2,625 research outputs found
Simple yet stable bearing-only navigation
This article describes a simple monocular navigation system for a mobile robot based on the map-and-replay technique. The presented method is robust and easy to implement and does not require sensor calibration or structured environment, and its computational complexity is independent of the environment size. The method can navigate a robot while sensing only one landmark at a time, making it more robust than other monocular approaches. The aforementioned properties of the method allow even low-cost robots to effectively act in large outdoor and indoor environments with natural landmarks only. The basic idea is to utilize a monocular vision to correct only the robot's heading, leaving distance measurements to the odometry. The heading correction itself can suppress the odometric error and prevent the overall position error from diverging. The influence of a map-based heading estimation and odometric errors on the overall position uncertainty is examined. A claim is stated that for closed polygonal trajectories, the position error of this type of navigation does not diverge. The claim is defended mathematically and experimentally. The method has been experimentally tested in a set of indoor and outdoor experiments, during which the average position errors have been lower than 0.3 m for paths more than 1 km long
Computing Petaflops over Terabytes of Data: The Case of Genome-Wide Association Studies
In many scientific and engineering applications, one has to solve not one but
a sequence of instances of the same problem. Often times, the problems in the
sequence are linked in a way that allows intermediate results to be reused. A
characteristic example for this class of applications is given by the
Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS), a widely spread tool in computational
biology. GWAS entails the solution of up to trillions () of correlated
generalized least-squares problems, posing a daunting challenge: the
performance of petaflops ( floating-point operations) over terabytes
of data.
In this paper, we design an algorithm for performing GWAS on multi-core
architectures. This is accomplished in three steps. First, we show how to
exploit the relation among successive problems, thus reducing the overall
computational complexity. Then, through an analysis of the required data
transfers, we identify how to eliminate any overhead due to input/output
operations. Finally, we study how to decompose computation into tasks to be
distributed among the available cores, to attain high performance and
scalability. With our algorithm, a GWAS that currently requires the use of a
supercomputer may now be performed in matter of hours on a single multi-core
node.
The discussion centers around the methodology to develop the algorithm rather
than the specific application. We believe the paper contributes valuable
guidelines of general applicability for computational scientists on how to
develop and optimize numerical algorithms
A distributed-memory package for dense Hierarchically Semi-Separable matrix computations using randomization
We present a distributed-memory library for computations with dense
structured matrices. A matrix is considered structured if its off-diagonal
blocks can be approximated by a rank-deficient matrix with low numerical rank.
Here, we use Hierarchically Semi-Separable representations (HSS). Such matrices
appear in many applications, e.g., finite element methods, boundary element
methods, etc. Exploiting this structure allows for fast solution of linear
systems and/or fast computation of matrix-vector products, which are the two
main building blocks of matrix computations. The compression algorithm that we
use, that computes the HSS form of an input dense matrix, relies on randomized
sampling with a novel adaptive sampling mechanism. We discuss the
parallelization of this algorithm and also present the parallelization of
structured matrix-vector product, structured factorization and solution
routines. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated on large problems from
different academic and industrial applications, on up to 8,000 cores.
This work is part of a more global effort, the STRUMPACK (STRUctured Matrices
PACKage) software package for computations with sparse and dense structured
matrices. Hence, although useful on their own right, the routines also
represent a step in the direction of a distributed-memory sparse solver
Joint Regression and Ranking for Image Enhancement
Research on automated image enhancement has gained momentum in recent years,
partially due to the need for easy-to-use tools for enhancing pictures captured
by ubiquitous cameras on mobile devices. Many of the existing leading methods
employ machine-learning-based techniques, by which some enhancement parameters
for a given image are found by relating the image to the training images with
known enhancement parameters. While knowing the structure of the parameter
space can facilitate search for the optimal solution, none of the existing
methods has explicitly modeled and learned that structure. This paper presents
an end-to-end, novel joint regression and ranking approach to model the
interaction between desired enhancement parameters and images to be processed,
employing a Gaussian process (GP). GP allows searching for ideal parameters
using only the image features. The model naturally leads to a ranking technique
for comparing images in the induced feature space. Comparative evaluation using
the ground-truth based on the MIT-Adobe FiveK dataset plus subjective tests on
an additional data-set were used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the
proposed approach.Comment: WACV 201
Artificial Noise-Aided Biobjective Transmitter Optimization for Service Integration in Multi-User MIMO Gaussian Broadcast Channel
This paper considers an artificial noise (AN)-aided transmit design for
multi-user MIMO systems with integrated services. Specifically, two sorts of
service messages are combined and served simultaneously: one multicast message
intended for all receivers and one confidential message intended for only one
receiver and required to be perfectly secure from other unauthorized receivers.
Our interest lies in the joint design of input covariances of the multicast
message, confidential message and artificial noise (AN), such that the
achievable secrecy rate and multicast rate are simultaneously maximized. This
problem is identified as a secrecy rate region maximization (SRRM) problem in
the context of physical-layer service integration. Since this bi-objective
optimization problem is inherently complex to solve, we put forward two
different scalarization methods to convert it into a scalar optimization
problem. First, we propose to prefix the multicast rate as a constant, and
accordingly, the primal biobjective problem is converted into a secrecy rate
maximization (SRM) problem with quality of multicast service (QoMS) constraint.
By varying the constant, we can obtain different Pareto optimal points. The
resulting SRM problem can be iteratively solved via a provably convergent
difference-of-concave (DC) algorithm. In the second method, we aim to maximize
the weighted sum of the secrecy rate and the multicast rate. Through varying
the weighted vector, one can also obtain different Pareto optimal points. We
show that this weighted sum rate maximization (WSRM) problem can be recast into
a primal decomposable form, which is amenable to alternating optimization (AO).
Then we compare these two scalarization methods in terms of their overall
performance and computational complexity via theoretical analysis as well as
numerical simulation, based on which new insights can be drawn.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure
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