1,288 research outputs found
Energy-efficient acceleration of MPEG-4 compression tools
We propose novel hardware accelerator architectures for the most computationally demanding algorithms of the MPEG-4 video compression standard-motion estimation, binary motion estimation (for shape coding), and the forward/inverse discrete cosine transforms (incorporating shape adaptive modes). These accelerators have been designed using general low-energy design philosophies at the algorithmic/architectural abstraction levels. The themes of these philosophies are avoiding waste and trading area/performance for power and energy gains. Each core has been synthesised targeting TSMC 0.09
μm TCBN90LP technology, and the experimental results presented in this paper show that the proposed cores improve upon the prior art
Noisy Gradient Descent Bit-Flip Decoding for LDPC Codes
A modified Gradient Descent Bit Flipping (GDBF) algorithm is proposed for
decoding Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes on the binary-input additive
white Gaussian noise channel. The new algorithm, called Noisy GDBF (NGDBF),
introduces a random perturbation into each symbol metric at each iteration. The
noise perturbation allows the algorithm to escape from undesirable local
maxima, resulting in improved performance. A combination of heuristic
improvements to the algorithm are proposed and evaluated. When the proposed
heuristics are applied, NGDBF performs better than any previously reported GDBF
variant, and comes within 0.5 dB of the belief propagation algorithm for
several tested codes. Unlike other previous GDBF algorithms that provide an
escape from local maxima, the proposed algorithm uses only local, fully
parallelizable operations and does not require computing a global objective
function or a sort over symbol metrics, making it highly efficient in
comparison. The proposed NGDBF algorithm requires channel state information
which must be obtained from a signal to noise ratio (SNR) estimator.
Architectural details are presented for implementing the NGDBF algorithm.
Complexity analysis and optimizations are also discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 22 figures, 2 table
Compressed Genotyping
Significant volumes of knowledge have been accumulated in recent years
linking subtle genetic variations to a wide variety of medical disorders from
Cystic Fibrosis to mental retardation. Nevertheless, there are still great
challenges in applying this knowledge routinely in the clinic, largely due to
the relatively tedious and expensive process of DNA sequencing. Since the
genetic polymorphisms that underlie these disorders are relatively rare in the
human population, the presence or absence of a disease-linked polymorphism can
be thought of as a sparse signal. Using methods and ideas from compressed
sensing and group testing, we have developed a cost-effective genotyping
protocol. In particular, we have adapted our scheme to a recently developed
class of high throughput DNA sequencing technologies, and assembled a
mathematical framework that has some important distinctions from 'traditional'
compressed sensing ideas in order to address different biological and technical
constraints.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transaction on Information Theory - Special Issue
on Molecular Biology and Neuroscienc
Unsupervised Heart-rate Estimation in Wearables With Liquid States and A Probabilistic Readout
Heart-rate estimation is a fundamental feature of modern wearable devices. In
this paper we propose a machine intelligent approach for heart-rate estimation
from electrocardiogram (ECG) data collected using wearable devices. The novelty
of our approach lies in (1) encoding spatio-temporal properties of ECG signals
directly into spike train and using this to excite recurrently connected
spiking neurons in a Liquid State Machine computation model; (2) a novel
learning algorithm; and (3) an intelligently designed unsupervised readout
based on Fuzzy c-Means clustering of spike responses from a subset of neurons
(Liquid states), selected using particle swarm optimization. Our approach
differs from existing works by learning directly from ECG signals (allowing
personalization), without requiring costly data annotations. Additionally, our
approach can be easily implemented on state-of-the-art spiking-based
neuromorphic systems, offering high accuracy, yet significantly low energy
footprint, leading to an extended battery life of wearable devices. We
validated our approach with CARLsim, a GPU accelerated spiking neural network
simulator modeling Izhikevich spiking neurons with Spike Timing Dependent
Plasticity (STDP) and homeostatic scaling. A range of subjects are considered
from in-house clinical trials and public ECG databases. Results show high
accuracy and low energy footprint in heart-rate estimation across subjects with
and without cardiac irregularities, signifying the strong potential of this
approach to be integrated in future wearable devices.Comment: 51 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables, 95 references. Under submission at
Elsevier Neural Network
Energy efficient hardware acceleration of multimedia processing tools
The world of mobile devices is experiencing an ongoing trend of feature enhancement and generalpurpose multimedia platform convergence. This trend poses many grand challenges, the most pressing being their limited battery life as a consequence of delivering computationally demanding features. The envisaged mobile application features can be considered to be accelerated by a set of underpinning hardware blocks Based on the survey that this thesis presents on modem video compression standards and their associated enabling technologies, it is concluded that tight energy and throughput constraints can still be effectively tackled at algorithmic level in order to design re-usable optimised hardware acceleration cores.
To prove these conclusions, the work m this thesis is focused on two of the basic enabling technologies that support mobile video applications, namely the Shape Adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform (SA-DCT) and its inverse, the SA-IDCT. The hardware architectures presented in this work have been designed with energy efficiency in mind. This goal is achieved by employing high level techniques such as redundant computation elimination, parallelism and low switching computation structures. Both architectures compare favourably against the relevant pnor art in the literature.
The SA-DCT/IDCT technologies are instances of a more general computation - namely, both are Constant Matrix Multiplication (CMM) operations. Thus, this thesis also proposes an algorithm for the efficient hardware design of any general CMM-based enabling technology. The proposed algorithm leverages the effective solution search capability of genetic programming. A bonus feature of the proposed modelling approach is that it is further amenable to hardware acceleration. Another bonus feature is an early exit mechanism that achieves large search space reductions .Results show an improvement on state of the art algorithms with future potential for even greater savings
IMPLEMENTATION OF NOISE CANCELLATION WITH HARDWARE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE
The objective of this project is to implement noise cancellation technique on an FPGA
using Hardware Description Language. The performance of several adaptive algorithms is
compared to determine the desirable algorithm used for adaptive noise cancellation
system. The project will focus on the implementation of adaptive filter with least-meansquares
(LMS) algorithm or normalized least-mean-squares (NLMS) algorithm to cancel
acoustic noises. This noise consists of extraneous or unwanted waveforms that can
interfere with communication. Due to the simplicity and effectiveness of adaptive noise
cancellation technique, it is used to remove the noise component from the desired signal.
The project is divided into four main parts: research, Matlab simulation, ModelSim
simulation and hardware implementation. The project starts with research on several noise
cancellation techniques, and then with Matlab code, Simulink and FDA tool, the adaptive
noise cancellation system is designed with the implementation of the LMS algorithm,
NLMS algorithm and recursive-least-square algorithm to remove the interference noise.
By using the Matlab code and Simulink, the noise that interfered with a sinusoidal signal
and a record of music can be removed. The original signal in turns can be retrieved from
the noise corrupted signal by changing the coefficient of the filter. Since filter is the
important component in adaptive filtering process, the filter is designed first before adding
adaptive algorithm. A Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter is designed and the desired
result of functional simulation and timing simulation is obtained through ModelSim and
Integrated Software Environment (ISE) software and FPGA implementation. Finally the
adaptive algorithm is added to the filter, and implemented in the FPGA. The noise is
greatly reduced in Matlab simulation, functional simulation and timing simulation. Hence
the results of this project show that noise cancellation with adaptive filter is feasible
Concepts for on-board satellite image registration, volume 1
The NASA-NEEDS program goals present a requirement for on-board signal processing to achieve user-compatible, information-adaptive data acquisition. One very specific area of interest is the preprocessing required to register imaging sensor data which have been distorted by anomalies in subsatellite-point position and/or attitude control. The concepts and considerations involved in using state-of-the-art positioning systems such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) in concert with state-of-the-art attitude stabilization and/or determination systems to provide the required registration accuracy are discussed with emphasis on assessing the accuracy to which a given image picture element can be located and identified, determining those algorithms required to augment the registration procedure and evaluating the technology impact on performing these procedures on-board the satellite
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