15157984
Image morphing based on mutual information and optimal mass transport
Time domain image interpolation, or image morphing, refers to a class of techniques for generating a series of smoothly changing intermediate images between two given related images. In this note, we present a novel approach based on the theoiy of optimal mass transport, using mutual information (MI) as the similarity measurement. The potential applications also include image registmtion, compression and coding.
9864159
Harmonic Skeleton Guided Evaluation of Stenoses in Human Coronary Arteries
This paper presents a novel approach that three-dimensionally visualizes and evaluates stenoses in human coronary arteries by using harmonic skeletons. A harmonic skeleton is the center line of a multi-branched tubular surface extracted based on a harmonic function, which is the solution of the Laplace equation. This skeletonization method guarantees smoothness and connectivity and provides a fast and straightforward way to calculate local cross-sectional areas of the arteries, and thus provides the possibility to localize and evaluate coronary artery stenosis, which is a commonly seen pathology in coronary artery disease.
43250103
An Agent-Based Ontological Approach for Information Reorganisation
This paper presents a novel approach for information reorganisation which is particularly suitable for distributed computing, such as Web services. An agent-based architecture is developed to cope with service agents' on and off and provide semantic support for implementation of complex e-business applications that may span diverse enterprises. A frame-based ontology representation is discussed. The representation is well suited for representing complex relationships that are unavailable in current ontology related work. Our approach aims to support dynamic information reorganisation in the Internet based e-business applications. The obtained information can serve for the knowledge acquisition purpose.
1759932
Main business service dimensions in an e-commerce environment
Improving service quality has long been recognized as a key business strategy in consumer market. However, little is written in the literature about service among business organizations. The shortage of knowledge on business service (BS) poses a significant challenge in tracking and improving BS quality in today's e-commerce environment. To address this, this paper takes a first step to identify main BS dimensions in an e-commerce environment. It first provides a review on BS. Then the BS gap model and main BS dimension are identified. The paper concludes with a summary and future research suggestions.
58339956
IPsec/VPN security policy correctness and assurance
With IPsec/VPN policies being widely deployed, how to correctly specify and configure them is critical in enforcing security requirements, especially among different administrative domains across the Internet. Under current practice, IPsec/VPN policies are specified individually by system administrators from different organizations without any formal coordination. This practice implies unintentional errors due to inconsistent IPsec/VPN policies. Furthermore, Internet routing dynamics may possibly interfere with IPsec/VPN policies such that unexpected conflicts occur due to a mismatch between the routing and IPsec/VPN layers. To deal with these problems, we formally define IPsec security requirements, policies, and their correctness criteria. Based on these definitions, we present an inter-domain architecture to automatically generate correct and efficient security policies. Our approach works when we are given a set of security requirements for a single end-to-end traffic flow. We can also deal with changes when new security requirements are added. Finally, we present simulation results which evaluate the performance of our solutions.
34587947
Guaranteed Mutually Consistent Checkpointing in Distributed Computations
In this paper, we emplore the isomorphism between vector time and causality to characterize consistency of a set of checkpoints in a distributed computing. A necessary and sufficient condition, to determine if a set of checkpoints can form a consistent global checkpoint, is presented and proved using the isomorphic power of vector time and causality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use the isomorphism for this purpose. This condition leads to a simple and straightforward algorithm for a guaranteed mutually consistent global checkpointing. In our approach, a process can take a checkpoint whenever and wherever it wants while other related process may be asked to take an additional checkpoint for ensuring the mutual consistency. We also show how this condition and the resulting algorithm can be used to obtain a maximum and minimum global checkpoints, another important paradigm for distributed applications.
1461453
Optimal partitioning of multicast receivers
Multicast sessions may have a large number of receivers with heterogeneous reception capacities. To accommodate this heterogeneity various multi-rate schemes, based upon the use of layering or replication, have been proposed. We consider the optimal partitioning of receivers into groups for multi-rate schemes. For a general class of utility functions, we formulate the partitioning problem as an optimization problem to maximize the sum of receiver utilities. We present an efficient dynamic programming algorithm to solve the partitioning problem, and prove that the solution it finds is optimal. We also show that the majority of the benefit of a multi-rate scheme can be gained by using a small number of groups (or layers), say 4 to 5. To illustrate our solution approach, we apply it to the case where receiver capacities are determined by multi-rate max-min fair rates. A complete protocol for receiver rates computation, rates collection, optimal receiver partitioning, and receiver adaptation is presented. We then compare our approach with other multi-rate approaches as well as a single-rate approach. Experimental results show that our approach provides substantial performance improvements.