9136723
Biped Locomotion by Reduced Ankle Power
Power reduction in the ankle joints of a biped robot is considered inthis paper. Ankles of human beings have small torque and are veryflexible within a certain range of motion (very stiff near and beyondthis range). This characteristic makes foot landing soft and gives agood contact between its sole and the ground. This feature can beimplemented in a biped robot by using a small actuator for the anklejoints. A small actuator consumes less energy and reduces the weightof the leg. With less power in the ankle joints, robot walkingbecomes more difficult to control. This problem can be solved byproviding a feedback control mechanism as presented in this paper. Thecontrol mechanism uses the motion of the body and the swinging leg toeliminate instability caused by the weak ankle. Two locomotionexamples, standing and walking, were investigated respectively toshow the validity of the proposed control scheme. In standing, thecontrol input is the displacement of the ankle joint of thesupporting leg. The control mechanism decides the bending angle ofthe body and the position of the swinging leg. For walking, only thebending angle of the body is used to avoid the discontinuity of thecontrol input. Experimental results are presented to show theeffectiveness of the control mechanism.
33641222
Object tracking using the Gabor wavelet transform and the golden section algorithm
The paper presents an object tracking method for object-based video processing which uses a two-dimensional (2D) Gabor wavelet transform (GWT) and a 2D golden section algorithm. An object in the current frame is modeled by local features from a number of the selected feature points, and the global placement of these feature points. The feature points are stochastically selected based on the energy of their GWT coefficients. Points with higher energy have a higher probability of being selected since they are visually more important. The amplitudes of the GWT coefficients of a feature point are then used as the local feature. The global placement of the feature points is determined by a 2D mesh whose feature is the area of the triangles formed by the feature points. In this way, a local feature is represented by a GWT coefficient amplitude vector, and a global feature is represented by a triangle area vector. One advantage of the 2D mesh is that the direction of its triangle area vector is invariant to affine transform. Consequently, the similarity between two local features or two global features can be defined as a function of the angle and the length ratio between two vectors, and the overall similarity between two objects is a weighted sum of the local and global similarities. In order to find the corresponding object in the next frame, the 2D golden section algorithm is employed. Our results show that the method is robust to object deformation and supports object tracking in noisy video sequences.
15990035
Content-based retransmission for 3-D wavelet video streaming on the Internet
Improving the QoS of video streaming with packet loss is a challenging topic of research. In this paper, we propose a novel content-based retransmission scheme to address this issue. The basic idea is to jointly consider the packets' contents and the channel conditions to optimize QoS. The goal is to deliver the best quality of video possible under the same channel condition. Using the proposed retransmission scheme, we have designed a 3D wavelet video streaming system. Simulation results show that the content-based retransmission can improve the video quality by more than 2 dB compared with the existing non-content-based delay-constrained retransmission when the channel loss rate is high.
10569326
Intelligent compliant motion control
The role of a compliant motion scheme is to control a robot manipulator in contact with its environment. By accommodating with the interaction force, the manipulator can be used to accomplish tasks that involve constrained motions. This paper presents a new work on the compliant motion control for position-controlled manipulator. A new method for achieving efficient interaction between the manipulator and its environment is developed. The interaction force is reduced using a quadratic cost function. In this method, the compliance is formulated as function of the interaction force. An adaptive element is used to update the compliance. The stability of the system is investigated using the Lyapunov approach. Experiments are conducted in our laboratory to demonstrate the use of such scheme.
16622032
AVP: A Highly Efficient Transport Protocol for Low Bit Rate Multimedia Communications
Utilization of Internet communications in distance learning, distributed simulation, and distributed work groups involves multimedia transmission of animation, voice and video clips. Highly compressed audio-video data protocols are required for efficient Internet multimedia communications. Addressing this requirement, a new transport protocol called Audio-Video Protocol (AVP) for highly efficient multimedia communications on the Internet is presented. While providing similar real-time delivery functions as Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) and Real-Time Control Protocol (RTCP), AVP adopts a novel audio-based synchronization scheme. This synchronization scheme has two advantages. One is the overhead reduction through eliminating the timestamp in each transmitted data packet. The other is the packet rate reduction by putting multiple audio frames or mixed audio-video frames in a single AVP packet. As a result, the end-to-end media unit delay is reduced while achieving implicit synchronization. Furthermore, AVP provides adaptive quality of service (QoS) by the prioritized packetization scheme. Simulation results are presented to verify the advantages of the AVP protocol.
46651638
Packed integer wavelet transform constructed by lifting scheme
A new method for speeding up the integer wavelet transforms constructed by the lifting scheme is proposed. The proposed method packs multiple pixels (wavelet coefficients) in a single word; therefore, it can make use of the 32-bit or 64-bit computational capability of modern computers to accomplish multiple addition/subtraction operations in one instruction cycle. As a result, our method can save the decomposition/reconstruction time by up to 37% on 32-bit machines and require much less working memory in comparison with the original wavelet transform algorithms.
790881
Compact and unforgeable key establishment over an ATM network
Authenticated session key establishment is a central issue in network security. This paper addresses the question of whether we can design a compact, efficient and authenticated key establishment protocol that has the following two properties: (1) each message exchanged between two participants can be transferred in a short packet such as an ATM cell whose payload has only 384 bits, and (2) messages that carry key materials are unforgeable and nonrepudiatable without the involvement of a trusted key distribution center. We discuss why the answer to this question is negative if one follows the currently standard approach to key establishment, namely employing secret/public key encryption and, possibly, digital signature. We then present a number of protocols that represent a positive answer to the question. Our protocols are all based on a cryptographic primitive called "signcryption" that fulfils both the functions of digital signature and public key encryption with a cost far smaller than that required by "digital signature followed by encryption".
11180883
An approach to multimodal biomedical image registration utilizing particle swarm optimization
Biomedical image registration, or geometric alignment of two-dimensional and/or three-dimensional (3D) image data, is becoming increasingly important in diagnosis, treatment planning, functional studies, computer-guided therapies, and in biomedical research. Registration based on intensity values usually requires optimization of some similarity metric between the images. Local optimization techniques frequently fail because functions of these metrics with respect to transformation parameters are generally nonconvex and irregular and, therefore, global methods are often required. In this paper, a new evolutionary approach, particle swarm optimization, is adapted for single-slice 3D-to-3D biomedical image registration. A new hybrid particle swarm technique is proposed that incorporates initial user guidance. Multimodal registrations with initial orientations far from the ground truth were performed on three volumes from different modalities. Results of optimizing the normalized mutual information similarity metric were compared with various evolutionary strategies. The hybrid particle swarm technique produced more accurate registrations than the evolutionary strategies in many cases, with comparable convergence. These results demonstrate that particle swarm approaches, along with evolutionary techniques and local methods, are useful in image registration, and emphasize the need for hybrid approaches for difficult registration problems.
129842
BLAS: an efficient XPath processing system
We present BLAS, a Bi-LAbeling based System, for efficiently processing complex XPath queries over XML data. BLAS uses P-labeling to process queries involving consecutive child axes, and D-labeling to process queries involving descendant axes traversal. The XML data is stored in labeled form, and indexed to optimize descendent axis traversals. Three algorithms are presented for translating complex XPath queries to SQL expressions, and two alternate query engines are provided. Experimental results demonstrate that the BLAS system has a substantial performance improvement compared to traditional XPath processing using D-labeling.
6457216
A CMOS Direct-Digital BPSK Modulator Using an Active Balun and Common-Gate Switches
A 0.18 mum CMOS binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulator circuit is proposed and demonstrated that can achieve high data rates and strong carrier suppression while having low DC power consumption and a very compact layout. The modulator accepts a single-ended microwave signal (2.4 GHz) and converts it to a balanced signal using an active balun. Complementary common-gate switches are then used to select one of the two balun outputs in correspondence with the digital data to produce BPSK modulation. Excellent performance is obtained with measured phase and amplitude errors of less than 1deg and 0.1 dB, respectively, and data rates up to 200 Mbps with a carrier frequency of 2.4 GHz. The insertion loss for the modulator is approximately 3 dB. Additionally, the active balun provides input matching and obtains an input reflection coefficient of -13 dB. The circuit layout area is 310 mumtimes260 mum and the power consumption is 7.2 mW.
207760
Encrypted Message Authentication by Firewalls
Firewalls typically filter network traffic at several different layers. At application layer, filtering is based on various security relevant information encapsulated into protocol messages. The major obstacle for efficient verification of authenticity of messages at application layer is the difficulty of verifying digital signatures without disclosure of content protected by encryption. This is due to a traditional paradigm of generating a digital signature of a message and then encrypting the signature together with the message to preserve confidentiality, integrity, non-repudiation and authenticity. To overcome this limitation, a scheme shall be proposed for enabling signature verification without disclosing the content of messages. To provide maximum efficiency, the scheme is based on digital signcryption.