46034477
Reliability Measurement, Analysis, and Improvement for Large Software Systems
Abstracts This chapter surveys recent developments in software reliability engineering, and presents results in measuring test activities, analyzing product reliability, and identifying high risk areas for focused reliability improvement for large software systems. Environmental constraints and existing analysis techniques are carefully examined to select appropriate analysis techniques, models, implementation strategies, and support tools suitable for large software systems. The analysis and modeling activities include measure definition, data gathering, graphical test activity and defect tracking, overall quality assessment using software reliability growth models, and identification of problematic areas and risk management using tree-based reliability models. Various existing software tools have been adapted and integrated to support these analysis and modeling activities. This approach has been used in the testing phase of several large software products developed in the IBM Software Solutions Toronto Laboratory and was demon- strated to be effective and efficient. Various practical problems and solutions in implementing this strategy are also discussed.
16987100
Measuring Prime Program Complexity
Abstract This paper uses the prime program decomposition of a program as the basis for a measure that closely correlates with our intuitive notion of program complexity. This measure is based upon the information theory ideas of randomness and entropy such that results about structured programming, data abstractions, and other programming paradigms can be stated in quantitative terms, and empirical means can be used to validate the assumptions used to develop the model. As a graph-based model, it can be applied to several graphical examples as extensions not otherwise available to source-code based models. This paper introduces the measure, derives several properties for it, and gives some simple examples to demonstrate that the measure is a plausible approximation of our notions concerning structured programming.
8007887
An application of decision theory for the evaluation of software prototypes
Abstract There is a need to quantify management decision making in software development. To this end, this article presents an application of concepts from economic decision theory to an aspect of this problem currently under study by many in the software engineering community—how to prototype a design and evaluate the effectiveness of this prototype. The role of prototyping as an experimental tool is analyzed and techniques for defining what to prototype and when it is cost effective are introduced. We demonstrate some of these decision theory techniques to define a model that management can use to select solutions from a set of alternative designs.
10468208
Measurement and defect modeling for a legacy software system
This paper analyzes the quality of a large-scale legacy software system using selected metrics. Quality measurements include defect information collected during product development and in-field operation. Other software metrics include measurements on various product and process attributes, including design, size, change, and complexity. Preliminary analyses revealed the high degree of skew in our data and a weak correlation between defects and software metrics. Tree-based models were then used to uncover relationships between defects and software metrics, and to identify high-defect modules together with their associated measurement characteristics. As results presented in tree forms are natural to the decision process and are easy to understand, tree-based modeling is shown to be suitable for change solicitation and useful in guiding remedial actions for quality improvement.
33942395
Measuring and Modeling Usage and Reliability for Statistical Web Testing
Statistical testing and reliability analysis can be used effectively to assure quality for Web applications. To support this strategy, we extract Web usage and failure information from existing Web logs. The usage information is used to build models for statistical Web testing. The related failure information is used to measure the reliability of Web applications and the potential effectiveness of statistical Web testing. We applied this approach to analyze some actual Web logs. The results demonstrated the viability and effectiveness of our approach.
37559798
Measurement and continuous improvement of software reliability throughout software life-cycle
Abstract Software reliability is one of the most important aspects of software quality. However, most of the existing techniques focus on the system testing and other late stages of development life-cycle. Therefore, they are not effective for early problem identification and reliability improvement. This paper describes our recent work in establishing predictive linkage between software reliability and other entities that we can measure and control early in the development cycle, and using such predictive relations to drive continuous reliability improvement.
16586772
A new state-space approach for super-resolution image sequence reconstruction
Super-resolution imaging is to overcome the inherent limitations of image acquisition to create high-resolution images from their low-resolution counterparts. In this paper, a novel state-space approach is proposed to incorporate the temporal correlations among the low-resolution observations into the framework of the Kalman filtering. The proposed approach exploits both the temporal correlations information among the high-resolution images and the temporal correlations information among the low-resolution images to improve the quality of the reconstructed high-resolution sequence. Experimental results show that the proposed framework is superior to bi-linear interpolation, bi-cubic spline interpolation and the conventional Kalman filter approach, due to the consideration of the temporal correlations among the low-resolution images.
622959
Markov Chain Monte Carlo Super-Resolution Image Reconstruction with Simultaneous Adaptation of the Prior Image Model
In our recent work, the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique has been successfully exploited and shown as an effective approach to perform super-resolution image reconstruction. However, one major challenge lies at the selection of the hyperparameter of the prior image model, which affects the degree of regularity imposed by the prior image model, and consequently, the quality of the estimated high-resolution image. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatically adapt the model’s hyperparameter during the MCMC process, rather than the exhaustive, off-line search. Experimental results presented show that the proposed hyperparameter adaptation method yields extremely close performance to that of the optimal prior image model case.
12486810
A new class of biorthogonal wavelet systems for image transform coding
We construct general biorthogonal Coifman wavelet systems, a new class of compactly supported biorthogonal wavelet systems with vanishing moments equally distributed for a scaling function and wavelet pair. A time-domain design method is employed and closed-form expressions for the impulse responses and the frequency responses of the corresponding dual filters are derived. The resulting filter coefficients are all dyadic fractions, which is an attractive feature in the realization of multiplication-free discrete wavelet transform. Even-ordered systems in this family are symmetric, which correspond to linear-phase dual filters. In particular, three filterbanks (FBs) in this family are systematically verified to have competitive compression potential to the 9-7 tap biorthogonal wavelet FB by Cohen et al., which is currently the most widely used one in the field of wavelet transform coding. In addition, the proposed FB's have much smaller computational complexity in terms of floating-point operations required in transformation, and therefore indicate a better tradeoff between compression performance and computational complexity.
10434536
Identifying Linear Causal Effects
This paper concerns the assessment of linear cause-effect relationships from a combination of observational data and qualitative causal structures. The paper shows how techniques developed for identifying causal effects in causal Bayesian networks can be used to identify linear causal effects, and thus provides a new approach for assessing linear causal effects in structural equation models. Using this approach the paper develops a systematic procedure for recognizing identifiable direct causal effects.
37244
Data Hiding in Film Grain
This paper presents a data hiding technique based on a new compression enhancement called Film Grain Technology. Film grain is a mid-frequency noise-like pattern naturally appearing in imagery captured on film. The Film Grain Technology is a method for modeling and removing the film grain, thus enhancing the compression efficiency, and then using the model parameters to create synthetic film grain at the decoder. We propose slight modifications to the decoder that enable the synthetic film grain to represent metadata available at the decoder. We examine a number of implementation approaches and report results of fidelity and robustness experiments.