The research book is a continuation of the authors' previous works, which are focused on recent advances in computer vision methodologies and technical solutions using conventional and intelligent paradigms. The book gathers selected contributions addressing a number of real-life applications including the identification of handwritten texts, watermarking techniques, simultaneous localization and mapping for mobile robots, motion control systems for mobile robots, analysis of indoor human activity, facial image quality assessment, android device controlling, processing medical images, clinical decision-making and foot progression angle detection. Given the tremendous interest among researchers in the development and applications of computer vision paradigms in the field of business, engineering, medicine, security and aviation, the book offers a timely guide for all PhD students, professors, researchers and software developers working in the areas of digital video processing and computer vision technologies.

This book covers and makes four major contributions: 1) analyzing and surveying the pros and cons of current approaches for identifying rumor sources on complex networks; 2) proposing a novel approach to identify rumor sources in time-varying networks; 3) developing a fast approach to identify multiple rumor sources; 4) proposing a community-based method to overcome the scalability issue in this research area. These contributions enable rumor source identification to be applied effectively in real-world networks, and eventually diminish rumor damages, which the authors rigorously illustrate in this book. In the modern world, the ubiquity of networks has made us vulnerable to various risks. For instance, viruses propagate throughout the Internet and infect millions of computers. Misinformation spreads incredibly fast in online social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Infectious diseases, such as SARS, H1N1 or Ebola, have spread geographically and killed hundreds of thousands people. In essence, all of these situations can be modeled as a rumor spreading through a network, where the goal is to find the source of the rumor so as to control and prevent network risks. So far, extensive work has been done to develop new approaches to effectively identify rumor sources. However, current approaches still suffer from critical weaknesses. The most serious one is the complex spatiotemporal diffusion process of rumors in time-varying networks, which is the bottleneck of current approaches. The second problem lies in the expensively computational complexity of identifying multiple rumor sources. The third important issue is the huge scale of the underlying networks, which makes it difficult to develop efficient strategies to quickly and accurately identify rumor sources. These weaknesses prevent rumor source identification from being applied in a broader range of real-world applications. This book aims to analyze and address these issues to make rumor source identification more effective and applicable in the real world. The authors propose a novel reverse dissemination strategy to narrow down the scale of suspicious sources, which dramatically promotes the efficiency of their method. The authors then develop a Maximum-likelihood estimator, which can pin point the true source from the suspects with high accuracy. For the scalability issue in rumor source identification, the authors explore sensor techniques and develop a community structure based method. Then the authors take the advantage of the linear correlation between rumor spreading time and infection distance, and develop a fast method to locate the rumor diffusion source. Theoretical analysis proves the efficiency of the proposed method, and the experiment results verify the significant advantages of the proposed method in large-scale networks. This book targets graduate and post-graduate students studying computer science and networking. Researchers and professionals working in network security, propagation models and other related topics, will also be interested in this book.

The increasing business use of wireless and mobile technologies on a variety of devices has accelerated the need for a better understanding of the technologies involved. ""Business Data Communications and Networking: A Research Perspective"" addresses the key issues for businesses utilizing data communications and the increasing importance of networking technologies in business. ""Business Data Communications and Networking: A Research Perspective"" covers a series of technical advances in the field while highlighting their respective contributions to business or organizational goals, and centers on the issues of network-based applications, mobility, wireless networks, and network security.

Opto-mechanical Fiber Optic Sensors: Research, Technology, and Applications in Mechanical Sensing offers comprehensive coverage of the theoretical aspects of fiber optic sensors (FOS), along with current and emerging applications in the mechanical, petroleum, biomedical, biomechanical, aerospace and automotive industries. Special attention is given to FOS applications in harsh environments. Due to recent technology advances, optical fibers have found uses in many industrial applications. Various sectors are major targets for FOS's capable of measuring mechanical parameters, such as pressure, stress, strain and temperature. Opto-mechanical FOS's offer unique advantages, including immunity to electromagnetic interference, high fidelity and signal-to-noise ratio, low-loss remote sensing and small size.

This thesis describes novel devices for the secure identification of objects or electronic systems. The identification relies on the the atomic-scale uniqueness of semiconductor devices by measuring a macroscopic quantum property of the system in question. Traditionally, objects and electronic systems have been securely identified by measuring specific characteristics: common examples include passwords, fingerprints used to identify a person or an electronic device, and holograms that can tag a given object to prove its authenticity. Unfortunately, modern technologies also make it possible to circumvent these everyday techniques. Variations in quantum properties are amplified by the existence of atomic-scale imperfections. As such, these devices are the hardest possible systems to clone. They also use the least resources and provide robust security. Hence they have tremendous potential significance as a means of reliably telling the good guys from the bad.

This book details some of the major developments in the implementation of compressive sensing in radio applications for electronic defense and warfare communication use. It provides a comprehensive background to the subject and at the same time describes some novel algorithms. It also investigates application value and performance-related parameters of compressive sensing in scenarios such as direction finding, spectrum monitoring, detection, and classification.

This monograph presents new theories and methods for fixed-time cooperative control of multi-agent systems. Fundamental concepts of fixed-time stability and stabilization are introduced with insightful understanding. This book presents solutions for several problems of fixed-time cooperative control using systematic design methods. The book compares fixed-time cooperative control with asymptotic cooperative control, demonstrating how the former can achieve better closed-loop performance and disturbance rejection properties. It also discusses the differences from finite-time control, and shows how fixed-time cooperative control can produce the faster rate of convergence and provide an explicit estimate of the settling time independent of initial conditions. This monograph presents multiple applications of fixed-time control schemes, including to distributed optimization of multi-agent systems, making it useful to students, researchers and engineers alike.

This book presents cutting-edge research on various ways to bridge the semantic gap in image and video analysis. The respective chapters address different stages of image processing, revealing that the first step is a future extraction, the second is a segmentation process, the third is object recognition, and the fourth and last involve the semantic interpretation of the image. The semantic gap is a challenging area of research, and describes the difference between low-level features extracted from the image and the high-level semantic meanings that people can derive from the image. The result greatly depends on lower level vision techniques, such as feature selection, segmentation, object recognition, and so on. The use of deep models has freed humans from manually selecting and extracting the set of features. Deep learning does this automatically, developing more abstract features at the successive levels. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, students and professors in Computer Engineering, Computer Science and related fields whose work involves images, video analysis, image interpretation and so on.

When trying to solve a complex, seemingly unsolvable problem, electrical engineers sometimes just need to start at the very beginning of the problem. To arrive at a solution, they have to go back to the basics and examine the mathematical rules, laws, and formulas that are at the root of every electrical engineering problem. This is why engineers need the Mathematical Handbook for Electrical Engineers. Written by electrical engineers, specifically for electrical engineers, this valuable resource presents the most common mathematical techniques used for problem solving and computer-aided analysis. It concisely, clearly, and easily explains the essential mathematics engineers use everyday on the job, and also serves as a time-saving reference for students. Examples are taken from a wide variety of electrical engineering disciplines, including circuits, devices and systems, antennas and propagation, waveforms and signal processing, and stochastic radio engineering.

This book traces the pedagogical evolution of technical communication in America as it grew out of Engineering English requirements from roughly the turn of the century to 1950. This study examines specific curricular patterns, texts, and writers on the subject of technical communication, while also tracing engineering educational patterns as they emerge from the proceedings of the society for the promotion of engineering education. Unique to the second edition of the book is a new preface by the recent past ATTW series editor, Jimmie Killingsworth, a new introduction by Elizabeth Tebeaux, and an epilogue by Katherine Staples. Writing in a Milieu of Utility concludes that technical writing, as we teach it today, likely found its roots in engineering composition pedagogy, when, at approximately the turn of the century, engineering educators recognized that writing about science and technology not only made sense in an academic milieu that emphasized utility, but that such writing could also contribute to the professional success of engineering students. Existing somewhat tenuously as engineering itself sought academic status, technical communication emerged ultimately as a re-conceptualized composition course, after early to mid twentieth century calls for English and engineering cooperation made traditional composition offerings less relevant. Academic writing on environmental communication proliferated in the 1990's. A few of us had been calling for such work and making initial investigations throughout the 1980's, but the momentum in the field built slowly. Spurred by coverage in the mass media, academic publishers finally caught the wave of interest. In this exciting new volume, the editors demonstrate more fully than ever before how environmental rhetoric and technical communication go hand in hand. The key link that they and their distinguished group of contributors have discovered is the ancient concern of communication scholars with public deliberation. Environmental issues present technical communicators with some of their greatest challenges, above all, how to make the highly specialized and inscrutably difficult technical information generated by environmental scientists and engineers usable in public decision making. The editors encourage us to accept the challenge of contributing to environmentally conscious decision making by integrating technical knowledge and human values. For technical communicators who accept the challenge of working toward solutions by opening access to crucial information and by engaging in critical thinking on ecological issues, the research and theory offered in this volume provide a strong foundation for future practice.

This book focuses on conceptual frameworks that are helpful in understanding the basics of electronics - what the feedback system is, the principle of an oscillator, the operational working of an amplifier, and other relevant topics. It also provides an overview of the technologies supporting electronic systems, like OP-AMP, transistor, filter, ICs, and diodes. It consists of seven chapters, written in an easy and understandable language, and featuring relevant block diagrams, circuit diagrams, valuable and interesting solved examples, and important test questions. Further, the book includes up-to-date illustrations, exercises, and numerous worked examples to illustrate the theory and to demonstrate their use in practical designs.

This book is based on the 18 tutorials presented during the 28th workshop on Advances in Analog Circuit Design. Expert designers present readers with information about a variety of topics at the frontier of analog circuit design, including next-generation analog-to-digital converters , high-performance power management systems and technology considerations for advanced IC design. For anyone involved in analog circuit research and development, this book will be a valuable summary of the state-of-the-art in these areas. Provides a summary of the state-of-the-art in analog circuit design, written by experts from industry and academia; Presents material in a tutorial-based format; Includes coverage of next-generation analog-to-digital converters, high-performance power management systems, and technology considerations for advanced IC design.

Simplified Design of Data Converters shows how to design and experiment with data converters, both analog-to-digital and digital to analog. The design approach here is the same one used in all of John Lenk's best-selling books on simplified and practical design. Throughout the book, design problems start with guidelines for selecting all components on a trial-value basis, assuming a specific design goal and set of conditions. Then, using the guideline values in experimental circuits, the desired results are produced by varying the experimental component values, if needed.
If you are a working engineer responsible for designing data-converters circuits, or selecting IC data converters, the variety of circuit configurations described here should generally simplify your task. Not only does the book describe converter-circuit designs, but it also covers the most popular forms of data-converter ICs available. Throughout the book, you will find a wealth of information on data-converter ICs and related components.
For all skill levels.
Tells how to design and build data-converter circuits from scratch.

This book presents recent research on the hybridization of intelligent methods, which refers to combining methods to solve complex problems. It discusses hybrid approaches covering different areas of intelligent methods and technologies, such as neural networks, swarm intelligence, machine learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, agent-based approaches, knowledge-based system and image processing. The book includes extended and revised versions of invited papers presented at the 6th International Workshop on Combinations of Intelligent Methods and Applications (CIMA 2016), held in The Hague, Holland, in August 2016. The book is intended for researchers and practitioners from academia and industry interested in using hybrid methods for solving complex problems.

This book objectively represents the status quo and trends of world Internet development in 2021, systematically summarizes Internet development in major countries and regions, and deeply analyzes new development condition and trends in key fields of Internet, in terms of eight aspects, i.e., information infrastructure, information technology, digital economy, e-government, cyber media, cybersecurity, cyberlaws, and international cyberspace governance. This book maintains the index system of world Internet development, optimizes some indexes, and comprehensively evaluates Internet development in major countries and regions in the world, in order to better demonstrate the strength and characteristics of Internet development in various countries and mirror the overall trend in world Internet development in a comprehensive, accurate, and objective way. This book collects the latest research results in world Internet development. With diverse subjects and detailed discussion, this book possesses great significance for these engaged in Internet field in governmental departments, Internet enterprises, scientific research institutions, and universities, who hope to fully understand world Internet development.

The book focuses on system dependability modeling and calculation, considering the impact of s-dependency and uncertainty. The best suited approaches for practical system dependability modeling and calculation, (1) the minimal cut approach, (2) the Markov process approach, and (3) the Markov minimal cut approach as a combination of (1) and (2) are described in detail and applied to several examples. The stringently used Boolean logic during the whole development process of the approaches is the key for the combination of the approaches on a common basis. For large and complex systems, efficient approximation approaches, e.g. the probable Markov path approach, have been developed, which can take into account s-dependencies be-tween components of complex system structures. A comprehensive analysis of aleatory uncertainty (due to randomness) and epistemic uncertainty (due to lack of knowledge), and their combination, developed on the basis of basic reliability indices and evaluated with the Monte Carlo simulation method, has been carried out. The uncertainty impact on system dependability is investigated and discussed using several examples with different levels of difficulty. The applications cover a wide variety of large and complex (real-world) systems. Actual state-of-the-art definitions of terms of the IEC 60050-192:2015 standard, as well as the dependability indices, are used uniformly in all six chapters of the book.

This book reports on the design, synthesis and characterization of new small molecule electron acceptors for polymer solar cells. Starting with a detailed introduction to the science behind polymer solar cells, the author then goes on to review the challenges and advances made in developing non-fullerene acceptors so far. In the main body of the book, the author describes the design principles and synthetic strategy for a new family of acceptors, including detailed synthetic procedures and molecular modeling data used to predict physical properties. An indepth characterization of the photovoltaic performance, with transient absorption spectroscopy (TAS), photo-induced charge extraction, and grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXRD) is also included, and the author uses this data to relate material properties and device performance. This book provides a useful overview for researchers beginning a project in this or related areas.

This thesis develops new techniques for simulating the low-energy behaviour of quantum spin systems in one and two dimensions. Combining these developments, it subsequently uses the formalism of tensor network states to derive an effective particle description for one- and two-dimensional spin systems that exhibit strong quantum correlations. These techniques arise from the combination of two themes in many-particle physics: (i) the concept of quasiparticles as the effective low-energy degrees of freedom in a condensed-matter system, and (ii) entanglement as the characteristic feature for describing quantum phases of matter. Whereas the former gave rise to the use of effective field theories for understanding many-particle systems, the latter led to the development of tensor network states as a description of the entanglement distribution in quantum low-energy states.

Mobile Commerce Applications addresses and explores the critical architectural issues in constructing m-commerce applications and in applying mobile technologies in different areas, including methodologies, enabling technologies, models, paradigms, architectures, standards and innovations.

This book reports on the latest advances in the study of motion control in biomimetic swimming robots with high speed and high manoeuvrability. It presents state-of-the-art studies on various swimming robots including robotic fish, dolphins and jellyfish in a unified framework, and discusses the potential benefits of applying biomimetic underwater propulsion to autonomous underwater vehicle design, such as: speed, energy economy, enhanced manoeuvrability, and reduced detectability. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to researchers, engineers and graduate students in robotics and ocean engineering who wish to learn about the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of biomimetic underwater robots.