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Most of the papers published so far in literature have focused on the theoretical phenomena underlying the formation of chaos, rather than on the investigation of potential applications of chaos to the real world. This paper aims to bridge the gap between chaos theory and chaos applications by presenting a survey of very recent applications of chaos. In particular, the manuscript covers the last three years by describing different applications of chaos as reported in the literature published during the years 2018 to 2020, including the matter related to the symmetry properties of chaotic systems. The topics covered herein include applications of chaos to communications, to distributed sensing, to robotic motion, to bio-impedance modelling, to hardware implementation of encryption systems, to computing and to random number generation.

Smart Home Architecture is suitable for progressive and symmetric urbanization. Data being generated in smart home appliances using internet of things should be stored in cloud where computing resources can analyze the data and generate the decisive pattern within no time. This additional requirement of storage, majorly, comprising of unfiltered data escalates requirement of host machines which carries with itself extra overhead of energy consumption; thus, extra cost has to be beard by service providers. Various static algorithms are already proposed to improve energy management of cloud data centers by reducing number of active bins. These algorithms are not able to cater to the needs of present heterogeneous requests generated in cloud machines by people of diversified work environment with adhering to the requirements of quality parameters. Therefore, the paper has proposed and implemented dynamic bin-packing approaches for smart architecture that can significantly reduce energy consumption without compromising upon makespan, resource utilization and Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. The novelty of the proposed dynamic approaches in comparison to the existing static approaches is that the proposed approach dynamically creates and dissolves virtual machines as per incoming and completed requests which is a dire need of present computing paradigms via attachment of time-frame with each virtual machine. The simulations have been performed on JAVA platform and dynamic energy utilized-best fit decreasing bin packing technique has produced better results in maximum runs.

Over the last two decades (2000–2020), the Internet has rapidly evolved, resulting in symmetrical and asymmetrical Internet consumption patterns and billions of users worldwide. With the immense rise of the Internet, attacks and malicious behaviors pose a huge threat to our computing environment. Brute-force attack is among the most prominent and commonly used attacks, achieved out using password-attack tools, a wordlist dictionary, and a usernames list—obtained through a so-called an enumeration attack. In this paper, we investigate username enumeration attack detection on SSH protocol by using machine-learning classifiers. We apply four asymmetrical classifiers on our generated dataset collected from a closed-environment network to build machine-learning-based models for attack detection. The use of several machine-learners offers a wider investigation spectrum of the classifiers’ ability in attack detection. Additionally, we investigate how beneficial it is to include or exclude network ports information as features-set in the process of learning. We evaluated and compared the performances of machine-learning models for both cases. The models used are k-nearest neighbor (K-NN), naïve Bayes (NB), random forest (RF) and decision tree (DT) with and without ports information. Our results show that machine-learning approaches to detect SSH username enumeration attacks were quite successful, with KNN having an accuracy of 99.93%, NB 95.70%, RF 99.92%, and DT 99.88%. Furthermore, the results improve when using ports information.

In traditional cloud computing research, it is often considered that the network resources between edge devices and cloud platform are sufficient, and the symmetry between the upward link from edge devices to the cloud platform and the downward link from cloud platform to edge devices is definite. However, in many application scenarios, the network resources between edge devices and cloud platform might be limited, and the link symmetry may not be guaranteed. To solve this problem, network relay nodes are introduced to realize the data transmission between edge devices and the cloud platform. The environment in which network relay nodes that can cooperate with the cloud platform is called cloud network collaborative environment (CNCE). In CNCE, how to optimize data transmission from edge devices to cloud platform through relay nodes has become one of the most important research topics. In this paper, we focus on the following two influencing factors that previous studies ignored: (1) the multi-link and multi-constraint transmission process, and (2) the timely resource state of the relay node. Taking these factors into consideration, we design a novel data transmission scheduling algorithm, called ant colony based transmission scheduling approach (ACTS). First, we propose a multi-link optimization mechanism to optimize the constraint limits. This mechanism divides the transmission into two links called the downlink relay link and uplink relay link. For the downlink relay link, we use the store-and-forward method for the optimization. For the uplink relay link, we use the min–min method for the optimization. We use the ant colony algorithm for the overall optimization of the two links. Finally, we improve the pheromone update rule of the ant colony algorithm to avoid the algorithm from falling into a local optimum. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach has better results in transmission efficiency than other advanced algorithms.

The electricity distribution system is the coupling point between the utility and the end-user. Typically, these systems have unbalanced feeders due to the variety of customers’ behaviors. Some significant problems occur, the unbalanced loads increase the operational cost and system investment. In radial distribution systems, swapping loads between the three phases is the most effective method for phase balancing. It is performed manually and subjected to load flow equations, capacity, and voltage constraints. Recently, due to smart grids and automated networks, dynamic phase balancing received more attention, thus swapping the loads between the three phases automatically when unbalance exceeds permissible limits by using a remote-controlled phase switch selector/controller. Automatic feeder reconfiguration and phase balancing eliminates the service interruption, enhances energy restoration, and minimize losses. In this paper, a case study from the Irbid district electricity company (IDECO) is presented. Optimal reconfiguration of phase balancing using three techniques: feed-forward back-propagation neural network (FFBPNN), radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), and a hybrid are proposed to control the switching sequence for each connected load. The comparison shows that the hybrid technique yields the best performance. This work is simulated using MATLAB and C programming language.

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a symmetric flow transport that surrounds brain and central nervous system (CNS). Congenital hydrocephalusis is an asymmetric and unusual cerebrospinal fluid flow during fetal development. This dumping impact enhances the elasticity over the ventricle wall. Henceforth, compression change influences the force of brain tissues. This paper presents a mathematical model to establish the effects of ventricular elasticity through a porous channel. The current model is good enough for immediate use by a neurosurgeon. The mathematical model is likely to be a powerful tool for the better treatment of hydrocephalus and other brain biomechanics. The non-linear dimensionless governing equations are solved using a perturbation technique, and the outcome is portrayed graphically with the aid of MATLAB.

The early diagnosis of retinopathy is crucial to the prevention and treatment of diabetic retinopathy. The low proportion of positive cases in the asymmetric microaneurysm detection problem causes preprocessing to treat microaneurysms as noise to be eliminated. To obtain a binary image containing microaneurysms, the object was segmented by a symmetry algorithm, which is a combination of the connected components and SSA methods. Next, a candidate microaneurysm set was extracted by multifeature clustering of binary images. Finally, the candidate microaneurysms were mapped to the Radon frequency domain to achieve microaneurysm detection. In order to verify the feasibility of the algorithm, a comparative experiment was conducted on the combination of the connected components and SSA methods. In addition, PSNR, FSIM, SSIM, fitness value, average CPU time and other indicators were used as evaluation standards. The results showed that the overall performance of the binary image obtained by the algorithm was the best. Last but not least, the accuracy of the detection method for microaneurysms in this paper reached up to 93.24%, which was better than that of several classic microaneurysm detection methods in the same period.

In this paper, we study a family of fusion and modular systems realizing fusion categories Grothendieck equivalent to the representation category for $so(2p+1)_2$. These categories describe non-abelian anyons dubbed `metaplectic anyons'. We obtain explicit expressions for all the $F$- and $R$-symbols. Based on these, we conjecture a classification for their monoidal equivalence classes from an analysis of their gauge invariants and define a function which gives us the number of classes., 28 pages; v2: minor changes

In this paper, a method for detecting real-time images that include counterlight produced by the sun, is proposed. It involves applying a multistep analysis of the size, location, and distribution of bright areas in the image. In general, images containing counterlight have a symmetrically high brightness value at a specific location spread over an extremely large region. In addition, the distribution and change in brightness in that specific region have a symmetrically large difference compared with other regions. Through a multistep analysis of these symmetrical features, it is determined whether counterlight is included in the image. The proposed method presents a processing time of approximately 0.7 s and a detection accuracy of 88%, suggesting that the approach can be applied to a safe driving support system for autonomous vehicles.

Expert systems, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), are typically designed to solve many real-world problems by reasoning through knowledge, which is primarily represented as IF–THEN rules, with the information acquired from humans or domain experts. However, to assume such rules for personalized decision-making in an intelligent, context-aware mobile application is a challenging issue. The reason is that different mobile users may behave differently in various day-to-day situations, i.e., not identical, and thus the rules for personalized services must be reflected according to their symmetrical or asymmetrical behavioral activities. Therefore, our key focus is to solve this issue through adding personalized decision-making intelligence to develop powerful mobile applications to assist the end-users. To achieve our goal, in this paper, we explore on “Mobile Expert System”, where we take into account machine-learning rules as knowledge-base rather than traditional handcrafted static rules. Thus, the concept of a mobile expert system enables the computing and decision-making processes more actionable and intelligent than traditional ones in the domain of mobile analytics and applications. Our experiment section shows that the context-aware machine learning rules discovered from users’ mobile phone data can contribute in building a mobile expert system to solve a particular problem, through making personalized decisions in various context-aware test cases.

Decision support systems (DSS) are currently developing rapidly and are increasingly used in various fields. More often, those systems are inseparable from information-based systems and computer systems. Therefore, from a methodical point of view, the algorithms implemented in the DSS play a critical role. In this aspect, multi-criteria decision support (MCDA) methods are widely used. As research progresses, many MCDA methods and algorithms for the objective identification of the significance of individual criteria of the MCDA models were developed. In this paper, an analysis of available objective methods for criteria weighting is presented. Additionally, the authors presented the implementation of the system that provides easy and accessible weight calculations for any decision matrix with the possibility of comparing results of different weighting methods. The results of weighting methods were compared using carefully selected similarity coefficients to emphasise the correlation of the resulting weights. The performed research shows that every method should provide distinctive weights considering input data, emphasising the importance of choosing the correct method for a given multi-criteria decision support model and DSS.

Blind image deblurring is a well-known ill-posed inverse problem in the computer vision field. To make the problem well-posed, this paper puts forward a plain but effective regularization method, namely spectral norm regularization (SN), which can be regarded as the symmetrical form of the spectral norm. This work is inspired by the observation that the SN value increases after the image is blurred. Based on this observation, a blind deblurring algorithm (BDA-SN) is designed. BDA-SN builds a deblurring estimator for the image degradation process by investigating the inherent properties of SN and an image gradient. Compared with previous image regularization methods, SN shows more vital abilities to differentiate clear and degraded images. Therefore, the SN of an image can effectively help image deblurring in various scenes, such as text, face, natural, and saturated images. Qualitative and quantitative experimental evaluations demonstrate that BDA-SN can achieve favorable performances on actual and simulated images, with the average PSNR reaching 31.41, especially on the benchmark dataset of Levin et al.

The energy manufacturers are required to produce an accurate amount of energy by meeting the energy requirements at the end-user side. Consequently, energy prediction becomes an essential role in the electric industrial zone. In this paper, we propose the hybrid ensemble deep learning model, which combines multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and hybrid CNN-LSTM to improve the forecasting performance. These DL architectures are more popular and better than other machine learning (ML) models for time series electrical load prediction. Therefore, hourly-based energy data are collected from Jeju Island, South Korea, and applied for forecasting. We considered external features associated with meteorological conditions affecting energy. Two-year training and one-year testing data are preprocessed and arranged to reform the times series, which are then trained in each DL model. The forecasting results of the proposed ensemble model are evaluated by using mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Error metrics are compared with DL stand-alone models such as MLP, CNN, LSTM, and CNN-LSTM. Our ensemble model provides better performance than other forecasting models, providing minimum MAPE at 0.75%, and was proven to be inherently symmetric for forecasting time-series energy and demand data, which is of utmost concern to the power system sector.

The information technique has developed rapidly. The technique of QR codes is widely applied in our daily life, and the mechanism is suitable to share data. A QR code uses symmetric encryption to store and retrieve data efficiently. However, the security issues of QR codes are seldom discussed by the wider community. Moreover, if the sender wishes only the authorized participant to attain the private data which are shared, the data must be encrypted. Furthermore, we do not know who should be censured when problems arise. In view of this, to maintain the integrity and the confidentiality of information security, this paper proposed a new puzzle-based data sharing scheme to share the private information safely. Firstly, we generated the digital signature of the information, then applied the random grids algorithm to obtain the shares. Then, we disarrayed the shares which contain the information and the digital signature with a puzzle-based encoding method. Afterwards, we concealed them into the cover QR codes. With the QR code mechanism of error correction, the marked QR code remain meaningful. Finally, we could send marked QR codes via transmission. The receiver could use XOR operation to obtain the private information after solving the puzzles and verify whether it was tampered with by the digital signature. The proposed system can recover the lossless data and protect them from being divulged. To deal with the potential hazard of transmission in a public environment, there are more and more studies on data hiding and image authentication.

In order to adapt to the rapid development of network technology and network security detection in different scenarios, the generalization ability of the classifier needs to be further improved and has the ability to detect unknown attacks. However, the generalization ability of a single classifier is limited to dealing with class imbalance, and the previous ensemble methods inevitably increase the training cost. Therefore, in this paper, a novel network intrusion detection algorithm combined with group convolution is proposed to improve the generalization performance of the model. The basic classifier uses group convolution with symmetric structure instead of ordinary convolution neural network, which is trained by the cyclic cosine annealing learning rate. Through snapshot ensemble, the generalization ability of the integration model is improved without increasing the training cost. The effectiveness of this method is proved on NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 datasets compared to six other ensemble methods, the classification accuracy can achieve 85.82% and 80.38%, respectively.

Although hyperspectral data provide rich feature information and are widely used in other fields, the data are still scarce. Training small sample data classification is still a major challenge for HSI classification based on deep learning. Recently, the method of mining sample relationships has been proved to be an effective method for training small samples. However, this strategy requires high computational power, which will increase the difficulty of network model training. This paper proposes a modified depthwise separable relational network to deeply capture the similarity between samples. In addition, in order to effectively mine the similarity between samples, the feature vectors of support samples and query samples are symmetrically spliced. According to the metric distance between symmetrical structures, the dependence of the model on samples can be effectively reduced. Firstly, in order to improve the training efficiency of the model, depthwise separable convolution is introduced to reduce the computational cost of the model. Secondly, the Leaky-ReLU function effectively activates all neurons in each layer of neural network to improve the training efficiency of the model. Finally, the cosine annealing learning rate adjustment strategy is introduced to avoid the model falling into the local optimal solution and enhance the robustness of the model. The experimental results on two widely used hyperspectral remote sensing image data sets (Pavia University and Kennedy Space Center) show that compared with seven other advanced classification methods, the proposed method achieves better classification accuracy under the condition of limited training samples.

Carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) reinforcement technology has been widely used in the reinforcement of reinforced concrete (RC) beams. At this stage, high prestressed CFRP board reinforcement is often used in actual reinforcement. However, most reinforced bridges are designed for a long time, and the design value of the protective layer is low, and it is impossible to achieve a large prestressed tension. Therefore, this paper proposes the reverse-arch method to paste the CFRP board and apply low prestress to strengthen the symmetrical RC beam. Through the three-point forward loading test, the cracking load, ultimate load, crack width, mid-span deflection, strain and failure mode of a reverse-arch method-pasted CFRP board-reinforced beam, a directly pasted CFRP board-reinforced beam and an unreinforced beam are compared. The results show that the load-bearing capacity and stiffness of the test beam can be improved by pasting CFRP plates with anti-arch method, but the ductility of the test beam is reduced. Compared with the unreinforced beam, the maximum cracking load and ultimate load are increased by 56% and 63% respectively. The reverse-arch method can produce low prestress, improve the stiffness and bearing capacity of members, and has a good prospect of engineering application.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the fundamental of secure digital communications. It provides a secure means to authenticate identities over the Internet. Symmetric or asymmetric encryption schemes are widely used in identity authentication in any kind of PKI. The conventional PKI has several drawbacks due to the centralized and non-transparent design. Several recent research works utilize blockchain technology to overcome the limitations of conventional implementations of PKI. Blockchain-based PKI integrates blockchain technology with PKI to form a new type of decentralized PKI (DPKI). Several works utilize the currency property in blockchains to implement the reward-and-punishment mechanism. In this paper, we propose a smart contract-based PKI which utilizes the Ethereum smart contract to build a new type of blockchain-based PKI with the reward-and-punishment mechanism using ERC-20 tokens. It has several advantages over previous implementations of similar research that use Ethereum’s main currency—Ether.

Fewer contribution feature components in the image high-dimensional steganalysis feature are able to increase the spatio-temporal complexity of detecting the stego images, and even reduce the detection accuracy. In order to maintain or even improve the detection accuracy while effectively reducing the dimension of the DCTR steganalysis feature, this paper proposes a new selection approach for DCTR feature. First, the asymmetric distortion factor and information gain ratio of each feature component are improved to measure the difference between the symmetric cover and stego features, which provides the theoretical basis for selecting the feature components that contribute to a great degree to detecting the stego images. Additionally, the feature components are arranged in descending order rely on the two measurement criteria, which provides the basis for deleting the components. Based on the above, removing feature components that are ranked larger differently according to two criteria. Ultimately, the preserved feature components are used as the final selected feature for training and detection. Comparison experiments with existing classical approaches indicate that this approach can effectively reduce the feature dimension while maintaining or even improving the detection accuracy. At the same time, it can reduce the detection spatio-temporal complexity of the stego images.

Recently, Discriminative Correlation Filters (DCF) have shown excellent performance in visual object tracking. The correlation for a computing response map can be conducted efficiently in Fourier domain by Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of inputs, where the DFT of an image has symmetry on the Fourier domain. To enhance the robustness and discriminative ability of the filters, many efforts have been devoted to optimizing the learning process. Regularization methods, such as spatial regularization or temporal regularization, used in existing DCF trackers aim to enhance the capacity of the filters. Most existing methods still fail to deal with severe appearance variations—in particular, the large scale and aspect ratio changes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that employs adaptive spatial regularization and temporal regularization to learn reliable filters in both spatial and temporal domains for tracking. To alleviate the influence of the background and distractors to the non-rigid target objects, two sub-models are combined, and multiple features are utilized for learning of robust correlation filters. In addition, most DCF trackers that applied 1-dimensional scale space search method suffered from appearance changes, such as non-rigid deformation. We proposed a 2-dimensional scale space search method to find appropriate scales to adapt to large scale and aspect ratio changes. We perform comprehensive experiments on four benchmarks: OTB-100, VOT-2016, VOT-2018, and LaSOT. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our tracker, which achieved a competitive tracking performance. On OTB-100, our tracker achieved a gain of 0.8% in success, compared to the best existing DCF trackers. On VOT2018, our tracker outperformed the top DCF trackers with a gain of 1.1% in Expected Average Overlap (EAO). On LaSOT, we obtained a gain of 5.2% in success, compared to the best DCF trackers.

The segmentation of retinal vessels is critical for the diagnosis of some fundus diseases. Retinal vessel segmentation requires abundant spatial information and receptive fields with different sizes while existing methods usually sacrifice spatial resolution to achieve real-time reasoning speed, resulting in inadequate vessel segmentation of low-contrast regions and weak anti-noise interference ability. The asymmetry of capillaries in fundus images also increases the difficulty of segmentation. In this paper, we proposed a two-branch network based on multi-scale attention to alleviate the above problem. First, a coarse network with multi-scale U-Net as the backbone is designed to capture more semantic information and to generate high-resolution features. A multi-scale attention module is used to obtain enough receptive fields. The other branch is a fine network, which uses the residual block of a small convolution kernel to make up for the deficiency of spatial information. Finally, we use the feature fusion module to aggregate the information of the coarse and fine networks. The experiments were performed on the DRIVE, CHASE, and STARE datasets. Respectively, the accuracy reached 96.93%, 97.58%, and 97.70%. The specificity reached 97.72%, 98.52%, and 98.94%. The F-measure reached 83.82%, 81.39%, and 84.36%. Experimental results show that compared with some state-of-art methods such as Sine-Net, SA-Net, our proposed method has better performance on three datasets.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for plant leaves recognition by incorporating an unsupervised convolutional auto-encoder (CAE) and Siamese neural network in a unified framework by considering Siamese as an alternative to the conventional loss of CAE. Rather than the conventional exploitation of CAE and Siamese, in our case we have proposed to extend CAE for a novel supervised scenario by considering it as one-class learning classifier. For each class, CAE is trained to reconstruct its positive and negative examples and Siamese is trained to distinguish the similarity and the dissimilarity of the obtained examples. On the contrary and asymmetric to the related hierarchical classification schemes which require pre-knowledge on the dataset being recognized, we propose a hierarchical classification scheme that doesn’t require such a pre-knowledge and can be employed by non-experts automatically. We cluster the dataset to assemble similar classes together. A test image is first assigned to the nearest cluster, then matched to one class from the classes that fall under the determined cluster using our novel one-class learning classifier. The proposed method has been evaluated on the ImageCLEF2012 dataset. Experimental results have proved the superiority of our method compared to several state-of-the art methods.

ACOM/TEM is an automated electron diffraction pattern indexing tool that enables the structure, phase and crystallographic orientation of materials to be routinely determined. The software package, which is part of ACOM/TEM, has substantially evolved over the last fifteen years and has pioneered numerous additional functions with the constant objective of improving its capabilities to make the tremendous amount of information contained in the diffraction patterns easily available to the user. Initially devoted to the analysis of local crystallographic texture, and as an alternative to both X-ray pole figure measurement and EBSD accessories for scanning electron microscopes, it has rapidly proven itself effective to distinguish multiple different phases contained within a given sample, including amorphous phases. Different strategies were developed to bypass the inherent limitations of transmission electron diffraction patterns, such as 180° ambiguities or the complexity of patterns produced from overlapping grains. Post processing algorithms have also been developed to improve the angular resolution and to increase the computing rate. The present paper aims to review some of these facilities. On-going works on 3D reconstruction are also introduced.

The pile–bucket foundation that features a bucket slipped onto a monopile is a new type of symmetric offshore foundation supporting the wind turbine. Its load bearing and deformation resistance capacity are unclear, especially when subjected to cyclic horizontal loadings. In this paper, a model test has been designed and carried out for investigating the cyclic behavior of the pile–bucket foundation embedded in soft marine clay. Cyclic horizontal loads are applied in a displacement-controlled manner with different amplitudes and frequencies. The influences of cyclic loading parameters, including the amplitude, the frequency and the cycle number, have been studied from the perspectives of stiffness-degradation and damping effect that are evaluated from the recorded horizontal force–displacement relationships at the loading point. In addition, the influences of cyclic horizontal loading on the bending moment distribution and on the p–y curve have been presented and discussed. The results show that significant reductions in the foundation stiffness and in the soil resistance may be observed during the first few cycles when the loading displacement is relatively high.

LightMAC_Plus proposed by Naito (ASIACRYPT 2017) is a blockcipher-based MAC that has beyond the birthday bound security without message length in the sense of PRF (Pseudo-Random Function) security. In this paper, we present a single-key variant of LightMAC_Plus that has beyond the birthday bound security in terms of PRF security. Compared with the previous construction LightMAC_Plus1k of Naito (CT-RSA 2018), our construction is simpler and of higher efficiency.