Efficient reconfigurable architectures for 3D medical image compression

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Recently, the more widespread use of three-dimensional (3-D) imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound (US) have generated a massive amount of volumetric data. These have provided an impetus to the development of other applications, in particular telemedicine and teleradiology. In these fields, medical image compression is important since both efficient storage and transmission of data through high-bandwidth digital communication lines are of crucial importance. Despite their advantages, most 3-D medical imaging algorithms are computationally intensive with matrix transformation as the most fundamental operation involved in the transform-based methods. Therefore, there is a real need for high-performance systems, whilst keeping architectures exible to allow for quick upgradeability with real-time applications. Moreover, in order to obtain efficient solutions for large medical volumes data, an efficient implementation of these operations is of significant importance. Reconfigurable hardware, in the form of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has been proposed as viable system building block in the construction of high-performance systems at an economical price. Consequently, FPGAs seem an ideal candidate to harness and exploit their inherent advantages such as massive parallelism capabilities, multimillion gate counts, and special low-power packages. The key achievements of the work presented in this thesis are summarised as follows. Two architectures for 3-D Haar wavelet transform (HWT) have been proposed based on transpose-based computation and partial reconfiguration suitable for 3-D medical imaging applications. These applications require continuous hardware servicing, and as a result dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) has been introduced. Comparative study for both non-partial and partial reconfiguration implementation has shown that DPR offers many advantages and leads to a compelling solution for implementing computationally intensive applications such as 3-D medical image compression. Using DPR, several large systems are mapped to small hardware resources, and the area, power consumption as well as maximum frequency are optimised and improved. Moreover, an FPGA-based architecture of the finite Radon transform (FRAT)with three design strategies has been proposed: direct implementation of pseudo-code with a sequential or pipelined description, and block random access memory (BRAM)- based method. An analysis with various medical imaging modalities has been carried out. Results obtained for image de-noising implementation using FRAT exhibits promising results in reducing Gaussian white noise in medical images. In terms of hardware implementation, promising trade-offs on maximum frequency, throughput and area are also achieved. Furthermore, a novel hardware implementation of 3-D medical image compression system with context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) has been proposed. An evaluation of the 3-D integer transform (IT) and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with lifting scheme (LS) for transform blocks reveal that 3-D IT demonstrates better computational complexity than the 3-D DWT, whilst the 3-D DWT with LS exhibits a lossless compression that is significantly useful for medical image compression. Additionally, an architecture of CAVLC that is capable of compressing high-definition (HD) images in real-time without any buffer between the quantiser and the entropy coder is proposed. Through a judicious parallelisation, promising results have been obtained with limited resources. In summary, this research is tackling the issues of massive 3-D medical volumes data that requires compression as well as hardware implementation to accelerate the slowest operations in the system. Results obtained also reveal a significant achievement in terms of the architecture efficiency and applications performance.Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (MOHE), Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) and the British Counci

Literature Study on Data Protection for Cloud Storage

Many data security and privacy incidents are observed in today Cloud services. On the one hand, Cloud service providers deal with    a large number of external attacks. In 2018, a total of 1.5 million Sing Health patients’ non-medical personal data were stolen from the health system in Singapore. On the other hand, Cloud service providers cannot be entirely trusted either. Personal data may be exploited in a malicious way such as in the Face book and Cambridge Analytical data scandal which affected 87 million users in 2018. Thus, it becomes increasingly important for end users to efficiently protect their data (texts, images, or videos) independently from Cloud service providers. In this paper, we aim at presenting a novel data protection scheme by combining fragmentation, encryption, and dispersion with high performance and enhanced level of protection as Literature study

PC-grade parallel processing and hardware acceleration for large-scale data analysis

Arguably, modern graphics processing units (GPU) are the first commodity, and desktop parallel processor. Although GPU programming was originated from the interactive rendering in graphical applications such as computer games, researchers in the field of general purpose computation on GPU (GPGPU) are showing that the power, ubiquity and low cost of GPUs makes them an ideal alternative platform for high-performance computing. This has resulted in the extensive exploration in using the GPU to accelerate general-purpose computations in many engineering and mathematical domains outside of graphics. However, limited to the development complexity caused by the graphics-oriented concepts and development tools for GPU-programming, GPGPU has mainly been discussed in the academic domain so far and has not yet fully fulfilled its promises in the real world. This thesis aims at exploiting GPGPU in the practical engineering domain and presented a novel contribution to GPGPU-driven linear time invariant (LTI) systems that are employed by the signal processing techniques in stylus-based or optical-based surface metrology and data processing. The core contributions that have been achieved in this project can be summarized as follow. Firstly, a thorough survey of the state-of-the-art of GPGPU applications and their development approaches has been carried out in this thesis. In addition, the category of parallel architecture pattern that the GPGPU belongs to has been specified, which formed the foundation of the GPGPU programming framework design in the thesis. Following this specification, a GPGPU programming framework is deduced as a general guideline to the various GPGPU programming models that are applied to a large diversity of algorithms in scientific computing and engineering applications. Considering the evolution of GPU’s hardware architecture, the proposed frameworks cover through the transition of graphics-originated concepts for GPGPU programming based on legacy GPUs and the abstraction of stream processing pattern represented by the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) in which GPU is considered as not only a graphics device but a streaming coprocessor of CPU. Secondly, the proposed GPGPU programming framework are applied to the practical engineering applications, namely, the surface metrological data processing and image processing, to generate the programming models that aim to carry out parallel computing for the corresponding algorithms. The acceleration performance of these models are evaluated in terms of the speed-up factor and the data accuracy, which enabled the generation of quantifiable benchmarks for evaluating consumer-grade parallel processors. It shows that the GPGPU applications outperform the CPU solutions by up to 20 times without significant loss of data accuracy and any noticeable increase in source code complexity, which further validates the effectiveness of the proposed GPGPU general programming framework. Thirdly, this thesis devised methods for carrying out result visualization directly on GPU by storing processed data in local GPU memory through making use of GPU’s rendering device features to achieve realtime interactions. The algorithms employed in this thesis included various filtering techniques, discrete wavelet transform, and the fast Fourier Transform which cover the common operations implemented in most LTI systems in spatial and frequency domains. Considering the employed GPUs’ hardware designs, especially the structure of the rendering pipelines, and the characteristics of the algorithms, the series of proposed GPGPU programming models have proven its feasibility, practicality, and robustness in real engineering applications. The developed GPGPU programming framework as well as the programming models are anticipated to be adaptable for future consumer-level computing devices and other computational demanding applications. In addition, it is envisaged that the devised principles and methods in the framework design are likely to have significant benefits outside the sphere of surface metrology.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Exploiting the GPU power for intensive geometric and imaging data computation.

Wang Jianqing.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-86).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Overview --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- Thesis --- p.3Chapter 1.3 --- Contributions --- p.4Chapter 1.4 --- Organization --- p.6Chapter 2 --- Programmable Graphics Hardware --- p.8Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.8Chapter 2.2 --- Why Use GPU? --- p.9Chapter 2.3 --- Programmable Graphics Hardware Architecture --- p.11Chapter 2.4 --- Previous Work on GPU Computation --- p.15Chapter 3 --- Multilingual Virtual Performer --- p.17Chapter 3.1 --- Overview --- p.17Chapter 3.2 --- Previous Work --- p.18Chapter 3.3 --- System Overview --- p.20Chapter 3.4 --- Facial Animation --- p.22Chapter 3.4.1 --- Facial Animation using Face Space --- p.23Chapter 3.4.2 --- Face Set Selection for Lip Synchronization --- p.27Chapter 3.4.3 --- The Blending Weight Function Generation and Coartic- ulation --- p.33Chapter 3.4.4 --- Expression Overlay --- p.38Chapter 3.4.5 --- GPU Algorithm --- p.39Chapter 3.5 --- Character Animation --- p.44Chapter 3.5.1 --- Skeletal Animation Primer --- p.44Chapter 3.5.2 --- Mathematics of Kinematics --- p.46Chapter 3.5.3 --- Animating with Motion Capture Data --- p.48Chapter 3.5.4 --- Skeletal Subspace Deformation --- p.49Chapter 3.5.5 --- GPU Algorithm --- p.50Chapter 3.6 --- Integration of Skeletal and Facial Animation --- p.52Chapter 3.7 --- Result --- p.53Chapter 3.7.1 --- Summary --- p.58Chapter 4 --- Discrete Wavelet Transform On GPU --- p.60Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.60Chapter 4.1.1 --- Previous Works --- p.61Chapter 4.1.2 --- Our Solution --- p.61Chapter 4.2 --- Multiresolution Analysis with Wavelets --- p.62Chapter 4.3 --- Fragment Processor for Pixel Processing --- p.64Chapter 4.4 --- DWT Pipeline --- p.65Chapter 4.4.1 --- Convolution Versus Lifting --- p.65Chapter 4.4.2 --- DWT Pipeline --- p.67Chapter 4.5 --- Forward DWT --- p.68Chapter 4.6 --- Inverse DWT --- p.71Chapter 4.7 --- Results and Applications --- p.73Chapter 4.7.1 --- Geometric Deformation in Wavelet Domain --- p.73Chapter 4.7.2 --- Stylish Image Processing and Texture-illuminance De- coupling --- p.73Chapter 4.7.3 --- Hardware-Accelerated JPEG2000 Encoding --- p.75Chapter 4.8 --- Web Information --- p.78Chapter 5 --- Conclusion --- p.79Bibliography --- p.8

Mengenal pasti tahap pengetahuan pelajar tahun akhir Ijazah Sarjana Muda Kejuruteraan di KUiTTHO dalam bidang keusahawanan dari aspek pengurusan modal

Malaysia ialah sebuah negara membangun di dunia. Dalam proses pembangunan ini, hasrat negara untuk melahirkan bakal usahawan beijaya tidak boleh dipandang ringan. Oleh itu, pengetahuan dalam bidang keusahawanan perlu diberi perhatian dengan sewajarnya; antara aspek utama dalam keusahawanan ialah modal. Pengurusan modal yang tidak cekap menjadi punca utama kegagalan usahawan. Menyedari hakikat ini, kajian berkaitan Pengurusan Modal dijalankan ke atas 100 orang pelajar Tahun Akhir Kejuruteraan di KUiTTHO. Sampel ini dipilih kerana pelajar-pelajar ini akan menempuhi alam pekeijaan di mana mereka boleh memilih keusahawanan sebagai satu keijaya. Walau pun mereka bukanlah pelajar dari jurusan perniagaan, namun mereka mempunyai kemahiran dalam mereka cipta produk yang boleh dikomersialkan. Hasil dapatan kajian membuktikan bahawa pelajar-pelajar ini berminat dalam bidang keusahawanan namun masih kurang pengetahuan tentang pengurusan modal terutamanya dalam menentukan modal permulaan, pengurusan modal keija dan caracara menentukan pembiayaan kewangan menggunakan kaedah jualan harian. Oleh itu, satu garis panduan Pengurusan Modal dibina untuk memberi pendedahan kepada mereka

An IoT Endpoint System-on-Chip for Secure and Energy-Efficient Near-Sensor Analytics

Near-sensor data analytics is a promising direction for IoT endpoints, as it minimizes energy spent on communication and reduces network load - but it also poses security concerns, as valuable data is stored or sent over the network at various stages of the analytics pipeline. Using encryption to protect sensitive data at the boundary of the on-chip analytics engine is a way to address data security issues. To cope with the combined workload of analytics and encryption in a tight power envelope, we propose Fulmine, a System-on-Chip based on a tightly-coupled multi-core cluster augmented with specialized blocks for compute-intensive data processing and encryption functions, supporting software programmability for regular computing tasks. The Fulmine SoC, fabricated in 65nm technology, consumes less than 20mW on average at 0.8V achieving an efficiency of up to 70pJ/B in encryption, 50pJ/px in convolution, or up to 25MIPS/mW in software. As a strong argument for real-life flexible application of our platform, we show experimental results for three secure analytics use cases: secure autonomous aerial surveillance with a state-of-the-art deep CNN consuming 3.16pJ per equivalent RISC op; local CNN-based face detection with secured remote recognition in 5.74pJ/op; and seizure detection with encrypted data collection from EEG within 12.7pJ/op.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication to the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems - I: Regular Paper

Pedestrian Detection Algorithms using Shearlets

In this thesis, we investigate the applicability of the shearlet transform for the task of pedestrian detection. Due to the usage of in several emerging technologies, such as automated or autonomous vehicles, pedestrian detection has evolved into a key topic of research in the last decade. In this time period, a wealth of different algorithms has been developed. According to the current results on the Caltech Pedestrian Detection Benchmark the algorithms can be divided into two categories. First, application of hand-crafted image features and of a classifier trained on these features. Second, methods using Convolutional Neural Networks in which features are learned during the training phase. It is studied how both of these types of procedures can be further improved by the incorporation of shearlets, a framework for image analysis which has a comprehensive theoretical basis

High-Performance Computational and Information Technologies for Numerical Models and Data Processing

This chapter discusses high-performance computational and information technologies for numerical models and data processing. In the first part of the chapter, the numerical model of the oil displacement problem was considered by injection of chemical reagents to increase oil recovery of reservoir. Moreover the fragmented algorithm was developed for solving this problem and the algorithm for high-performance visualization of calculated data. Analysis and comparison of parallel algorithms based on the fragmented approach and using MPI technologies are also presented. The algorithm for solving given problem on mobile platforms and analysis of computational results is given too. In the second part of the chapter, the problem of unstructured and semi-structured data processing was considered. It was decided to address the task of n-gram extraction which requires a lot of computing with large amount of textual data. In order to deal with such complexity, there was a need to adopt and implement parallelization patterns. The second part of the chapter also describes parallel implementation of the document clustering algorithm that used a heuristic genetic algorithm. Finally, a novel UPC implementation of MapReduce framework for semi-structured data processing was introduced which allows to express data parallel applications using simple sequential code