the technical characteristics of the fully automatic operation (FAO) system, the paper proposes an automated accident causal scenario identification method for FAO system based on the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) method. Aiming at the problem that there are too many layers in the hierarchical control structure diagram of STPA method, which makes it impossible to effectively trace the cause and the problem that the basic control structure model only contains the control structural information and lacks the cause information, a new basic control structure model is defined to model multiple control processes in time sequence, and then the paper extends it from four aspects: control action, input variables, external disturbance, and synchronous timing to add more system cause information. For the lack of a unified standard description problem for the causal scenario, a four-stage causal scenario description method is defined, this paper has developed the first timing, non-first timing, synchronous timing, and external disturbance causal scenario search rules to ensure the automatic identification of the causal scenarios. Applying the automated safety analysis method to the case study of the operational scenarios of parking in a station of Beijing Yanfang Line, the automated identification of related causal scenarios is successfully completed through the Auto-STPA platform, and corresponding safety requirements are added. The feasibility of the method and the applicability to the analysis of operational scenarios are verified.

In order to solve the problems of unbalanced sample data and the lack of consideration of temporal information in existing Siamese-based trackers, this paper proposes a Siamese recurrent neural network and region proposal network (Siamese R-RPN), which can be trained in an end-to-end manner. Siamese R-RPN is consisted of Siamese network, recurrent neural network and region proposal network. Image features extracted by the Siamese network are strengthened by the channel and spatial attention mechanisms, and are sent to the RPN for classification and regression. Temporal information is processed by a recurrent neural network-based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to predict the rough location of the target, it is mapped to the anchor feature map of the RPN for anchor selection. This makes the positive and negative samples participating in the training procedure to become more balanced and representative. Because of the collaborative use of temporal and spatial information, the tracker proposed in this paper has achieved state-of-the-art performance on three large tracking benchmarks—OTB 2015, VOT2016 and VOT 2018—where this verifies its effectiveness.

Using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) within the server-side has been recently proposed to address security vulnerabilities of the password (PW) authentication mechanism, including attacks on the database (DB) of user credentials. Practicing this idea using available memory technologies and constrained hardware modules may offer an additional hardware security layer. Thus, finding the PWs would require the attacker to access both the hardware containing the PUF and the information stored in the DB. PUFs have been used with other cryptographic algorithms in previous studies to improve the system’s security further. However, these studies have overlooked the challenges of implementing these algorithms with constrained hardware devices. Therefore, the trade-off between the achieved security and desired efficiency is still a challenge. The presented hardware-software PUF-based solutions lead to faster computation in the server-side hardware. Also, the client-side protocol can cope with the resource limitations existing in essential applications, including constrained IoTs. Moreover, the scheme handles the instability and bit alias of the Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) PUF. This paper’s reliable, low-cost, and efficient prototype shows the functionality of a hardware-dependent protocol that is resistant to insider, PW guessing, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The presented hardware-software can be easily integrated with the server-side. Statistical tests on the embedded SRAM show that this paper protocol improves PUF entropy responses stored in the DB. Besides, the experimental results of this work show the possibility of obtaining an SRAM with very low intra-PUF variation without using any extra hardware overhead.

In this paper, a finite control set model predictive direct power control (FCS-MPDPC) method based on satisfactory optimization, for single-phase three-level PWM rectifier, is proposed to achieve global optimization that takes into account all its objectives and constraints. Satisfaction optimization aims to obtain the satisfactory solution after coordination of multiple goals, instead of the optimal solution of a single goal. By replacing “optimal” with “satisfaction”, more control degrees of freedom are acquired, so that low-priority auxiliary control objectives can participate in the optimization process. Meanwhile, in order to enhance the description accuracy of FCS-MPDPC method for the future trend of PWM rectifier, the prediction time domain is extended from the traditional single-step to multi-step, and the average switching frequency model is established to realize the low switching frequency control. The satisfactory optimized FCS-MPDPC method proposed in this paper is compared, through simulation and experimental results, with the standard FCS-MPDPC method, which verifies the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm.

As Blockchain innovation picks up popularity in many areas, it is frequently hailed as a sound innovation. Because of the decentralization and encryption, many imagine that data put away in a Blockchain is and will consistently be protected. Among various abstraction layers of Blockchain architecture, the consensus layer is the core component behind the performance and security measures of the Blockchain network. Consensus mechanisms are a critical component of a Blockchain system’s long-term stability. Consensus forms the core of blockchain technology. Therefore, a range of consensus protocols has been introduced to maximize Blockchain systems’ efficiency and meet application domains’ individual needs. This research paper describes the layered architecture of Blockchain. A comprehensive review of mainstream consensus protocols mainly Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), Proof of Activity (PoA) is presented in the paper. These mainstream consensus protocols have been explained and detailed performance analysis of these consensus protocols has been done. We have proposed a performance matrix of these consensus protocols based on different parameters like Degree of decentralization, Latency, Fault Tolerance Rate, Scalability, etc. Consensus protocols being the core of a strong fault-tolerant secured blockchain system, the proposed work intends to help inappropriate protocol selection and further research on strengthening trust and ownership in the technology. Depending upon different parameters like decentralization which is low in POA compared to other protocols, whereas POW is non-scalable, so depending on the priority of a particular performance parameter, the paper will help in the selection of a specific protocol.

Several hypovigilance detection systems (HDx) were developed to avoid road-side accidents due to driver fatigue. They have suffered from several limitations. Notably many of these are focused on center-head position to define an area of interest (often referred to as PERCLOS (percentage eye closure)) without considering the face occlusion problem, light illumination, and suffer poor response time. These HDx systems mostly depend on image processing, vision-based, and multisensor-based features. To address these problems, the author utilized vision, sensors, environmental, and vehicular-based features that integrated together by fusion to predict multistage of HDx. Lately, few studies have utilized the combination of multimodal features and deep learning (DL) architectures. Those multimodal-based features (M-HDx) were feasible to predict stages of driver fatigue (multi-stage). However, there is a need to critically measure the performance of these M-HDx by carrying out a comparative analysis to recognize multi-stage of fatigue in terms of hardware-based benchmarks. Moreover, it is important to evaluate the M-HDx systems using different features-set with respect to traditional and advanced machine learning techniques. Therefore, the primary aim of this work is in algorithm and feature modeling, then compare the advantages and differences with other work. In this paper, a different study is conducted compare to state-of-the-art survey articles by statistically measuring the performance. After experiments on M-HDx systems, this paper concludes that there is still a research gap to real-time development of multistage M-HDx systems. In the end, the paper summarizes the directions, challenges, and applications in the development of HDx systems to assist other researchers for further research.

The transportation systems around the world are drastically going electrified as a trend because of inevitable heed being paid towards global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions. A variety of equipment is contained inside these modern versions of the electrified vehicles, and many appear to be similar in types. The internal electric motor and battery power used in these designs are largely responsible for their robustness and durability in transportation systems. The energy conservation problem, on the other hand, is a vital factor that must be handled in order to ensure overall performance and cost-effectiveness. This paper provides a thorough examination of the internal equipment needed to facilitate and optimize the transportation system’s energetic global success with these critical parameters. In the present study, a specific investigation is emphasized which mainly aims to recognize a new electric motor within the propulsion system. The same type of machine is discussed by elaborating internal designing through the implementation of the corresponding mathematical model and along with the corresponding electronic inverter. The associated control system is also established and implemented. Therefore, a significant theoretical contribution, made in this paper, can be used to examine the performance of a particular electrical machine for EV applications. A robust FOC-based control application confirmed this analysis. When a vehicle’s power needs to be increased rapidly, this one-of-a-kind electrical machine proves its worth. Using the MATLAB simulation method, the robustness of this system’s control has been demonstrated in this special mode.

A new application of network reliability is proposed to help analyze a business process performance in usual business activities. This research is to construct an easy, formal and mathematical tool to probe the health of daily-run business activities. A business activity consists of a series of value-added tasks, which are carried out by their related attenders, to meet business objectives. Traditional management behaviors include practices and skills to sustain the plan, sanction, management, and analysis of business activities. However, the assessment of activity performance remains a weak gap in analytic requirements. The approach proposed in this paper is one of the expected tools to fill the gaps in traditional management practices. The paper is to provide managers several new visions of modeling and analysis, which are not easily derived by traditional management practices. A distributor process with several scenarios to explain the approach are explored, and discussed.

A simple mathematical model of the scientific peer reviewing process is developed. Papers and reviewers are modeled as numerical vectors, respectively representing the paper’s value among multiple quality dimensions, and the importance given to these dimensions by a given reviewer. Computer simulations show that the model can reproduce various characteristics of a real-world paper decision process, and in particular its propensity to act as an “arbitrary” decision procedure for a range of submissions. A key finding of this study is that the appearance of randomness can be explained by a mismatch between high quality dimensions of a paper, and those valued by the reviewers it is assigned to. As a consequence, a program committee may exhibit arbitrariness even with a set of completely reliable reviewers. Various factors contributing to this arbitrariness are then examined, and alternate selection models are studied that could help reduce arbitrariness and reviewer effort.

In order to solve the NP-hard problem of mobile sink path planning in wireless sensor networks (WSN) where the communication range is modeled as a circular area and overlaps with each other, this paper proposes a sink node path planning method guided by the Hamiltonian of quantum annealing algorithm (EMGH) to balance the energy consumption of wireless sensor networks, improve the network life and solve the energy hole problem. First of all, this paper analyzes the problem in theory, and transforms the characteristics of the problem into a mathematical model. The mathematical model considers that the sensor network itself is a travelling salesman problem (TSP), but also requires the shortest path of the mobile sink node. Then, the path of each node in the sensor network is iterated by quantum annealing algorithm, and an optimal TSP path is obtained by using quantum tunneling effect and quantum circuit to achieve parallelism. Finally, in the case of compressing the solution space, the moving path of the mobile sink node is quantum coded, and the Hamiltonian in the quantum annealing algorithm is taken as the guiding factor, and then the individual dimensions are moved, which improves the accuracy of the algorithm and speeds up the convergence speed of the algorithm. Finally, the feasibility of EMGH is verified by simulation experiments and comparison with other algorithms, which provides a reference for the optimization and improvement of path planning method.

A workflow model specifies execution sequences of the associated activities and their affiliated relationships with roles, performers, invoked-applications, and relevant data. These affiliated relationships exhibit a series of valuable human-centered organizational knowledge and are utilized for exploring human resource’s work patterns. This paper focuses not only on a specific type of affiliated relationships between performers and activities, in particular, which forms a performer-to-activity affiliation network, but also on a specific type of analysis techniques, which builds a closeness centrality measurement approach for quantifying the degrees of farnesses between performers as well as between activities. In other words, this paper investigates a series of formal approaches for building organizational closeness centrality measurement techniques on the specific type of affiliation networks. The investigation mainly deploys two types of algorithmic formalisms along with an operational example, which are measuring performer-centered organizational closeness centralities and activity-centered organizational closeness centralities, respectively. In order to validate the deployed algorithmic equations, the paper carries out a couple of operational experiments; One is on an ICN-based workflow package and the other is on a discovered workflow model mined from a dataset of workflow event logs. Summarily, this paper devises a series of algorithms and equations for measuring closeness centralities of activities, verify the devised algorithms and their related equations along with operational examples, and discuss the ultimate implications of these analysis techniques of organizational closeness centrality measurements as the performer-to-activity affiliation networking knowledge in workflow-supported organizations.

Neuromorphic vision sensors provide low power sensing and capture salient spatial-temporal events. The majority of the existing neuromorphic sensing work focus on object detection. However, since they only record the events, they provide an efficient signal domain for privacy aware surveillance tasks. This paper explores how the neuromorphic vision sensor data streams can be analysed for human action recognition, which is a challenging application. The proposed method is based on handcrafted features. It consists of a pre-processing step for removing the noisy events followed by the extraction of handcrafted local and global feature vectors corresponding to the underlying human action. The local features are extracted considering a set of high-order descriptive statistics from the spatio-temporal events in a time window slice, while the global features are extracted by considering the frequencies of occurrences of the temporal event sequences. Then, low complexity classifiers, such as, support vector machines (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbours (KNNs), are trained using these feature vectors. The proposed method evaluation uses three groups of datasets: Emulator-based, re-recording-based and native NVS-based. The proposed method has outperformed the existing methods in terms of human action recognition accuracy rates by 0.54%, 19.3%, and 25.61% for E-KTH, E-UCF11 and E-HMDB51 datasets, respectively. This paper also reports results for three further datasets: E-UCF50, R-UCF50, and N-Actions, which are reported for the first time for human action recognition on neuromorphic vision sensor domain.

Recently, development in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) requires the input of various kinds of data in real-time and from multiple sources, which imposes additional research and application challenges. Ongoing studies on Data Fusion (DF) have produced significant improvement in ITS and manifested an enormous impact on its growth. This paper reviews the implementation of DF methods in ITS to facilitate traffic flow analysis (TFA) and solutions that entail the prediction of various traffic variables such as driving behavior, travel time, speed, density, incident, and traffic flow. It attempts to identify and discuss real-time and multi-sensor data sources that are used for various traffic domains, including road/highway management, traffic states estimation, and traffic controller optimization. Moreover, it attempts to associate abstractions of data level fusion, feature level fusion, and decision level fusion on DF methods to better understand the role of DF in TFA and ITS. Consequently, the main objective of this paper is to review DF methods used for real-time and multi-sensor (heterogeneous) TFA studies. The review outcomes are (i) a guideline of constructing DF methods which involve preprocessing, filtering, decision, and evaluation as core steps, (ii) a description of the recent DF algorithms or methods that adopt real-time and multi-sensor sources data and the impact of these data sources on the improvement of TFA, (iii) an examination of the testing and evaluation methodologies and the popular datasets and (iv) an identification of several research gaps, some current challenges, and new research trends.

New generations of small advanced aircraft may soon transform how people and freight are transported. Thus, ensuring safe and reliable operation of these systems, in all plausible scenarios, is of utmost priority. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a method to verify the safety of an autonomous aircraft controller following a navigational policy. The policy is encoded using discrete vector fields that are meant to drive the vehicle to a goal state and away from obstacles or restricted airspace. The solution presented in this paper provides the ability to verify the policy, catching unsafe scenarios which may be missed by random Monte Carlo methods or general reachability analysis. After illustrating the main theoretical principles, a possible practical implementation is described and compared with analysis based on Monte Carlo simulations. The comparison shows an insightful example where Monte Carlo simulations fail to detect several corner cases that are uncovered by the proposed method. In the conclusion of the paper, we provide insights about possible future research to implement the proposed solution obtaining higher accuracy and efficiency.

This paper investigates command filter backstepping fault-tolerant control for a class of nonlinear systems with nonlinear faults. In particular, the system nonlinear faults are non-affine, which are handled by the filtered signal and fuzzy logic systems approximate Lemma. Command filter is used in this paper, which eliminates the “explosion of complexity” of the classical backstepping and compensates the output of the filter to the derivative of the virtual control. In addition, the controller design procedure has been shown in detail, while the stability of the closed-loop system and the convergence of the tracking error are proved via Lyapunov Theorem. Simulation examples are given to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Non-Cartesian MRI k-space trajectories provide faster and more motion-robust data acquisitions than those of Cartesian trajectories. In this paper, we focus on the rosette trajectory and generalize the weighted rosette trajectories for fast undersampled k-space data acquisition. However, single-slice imaging using the rosette trajectory will be affected by the off-resonance effect. To reduce the artifacts from off-resonance slices, this paper introduced an adaptive iterative reconstruction method derived from the TV and nuclear norm regularization terms for raw MRI data reconstruction. This reconstruction problem was separated into two subproblems and solved with an adaptive regularization parameter. The results show that the weighted rosette trajectory that offers short acquisition times and good off-resonance behaviors with little blurring can be used for reconstruction with adaptive regularization parameters and achieve a superior performance.

Improving transmission lines (TL) steady-state stability limit can be achieved by Static Synchronous Series Compensators (SSSC) that work as a converter-based compensator. The modification of the SSSC function to inject both active and reactive power into the TL improves its performance according to different indices. The TL improvement indices include the reduction of TL losses, the enhancement of dynamic stability margin and the improvement of voltage profile along the TL. The economic index is considered a vital factor in the design of SSSC devices installed in TLs. This paper proposes an objective function to design and control SSSC devices by considering various technical and economical indices. The formulation of the objective function requires power flow analysis in the compensated transmission line under different loading conditions and compensation levels. The proposed multi-objective function includes the transmission line losses, the dynamic stability span, and the cost of SSSC device. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Self-adaptive Multi-population Elitist Jaya Algorithm (SAMPE-JAYA) are proposed as optimization techniques to obtain the minimized value of the multi-objective function. This paper proposes the installation of two SSSC devices in TL that leads to the improvement of the design and control indexes. The proposed objective function and the optimization techniques are applied for tie-line (400kV, 400km) that connects between two networks.

The construction industry lacks a comprehensive and holistic way of utilizing Building Information Modeling (BIM) throughout a building’s life-cycle, where the transition to Asset Management (AM) and Facility Management (FM) is particularly lacking. Enterprise BIM (EBIM) is an emerging, unexplored, holistic organizational concept that is designed to support and optimize business management throughout the entire life-cycles of buildings and infrastructure. However, current understanding and implementation of EBIM is rare. To fix this gap in knowledge, this paper defines the EBIM concept and assesses associated perspectives from research and practice in order to integrate BIM more strongly into the enterprise’s core processes and other needs at different levels within the organization and externally. To achieve a higher and more efficient utilization of building data, however, EBIMs need to develop a clear life-cycle-based information management strategy, including coordination and communication between all stakeholders. The paper highlights and discusses the importance of both available and missing standards related to the effective implementation of EBIM. Several existing open standards have been identified to help strengthen the EBIM concept. The paper identifies a need to develop standards to integrate BIM and IoT (the Internet of Things) and standards that can handle both structured and unstructured data. The authors have conducted a wide-ranging review of research, practice and existing standards and considers today’s potential for using EBIM, as well as discusses existing challenges and future research needs. Furthermore, the EBIM concept is contextualized by providing a case study with focus on cleaning. This study identifies a need to develop best practices in interdisciplinary collaborative projects. Such practical implementation requires integrated and standardized information and technology management and the exploitation of the available technologies in interdisciplinary interaction with those involved in the various processes and the flow of information throughout the life-cycle.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a prominent short-range, contact-less communication technology, which is rapidly getting popular in modern smart devices. For communication between two active devices via NFC, applications generally choose the peer-to-peer operation mode. In this paper, we exploit the possibility of using the NFC read/write mode, designed primarily for unidirectional data transfer from an active NFC reader to a passive NFC tag, for bi-directional half-duplex communication between two active NFC devices. The advantages of using the NFC read/write mode include low protocol overhead and permitting different data formats. However, the challenges are avoiding the reader collision problem, maintaining a secure session, and completing all transactions in an acceptable time frame. In this paper, we address the above challenges and propose a methodology for efficient communication between active NFC devices using NFC read/write mode. To evaluate the scheme, we design a secure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) system that requires bi-directional communication for mutually authenticating two NFC devices. The proposed methodology is experimentally verified using NFC-enabled Android smartphones and a Kerberos server as the third-party authenticator.

The increasing significance of technology in daily lives led to the need for the development of convenient methods of human-computer interaction (HCI). Given that the existing HCI approaches exhibit various limitations, hand gesture recognition-based HCI may serve as a more intuitive mode of human-machine interaction in many situations. In addition, the system has to be deployable on low-power devices for applicability in broadly defined Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home solutions. Recent advances exhibit the potential of deep learning models for gesture classification, whereas they are still limited to high-performance hardware. Embedded neural network accelerators are constrained in terms of available memory, central processing unit (CPU) clock speed, graphics processing unit (GPU) performance, and a number of supported operations. The aforementioned problems are addressed in this paper by namely two approaches - simplifying the signal processing pipeline to avoid recurrent structures and efficient topological design. This paper employs an intuitive scheme allowing for the generation of the data in the compressed form from the sequence of range-Doppler images (RDI). Thus, it allows for the design of a neural classifier avoiding the usage of recurrent layers. The proposed framework has been optimized for Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 (Intel® NCS 2), at the same time achieving promising classification accuracy of 97.57%. To confirm the robustness of the proposed algorithm, five independent persons have been involved in the algorithm testing process.

Research on the particle size of blast piles has always been an essential issue in mining engineering. Reasonable blasting parameters can reduce mining costs and reduce the workload of secondary crushing, which can significantly improve mining efficiency. The usual particle size analysis methods include the sieving method, the large particle size statistical method and other manual measurement methods. Nevertheless, these methods have the disadvantages of a high labor intensity, low efficiency and low precision. This paper analyzes UAV image information based on the single-picture photogrammetry method of computer image processing technology. A two-dimensional empirical wavelet transform (EWT) is used for image noise reduction. The nonlocal multiscale fractional differential (NMFD) enhances the texture of dark images and uses superpixel image segmentation technology so that the processed image can meet the granularity statistical study requirements of blast piles. The research results show that the accuracy of the ore particle size distribution by the method proposed in this paper is more than 90%.

In this paper, we present a novel approach that addresses the problem of large-scale network topology design and routing. There are research works that used exact methodologies based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) models to develop potential solutions for this problem. However, this problem is computationally NP-hard, thus solving it is hugely demanding on computational power for large-scale networks, and in many cases, it is not even possible to generate a solution with a reasonable optimality gap. This paper presents a hybrid algorithm based on the Genetic Algorithm with efficiently designed genetic operators. This algorithm aims to design the topology of large-scale networks and generate a routing configuration for a set of predefined traffic demands on the networks while keeping the total cost of design and routing at a minimum. The results have been compared to an exact ILP model, a relaxed ILP model, and a customized GA as benchmarks for validation purposes. These comparisons showed that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the ILP solutions in all of the large-scale network configurations that were used as case studies.