Computer Engineering Commons^™

A Triangulation-Based Approach To Nonrigid Image Registration, Timothy R. Linden

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A triangulation-based approach to nonrigid image registration is presented. This method builds upon control point projective registration methods. Control points for this method are located using the Harris point detector. An analysis is presented for this detector to show its properties. Projective registration is used as the basis for this non-rigid registration method. Details of the projective registration method used are presented. Nonrigid registration is used to spatially align images of a 3-D scene taken from different views. Projective registration approximates the scene geometry as a plane. This nonrigid approach subdivides the images into small corresponding triangles, to improve the …

Weapon Engagement Zone Maximum Launch Range Approximation Using A Multilayer Perceptron, Brian Michael Birkmire

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This thesis investigates the use of an artificial neural network (ANN), in particular a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), to perform function approximation on truth data representing a weapon engagement zone's (WEZ) maximum launch range. The WEZ of an air-to-air missile represents the boundaries and zones of effectiveness for a one-vs-one air-to-air combat engagement [13]. The intent is for the network to fuse table lookup and interpolation functionality into a physically compact and computationally efficient package, while improving approximation accuracy over conventional methods. Data was collected from simulated firings of a notional air-to-air missile model and used to train a two layer …

Design And Development Of A Fall Detection Device With Infrared Receiving Capabilities, Ammari Ramzi

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Fall related injuries are the leading cause of death and hospitalization among the elderly. Falls among older people become a major problem facing hospitals and nursing homes. In this study we put an effort to design a wireless device capable of detecting falls with the hope that this study will provide a path towards better healthcare monitoring and better independent living for the elderly.

In this project I showed how the fall detection device can be interfaced with different systems to achieve functionality without adding extra cost. For seniors who prefer to stay at their homes and live independently, the …

Large Scale Distributed Semantic N-Gram Language Model, Yuandong Jiang

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Language model is a crucial component in statistical machine translation system. The basic language model is N-gram which predicts the next word based on previous N-1 words. It has been used in the state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems over years. However, the N-gram model ignores the rich syntactic and semantic structure in natural languages. We propose a composite semantic N-gram language model which combines probabilistic latent semantic analysis model with N-gram as a generative model. We have implemented the proposed composite language model in a super-computer with thousand processors that is trained by 1.3 billion tokens corpus. Comparing with simple …

3-D Model Characterization And Identification From Intrinsic Landmarks, John L. Camp

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A method to automatically characterize and identify 3-D range scans based on intrinsic landmarks is presented. Intrinsic landmarks represent locally unique, intrinsic properties of a scanned surface, regardless of scale or rotation. The number, location, and characteristics of landmarks are used to characterize the scanned models. This method contains a selection process to identify stable, intrinsic landmarks for range scans as well as the identification of those scans. The selection process requires no user interaction or surface assumptions. It uses the principal curvatures at the range points to select the landmarks. First, a large number of landmarks are generated by …

A Domain Specific Language Based Approach For Developing Complex Cloud Computing Applications, Ashwin Kumar Manjunatha

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Computing has changed. Lately, a slew of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources has become available at the disposal of the common man. The latter commonly called Cloud Computing (or just Cloud) is democratizing computing by making large computing power accessible to people and corporations around the world easily and economically.

However, taking full advantage of this computing landscape, especially for the data intensive domains, has been hampered by many factors, the primary one being the complexity in developing applications for the variety of available platforms.

This thesis …

Formation Of Graphene Sheets Through Laser Exfoliation Of Highly Ordered Pyrolytic Graphite, Min Qian, Yun-Shen Zhou, Yang Gao, Jong Bok Park, Tao Feng, Su Mei Huang, Zhuo Sun, Lan Jiang, Yongfeng Lu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Freestanding two-dimensional (2D) few-layer graphene was formed through laser exfoliation of highly ordered pyrolytic graphite, using a pulsed neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Nd:YAG) laser. Graphene sheets of several nanometers in thickness and micrometers in size were obtained. The laser exfoliation process was investigated at different laser fluences and distances between target and substrate. Three different phases, amorphous carbon, few-layer graphene sheets, and thin graphite films, were obtained as the laser fluence increased. This study reveals an existing route of forming freestanding 2D nanostructures through laser exfoliation.

Terahertz Optical-Hall Effect Characterization Of Two-Dimensional Electron Gas Properties In Algan/Gan High Electron Mobility Transistor Structures, S. Schöche, Junxia Shi, A. Boosalis, P. Kühne, C. M. Herzinger, John A. Woollam, W. J. Schaff, L. F. Eastman, M. Schubert, Tino Hofmann

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The free-charge carrier mobility, sheet density, and effective mass of a two-dimensional electron gas are exemplarily determined in the spectral range from 640 GHz to 1 THz in a AlGaN/GaN heterostructure using the optical-Hall effect at room temperature. Complementary midinfrared spectroscopic ellipsometry measurements are performed for analysis of heterostructure constituents layer thickness, phonon mode, and free-charge carrier parameters. The electron effective mass is determined to be (0.22 ± 0.04)m₀. The high-frequency sheet density and carrier mobility parameters are in good agreement with results from dc electrical Hall effect measurements, indicative for frequency-independent carrier scattering mechanisms of the …

Reprogrammed Transcriptome In Rhesus-Bovine Interspecies Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer Embryos, Kai Wang, Hasan H. Otu, Ying Chen, Young Lee, Keith Latham, Jose B. Cibelli

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Background: Global activation of the embryonic genome (EGA), one of the most critical steps in early mammalian embryo development, is recognized as the time when interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer (iSCNT) embryos fail to thrive.

Methodology/Principal Findings: In this study, we analyzed the EGA-related transcriptome of rhesus-bovine iSCNT 8- to 16- cell embryos and dissected the reprogramming process in terms of embryonic gene activation, somatic gene silencing, and maternal RNA degradation. Compared with fibroblast donor cells, two thousand and seven genes were activated in iSCNT embryos, one quarter of them reaching expression levels comparable to those found in in vitro …

Power Controlled Multirate Multimedia Transmission In Self-Encoded Spread Spectrum Over Dynamic Fading Channels, Liang Chi, Poomathi Duraisamy, Won Mee Jang, Lim Nguyen

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

In this paper, we propose to apply power control to self-encoded spread spectrum (SESS) in multirate and multimedia applications. The transmitter employs power control to to combat dynamic channel fading and the receiver employs decorrelation to reduce interference from multiple applications. We show that iterative detection can significantly improve the system performance. The proposed approach also improves the power efficiency which is essential in battery-driven communications such as mobile cellular systems.

Self-Encoded Spread Spectrum For Multirate Multimedia Communication In Multipath Channel, Liang Chi, Won Mee Jang, Lim Nguyen

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

In this paper, we propose the self-encoded spread spectrum (SESS) with multirate multimedia communication in multipath channel. In multirate multimedia SESS system, each application has their own transmission bit rate. The signal is transmitted through multipath channels each with different channel gain and time delay. We view the main path as the signal resource and other paths as interference. At the receiver side, decorrelation scheme is employed for the main path combined signal not only to reduce the crosstalk between different applications, but also to provide a better estimation for the despreading sequence in the main path. Interference cancellation(IC) in …

Low-Complexity Image Coder/Decoder With An Approaching-Entropy Quad-Tree Search Code For Embedded Computing Platforms, Tao Ma, Pradhumna Shrestha, Michael Hempel, Dongming Peng, Hamid Sharif

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

In this paper, we propose a fast, simple and efficient image codec applicable for embedded processing systems. Among the existing image coding methods, wavelet quad-tree is a foundation leading to an efficient structure to encode images. By searching significant coefficients along quad-trees, an embedded efficient code can be obtained. In this work, we exploit hierarchical relations of the quad-tree structure in terms of searching entropy and present a quad-tree searching model that is very close to the searching entropy. By applying this model, our codec surpasses SPIHT [1] by 0.2-0.4 db over wide code rates, and its performance is comparable …

Impact Of Interference On Secrecy Capacity In A Cognitive Radio Network, Zhihui Shu, Yaoqing Lamar Yang, Yi Qian, Rose Qingyang Hu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

In this paper, we investigate secrecy capacity of a cognitive radio network based on stochastic geometry distributions. We consider the Poisson process of both the secondary users and the eavesdroppers, and analyze how the stochastic interference from the secondary users can influence the secrecy capacity of the primary users. First, we describe a network model with primary users, secondary users and eavesdroppers in a cognitive radio communication network environment, and derive the expression of secrecy capacity in an additive white Gaussian noise channel. Then, we study the outage probability of secrecy capacity of a primary node from a secure communication …

A Secure Data Aggregation And Dispatch Scheme For Home Area Networks In Smart Grid, Yun Ye, Yi Qian, Hamid Sharif

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

Cyber security for smart grid communication systems is one of the most critical requirements need to be assured before smart grid can be operationally ready for the market. Privacy is one of a very important security services. The customer information privacy in smart grid need to be protected. Smart grid data privacy encompasses confidentiality and anonymity of the information extracted from smart devices and metering transmission in a smart grid communication system. In this paper, we consider a home area network as a basic reading data aggregation and dispatch unit in smart grid systems, and we propose a secure in-network …

A Secure And Reliable In-Network Collaborative Communication Scheme For Advanced Metering Infrastructure In Smart Grid, Yun Ye, Yi Qian, Hamid Sharif

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

We consider various security vulnerabilities of deploying Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in smart grid, and explore the issues related to confidentiality for customer privacy and customer behavior as well as message authentication for meter reading and control messages. There are only a very few research work on AMI authentications, and no work exists on confidentiality for user privacy and user behavior, from the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we propose an in-network collaborative scheme to provide secure and reliable AMI communications in smart grid, with smart meters interconnected through a multihop wireless network. In this approach, an AMI …

A Cross-Layer Parallel Handover Optimization Scheme For Wimax Networks, Ting Zhou, Hamid Sharif, Michael Hempel, Puttipong Mahasukhon, Tao Ma, Pradhumna Shrestha

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

The handover performance plays a crucial role in guaranteeing the quality of real-time applications in WiMAX networks. In general, a handover process can be divided into four stages: i) cell reselection, ii) handover preparation, iii) link layer handover, and iv) IP layer handover. A cross-layer parallel handover optimization (CPHO) scheme is proposed in this paper to reduce the handover signaling overhead and latency in each stage. The key idea of our proposed scheme is that uses the knowledge achieved from the backhaul inter-BS communications to reduce the HO control message load in wireless links and overlaps the executions of the …

A Novel Channel Probing/Scanning Scheme For Secure Fast Handoff In Ieee 802.11-Based Wireless Networks, Ye Yan, Yi Qian, Rose Qingyang Hu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

With the proliferation of wireless networks for practical deployments in recent years, secure fast handoff has become significantly important to provide secured access while reduce the latency caused by handoff procedure. Channel probing/scanning delay has been a major contribution to the overall latency of handoff in IEEE 802.11 based wireless networks. In this paper, we present a novel secure fast handoff scheme that adopts network-assisted radio statement (NACS) to eliminate lengthy probing/scanning delay by taking advantage of the knowledge of network topology of neighboring nodes in the network. We apply an opportunistic mechanism to retrieve the channel condition from neighboring …

Mobile Wimax Throughput And Delay Measurements In Railroad Environment, Puttipong Mahasukhon, Hamid Sharif, Michael Hempel, Tao Ma, Pradhumna Shrestha

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

The railroad industry in North America is heavily involved in improving the broadband wireless connectivity of their railroad operations. We propose our approach of establishing a Mobile WiMAX test bed as a part of our collaborations with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for investigating the performance of current and upcoming broadband wireless technologies in a railroad environment. The focus is on studying the impact of mobility on the wireless system throughput for moving trains at high velocities. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive measurement that will assist others in understanding Mobile WiMAX performance and guiding future network deployment. In …

Battery-Aware Multimedia Coding Optimization By Dynamic Frequency Scaling, Jianxin Sun, Xueyi Wang, Song Ci

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

Nowadays, multimedia application and video streaming have gained a great popularity because of the boasting development on mobile hardware, and battery driven devices have emerged with a tremendous speed. Due to the important issue of battery efficiency on mobile devices, many optimization algorithms have being proposed toward various of battery powered platforms and scenarios. Most of the provided solutions choose to aim at the minimization of energy usage under a given task scheduling by adjusting parameters reside in the processes of different schemes. However, the battery discharging characteristics and its instant output pattern are still ignored if the optimization is …

Impact Of Channel Estimation Errors On Effectiveness Of Eigenvector-Based Jamming For Physical Layer Security In Wireless Networks, James M. Taylor, Michael Hempel, Hamid Sharif, Shichuan Ma, Yaoqing Lamar Yang

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

In this paper, we present our study of an Eigenvector-based artificial noise-based jamming technique developed to provide increased wireless physical layer security in transmit-receive diversity systems and analyze the impact of channel estimation errors on system performance. Our simulation results showed that with knowledge of perfect channel state information, the technique provided secrecy capacity of approximately 7 bits/s/Hz for a normalized transmit power of 25 dB for a variety of transmit, receive, and eavesdropper configurations. We also describe a novel method to simulate generalized channel state information estimation errors. While other publications neglect the impact of these estimation errors, our …

Prof. Dr. Marek E. Bialkowski (1951 – 2011), Tadeusz Wysocki, Salman Durrani, Rodney A. Kennedy

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

It is our sad duty to report the untimely death of Prof. Dr. Marek E. Bialkowski, who passed away on Thursday, October 27, 2011 after a short unexpected illness caused by pneumonia. He was a remarkable researcher and a mentor and friend to many us and he will be greatly missed.

Marek was born in Sochaczew, Poland, in 1951. He received the M.Eng.Sc. degree in applied mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering, both from the Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland, in 1974 and 1979, respectively. He received the Doctor of Engineering (higher doctorate) degree in computer science …

Message From The Chair Of Technical Program Committee, Tadeusz Wysocki

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

On behalf of all the members of the Organizing Committee, I would like to welcome you to the 5th International Conference on Signal Processing and Telecommunication Systems, ICSPCS’2011. The ICSPCS conferences evolved from the series of successful symposia and workshops, i.e. International Symposia on DSP and Communication Systems (DSPCS), and Workshops on the Internet, Telecommunications and Signal Processing (WITSP). As in the past, the Organizing Committee has succeeded this year in achieving an official technical co-sponsorship of the IEEE Communications Society for conference. As a result the ICSPCS’2011 conference has been listed in the IEEE database of the conferences and …

Priority Preemption For Real-Time Application Qos Guarantees In Cooperative Vehicular Networks, Ting Zhou, Hamid Sharif, Michael Hempel, Puttipong Mahasukhon, Tao Ma, Pradhumna Shrestha

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

Inter-vehicle and roadside-to-vehicle communications can contribute to a safer and more efficient driving experience by providing time-sensitive and location-aware information. However, its performance suffers from vehicle mobility, intermittent user connectivity, and wireless channel unreliability. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer optimization approach based on our Adaptive Distributed Cooperative Medium Access Control (ADC-MAC) protocol to guarantee the quality-of-service (QoS) of real-time applications. Markov chain based theoretical analysis show that our proposed priority preemption approach can improve the quality of a real-time application by guaranteeing its bandwidth and reducing its transmission latency.

Single View Modeling And View Synthesis, Miao Liao

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis develops new algorithms to produce 3D content from a single camera. Today, amateurs can use hand-held camcorders to capture and display the 3D world in 2D, using mature technologies. However, there is always a strong desire to record and re-explore the 3D world in 3D. To achieve this goal, current approaches usually make use of a camera array, which suffers from tedious setup and calibration processes, as well as lack of portability, limiting its application to lab experiments.

In this thesis, I try to produce the 3D contents using a single camera, making it as simple as shooting …

Investigations Into Library Web Scale Discovery Services, Jason Vaughan

Library Faculty Research

Web scale discovery services for libraries provide deep discovery to a library’s local and licensed content, and represent an evolution, perhaps a revolution, for end user information discovery as pertains to library collections. This article frames the topic of Web scale discovery, and begins by illuminating Web scale discovery from an academic library’s perspective – that is, the internal perspective seeking widespread staff participation in the discovery conversation. This included the creation of a Discovery Task Force, a group which educated library staff, conducted internal staff surveys, and gathered observations from early adopters. The article next addresses the substantial research …

Development Of Visualization Facility At The Gis And Remote Sensing Core Lab, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas, Haroon Stephen, William J. Smith, Zhongwei Liu

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Presentations

Visualization using advanced computational and graphic equipment has become a standard way of present day research. Availability of low cost and fast processing units, high resolution displays with graphic processing units, and specialized software has brought complex visualization capabilities to an office desktop. Nevertheless, when dealing with large datasets such as, global climate, geospatial, and social data the office desktop falls short and calls for a centralized visualization facility with high end computing and graphics equipment.

Visualization Facility at GIS and Remote Sensing Core Lab would be a useful and important addition to the UNLV IT infrastructure. It would provide …

Towards Calibration Of Optical Flow Of Crowd Videos Using Observed Trajectories, Iman K. Elbadramany

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The need exists for finding a quantitative method for validating crowd simulations. One approach is to use optical flow of videos of real crowds to obtain velocities that can be used for comparison to simulations. Optical flow, in turn, needs to be calibrated to be useful. It is essential to show that optical flow velocities obtained from crowd videos can be mapped into the spatially averaged velocities of the observed trajectories of crowd members, and to quantify the extent of the correlation of the results. This research investigates methods to uncover the best conditions for a good correlation between optical …

Cross-Layer Design For Mobile Ad-Hoc Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Communication Networks, Abdel Ilah Nour Alshbatat

Dissertations

Mobile Ad-Hoc network (MANET) is a popular type of wireless network that is formed by a collection of mobile nodes. Each node in such a network has the capability to communicate with its neighbors and non-neighbors through a wireless medium without using any existing network infrastructure. Due to the lack of infrastructure, all nodes in Ad-Hoc network are designed to act as an end system and a router for other nodes.

Traditionally, the dominant design methodology for network protocols was based on the open systems interconnection (OSI) reference model. This methodology divided the stack into seven layers in which each …

Leach-Sm: A Protocol For Extending Wireless Sensor Network Lifetime By Management Of Spare Nodes, Bilal Abu Bakr

Dissertations

Operational lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN) depends on its energy resources. Significant improvement of WSN lifetime can be achieved by adding spare sensor nodes to WSN. Spares are ready to be switched on when any primary (a node that is not a spare) exhausts its energy. A spare replacing a primary becomes a primary itself.

The LEACH-SM protocol (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy with Spare Management) proposed by us is a modification of the prominent LEACH protocol. LEACH extends WSN lifetime via rotation of cluster heads but allows for inefficiencies due to redundant sensing target coverage. There are two …

Image Editing Style-Based Authorship Authentication, Chengcui Zhang, Wei-Bang Chen, Liping Zhou

College of Arts & Sciences Professional Work

This paper aims to provide an authorship identification framework that can provide added clues to online auction user profiling systems, the primary purpose of which is early detection and prevention of fraudulent behaviors such as account taken-over. This framework authenticates the authorship of product listing pictures in terms of their image editing styles, and it achieves this goal in three steps: (1) editing style distinction: using a Hough transform based edge clustering algorithm to differentiate between image editing styles created by the same seller, (2) editing style summarization: analyzing and encoding each distinctive image editing style into a template based …