Anonymous subject identification and privacy information management in video surveillance

The widespread deployment of surveillance cameras has raised serious privacy concerns, and many privacy-enhancing schemes have been recently proposed to automatically redact images of selected individuals in the surveillance video for protection. Of equal importance are the privacy and efficiency of techniques to first, identify those individuals for privacy protection and second, provide access to original surveillance video contents for security analysis. In this paper, we propose an anonymous subject identification and privacy data management system to be used in privacy-aware video surveillance. The anonymous subject identification system uses iris patterns to identify individuals for privacy protection. Anonymity of the iris-matching process is guaranteed through the use of a garbled-circuit (GC)-based iris matching protocol. A novel GC complexity reduction scheme is proposed by simplifying the iris masking process in the protocol. A user-centric privacy information management system is also proposed that allows subjects to anonymously access their privacy information via their iris patterns. The system is composed of two encrypted-domain protocols: The privacy information encryption protocol encrypts the original video records using the iris pattern acquired during the subject identification phase; the privacy information retrieval protocol allows the video records to be anonymously retrieved through a GC-based iris pattern matching process. Experimental results on a public iris biometric database demonstrate the validity of our framework

On the uniform exponential stability of a wide class of linear time-delay systems

AbstractThis paper deals with the global uniform exponential stability independent of delay of time-delay linear and time-invariant systems subject to point and distributed delays for the initial conditions being continuous real functions except possibly on a set of zero measure of bounded discontinuities. It is assumed that the delay-free system as well as an auxiliary one are globally uniformly exponentially stable and globally uniform exponential stability independent of delay, respectively. The auxiliary system is typically a part of the overall dynamics of the delayed system but not necessarily the isolated undelayed dynamics as usually assumed in the literature. Since there is a great freedom in setting such an auxiliary system, the obtained stability conditions are very useful in a wide class of practical applications

Tentative Plan of Pneumatic Silt Scouring on Yellow River

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchiv

Continuation Newton methods with deflation techniques and quasi-genetic evolution for global optimization problems

The global minimum point of an optimization problem is of interest in engineering fields and it is difficult to be solved, especially for a nonconvex large-scale optimization problem. In this article, we consider a new memetic algorithm for this problem. That is to say, we use the continuation Newton method with the deflation technique to find multiple stationary points of the objective function and use those found stationary points as the initial seeds of the evolutionary algorithm, other than the random initial seeds of the known evolutionary algorithms. Meanwhile, in order to retain the usability of the derivative-free method and the fast convergence of the gradient-based method, we use the automatic differentiation technique to compute the gradient and replace the Hessian matrix with its finite difference approximation. According to our numerical experiments, this new algorithm works well for unconstrained optimization problems and finds their global minima efficiently, in comparison to the other representative global optimization methods such as the multi-start methods (the built-in subroutine GlobalSearch.m of MATLAB R2021b, GLODS and VRBBO), the branch-and-bound method (Couenne, a state-of-the-art open-source solver for mixed integer nonlinear programming problems), and the derivative-free algorithms (CMA-ES and MCS).Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2103.0582

The fatigue properties and damage of the corroded steel bars under the constant-amplitude fatigue load

We obtained the corroded steel bars by conducting electrically-accelerated corrosion tests. Then, to investigate the effects of the corrosion ratio and the stress amplitude on the fatigue life, and to further study the damage evolution law under corrosion and fatigue loads, we performed axial fatigue tests on 13 steel bars with various corrosion ratios. The laboratory results show that the fatigue life is logarithmical linear to the stress amplitude, and the increase in corrosion ratio leads to the accelerated decrease in the fatigue life. In addition, the increase in stress amplitude can accelerate the fatigue damage, and further decreases the fatigue life. With the laboratory data, we further established a model to predict the fatigue life of the steel bars with various corrosion ratios. The evolution of the residual strains includes the relatively rapid increase, stable increase and rapid increase stages. Moreover, we developed an evolution equation for the residual strain, and this equation can properly describe the laboratory results. Furthermore, considering the fatigue damage, we proposed a constitutive model to describe the stress-strain curve of the corroded steel bar under static tension. The comparison shows that the calculated stress curves agree well with the laboratory curves

Transcriptome profiling reveals the crucial biological pathways involved in cold response in Moso bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis).

Most bamboo species including Moso bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis) are tropical or subtropical plants that greatly contribute to human well-being. Low temperature is one of the main environmental factors restricting bamboo growth and geographic distribution. Our knowledge of the molecular changes during bamboo adaption to cold stress remains limited. Here, we provided a general overview of the cold-responsive transcriptional profiles in Moso bamboo by systematically analyzing its transcriptomic response under cold stress. Our results showed that low temperature induced strong morphological and biochemical alternations in Moso bamboo. To examine the global gene expression changes in response to cold, 12 libraries (non-treated, cold-treated 0.5, 1 and 24 h at -2 °C) were sequenced using an Illumina sequencing platform. Only a few differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified at early stage, while a large number of DEGs were identified at late stage in this study, suggesting that the majority of cold response genes in bamboo are late-responsive genes. A total of 222 transcription factors from 24 different families were differentially expressed during 24-h cold treatment, and the expressions of several well-known C-repeat/dehydration responsive element-binding factor negative regulators were significantly upregulated in response to cold, indicating the existence of special cold response networks. Our data also revealed that the expression of genes related to cell wall and the biosynthesis of fatty acids were altered in response to cold stress, indicating their potential roles in the acquisition of bamboo cold tolerance. In summary, our studies showed that both plant kingdom-conserved and species-specific cold response pathways exist in Moso bamboo, which lays the foundation for studying the regulatory mechanisms underlying bamboo cold stress response and provides useful gene resources for the construction of cold-tolerant bamboo through genetic engineering in the future