The Beauty of the Commons: Optimal Load Sharing by Base Station Hopping in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the base station (BS) is a critical sensor node whose failure causes severe data losses. Deploying multiple fixed BSs improves the robustness, yet requires all BSs to be installed with large batteries and large energy-harvesting devices due to the high energy consumption of BSs. In this paper, we propose a scheme to coordinate the multiple deployed BSs such that the energy supplies required by individual BSs can be substantially reduced. In this scheme, only one BS is selected to be active at a time and the other BSs act as regular sensor nodes. We first present the basic architecture of our system, including how we keep the network running with only one active BS and how we manage the handover of the role of the active BS. Then, we propose an algorithm for adaptively selecting the active BS under the spatial and temporal variations of energy resources. This algorithm is simple to implement but is also asymptotically optimal under mild conditions. Finally, by running simulations and real experiments on an outdoor testbed, we verify that the proposed scheme is energy-efficient, has low communication overhead and reacts rapidly to network changes

Adaptive Selection Problems in Networked Systems

Networked systems are composed of interconnected nodes that work collaboratively to maximize a given overall utility function. Typical examples of such systems are wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and participatory sensing systems: sensor nodes, either static or mobile, are deployed for monitoring a certain physical field. In these systems, there are a set of problems where we need to adaptively select a strategy to run the system, in order to enhance the efficiency of utilizing the resources available to the system. In particular, we study four adaptive selection problems as follows. We start by studying the problem of base-station (BS) selection in WSNs. Base stations are critical sensor nodes whose failures cause severe data losses. Deploying multiple fixed BSs improves the robustness, yet this scheme is not energy efficient because BSs have high energy consumptions. We propose a scheme that selects only one BS to be active at a time; other BSs are kept passive and act as regular sensor nodes. This scheme substantially reduces the energy supplies required by individual BSs. Then, we propose an algorithm for adaptively selecting the active BS so that the spatially and temporally varying energy resources are efficiently utilized. We also address implementation issues and apply the proposed algorithm on a real WSN. Field experiments have shown the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. We generalize the BS selection problem by considering both the energy efficiency of regular sensor nodes and that of BSs. In this scheme, a subset of active BSs (instead of only one) is adaptively selected and the routing of regular sensor nodes is adjusted accordingly. Because BSs have high fixed-energy consumptions and because the number of candidate subsets of active BSs is exponential with the number of BSs, this general BS selection problem is NP-hard. We propose a polynomial-time algorithm that is guaranteed, under mild conditions, to achieve a network lifetime at least 62% of the optimal one. Through extensive numerical simulations, we verify that the lifetime achieved by the proposed algorithm is always very close to the optimum. We then study the problem of scheduling the sparse-sensing patterns in WSNs. We observe that the traditional scheme of periodically taking sensing samples is not energy efficient. Instead, we propose to adaptively schedule when and where to activate sensors for sampling a physical field, such that the energy efficiency is enhanced and the sensing precision is maintained. The schedules are learnt from the temporal signal models derived from the collected measurements. Then, using the obtained signal models and the sparse sensing-measurements, the original signal can be effectively recovered. This proposed method requires minimal on-board computation, no inter-node communications and achieves an appealing reconstruction performance. With experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate significant improvements over both traditional sensing schemes and the state-of-the-art sparse-sensing schemes, particularly when the measured data is characterized by a strong temporal correlation. In the last part of the thesis, we discuss the sparse-sensing framework by exploiting the spatial correlations rather than the temporal correlations among the captured measurements. In this framework, application-specific utility functions can be employed. By adaptively selecting a small subset of active sensors for sensing, a certain utility is guaranteed and the efficiency of the sensing system is enhanced. We apply this framework both in static WSNs and participatory sensing systems where sensors move in an uncoordinated manner. Through extensive simulations, we show that our proposed algorithm enhances the resource efficiency

PKU-GoodsAD: A Supermarket Goods Dataset for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Segmentation

Visual anomaly detection is essential and commonly used for many tasks in the field of computer vision. Recent anomaly detection datasets mainly focus on industrial automated inspection, medical image analysis and video surveillance. In order to broaden the application and research of anomaly detection in unmanned supermarkets and smart manufacturing, we introduce the supermarket goods anomaly detection (GoodsAD) dataset. It contains 6124 high-resolution images of 484 different appearance goods divided into 6 categories. Each category contains several common different types of anomalies such as deformation, surface damage and opened. Anomalies contain both texture changes and structural changes. It follows the unsupervised setting and only normal (defect-free) images are used for training. Pixel-precise ground truth regions are provided for all anomalies. Moreover, we also conduct a thorough evaluation of current state-of-the-art unsupervised anomaly detection methods. This initial benchmark indicates that some methods which perform well on the industrial anomaly detection dataset (e.g., MVTec AD), show poor performance on our dataset. This is a comprehensive, multi-object dataset for supermarket goods anomaly detection that focuses on real-world applications.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Edge-Mediated Skyrmion Chain and Its Collective Dynamics in a Confined Geometry

The emergence of a topologically nontrivial vortex-like magnetic structure, the magnetic skyrmion, has launched new concepts for memory devices. There, extensive studies have theoretically demonstrated the ability to encode information bits by using a chain of skyrmions in one-dimensional nanostripes. Here, we report the first experimental observation of the skyrmion chain in FeGe nanostripes by using high resolution Lorentz transmission electron microscopy. Under an applied field normal to the nanostripes plane, we observe that the helical ground states with distorted edge spins would evolves into individual skyrmions, which assemble in the form of chain at low field and move collectively into the center of nanostripes at elevated field. Such skyrmion chain survives even as the width of nanostripe is much larger than the single skyrmion size. These discovery demonstrates new way of skyrmion formation through the edge effect, and might, in the long term, shed light on the applications.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

WaterScenes: A Multi-Task 4D Radar-Camera Fusion Dataset and Benchmark for Autonomous Driving on Water Surfaces

Autonomous driving on water surfaces plays an essential role in executing hazardous and time-consuming missions, such as maritime surveillance, survivors rescue, environmental monitoring, hydrography mapping and waste cleaning. This work presents WaterScenes, the first multi-task 4D radar-camera fusion dataset for autonomous driving on water surfaces. Equipped with a 4D radar and a monocular camera, our Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) proffers all-weather solutions for discerning object-related information, including color, shape, texture, range, velocity, azimuth, and elevation. Focusing on typical static and dynamic objects on water surfaces, we label the camera images and radar point clouds at pixel-level and point-level, respectively. In addition to basic perception tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation, we also provide annotations for free-space segmentation and waterline segmentation. Leveraging the multi-task and multi-modal data, we conduct numerous experiments on the single modality of radar and camera, as well as the fused modalities. Results demonstrate that 4D radar-camera fusion can considerably enhance the robustness of perception on water surfaces, especially in adverse lighting and weather conditions. WaterScenes dataset is public on https://waterscenes.github.io

Salient pairwise spatio-temporal interest points for real-time activity recognition

AbstractReal-time Human action classification in complex scenes has applications in various domains such as visual surveillance, video retrieval and human robot interaction. While, the task is challenging due to computation efficiency, cluttered backgrounds and intro-variability among same type of actions. Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based methods have shown promising results to tackle human action classification in complex scenes efficiently. However, the state-of-the-art works typically utilize bag-of-visual words (BoVW) model which only focuses on the word distribution of STIPs and ignore the distinctive character of word structure. In this paper, the distribution of STIPs is organized into a salient directed graph, which reflects salient motions and can be divided into a time salient directed graph and a space salient directed graph, aiming at adding spatio-temporal discriminant to BoVW. Generally speaking, both salient directed graphs are constructed by labeled STIPs in pairs. In detail, the “directional co-occurrence” property of different labeled pairwise STIPs in same frame is utilized to represent the time saliency, and the space saliency is reflected by the “geometric relationships” between same labeled pairwise STIPs across different frames. Then, new statistical features namely the Time Salient Pairwise feature (TSP) and the Space Salient Pairwise feature (SSP) are designed to describe two salient directed graphs, respectively. Experiments are carried out with a homogeneous kernel SVM classifier, on four challenging datasets KTH, ADL and UT-Interaction. Final results confirm the complementary of TSP and SSP, and our multi-cue representation TSP + SSP + BoVW can properly describe human actions with large intro-variability in real-time

Single-cell long-read sequencing in human cerebral organoids uncovers cell-type-specific and autism-associated exons

Summary: Dysregulation of alternative splicing has been repeatedly associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, but the extent of cell-type-specific splicing in human neural development remains largely uncharted. Here, single-cell long-read sequencing in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cerebral organoids identifies over 31,000 uncatalogued isoforms and 4,531 cell-type-specific splicing events. Long reads uncover coordinated splicing and cell-type-specific intron retention events, which are challenging to study with short reads. Retained neuronal introns are enriched in RNA splicing regulators, showing shorter lengths, higher GC contents, and weaker 5′ splice sites. We use this dataset to explore the biological processes underlying neurological disorders, focusing on autism. In comparison with prior transcriptomic data, we find that the splicing program in autistic brains is closer to the progenitor state than differentiated neurons. Furthermore, cell-type-specific exons harbor significantly more de novo mutations in autism probands than in siblings. Overall, these results highlight the importance of cell-type-specific splicing in autism and neuronal gene regulation