This paper presents a Variable Speed Limit (VSL) control algorithm for simultaneously maximizing the mobility, safety and environmental benefit in a Connected Vehicle environment. Development of Connected Vehicle (CV)/Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology has the potential to provide essential data at the microscopic level to provide a better understanding of real-time driver behavior. This paper investigated a VSL control algorithm using a microscopic approach by focusing on individual driver’s behavior (e.g., acceleration and deceleration) through the use of Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach. A multi-objective optimization function was formulated with the aim of finding a balanced trade-off among mobility, safety and sustainability. A microscopic traffic flow prediction model was used to calculate Total Travel Time (TTT); a surrogate safety measure Time To Collision (TTC) was used to measure instantaneous safety; and, a microscopic fuel consumption model (VT-Micro) was used to measure the environmental impact. Real-time driver’s compliance to the posted speed limit was used to adjust the optimal speed limit values. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to compare the performance of the developed approach for different weights in the objective function and for two different percentages of CV. The results showed that with 100% penetration rate, the developed VSL approach outperformed the uncontrolled scenario consistently, resulting in up to 20% of total travel time reductions, 6–11% of safety improvements and 5–16% reduction in fuel consumptions. Our findings revealed that the scenario which optimized for safety alone, resulted in more optimum improvements as compared to the multi-criteria optimization. Thus, one can argue that in case of 100% penetration rates of CVs, optimizing for safety alone is enough to achieve simultaneous and optimum improvements in all measures. However, mixed results were obtained in case of lower % penetration rate which showed higher collision risk when optimizing for only mobility or fuel consumption. This indicates that with such % penetration rate, multi-criteria optimization is crucial to realize optimum and balanced benefits for the examined measures.

Variable speed limit: A microscopic analysis in a connected vehicle environment

Use of optical imaging for medical and scientific applications requires accurate quantification of features such as object size, color, and brightness. High pixel density cameras available on modern mobile phones have made photography simple and convenient for consumer applications; however, the camera hardware and software that enables this simplicity can present a barrier to accurate quantification of image data. This issue is exacerbated by automated settings, proprietary image processing algorithms, rapid phone evolution, and the diversity of manufacturers. If mobile phone cameras are to live up to their potential to increase access to healthcare in low-resource settings, limitations of mobile phone–based imaging must be fully understood and addressed with procedures that minimize their effects on image quantification. Here we focus on microscopic optical imaging using a custom mobile phone microscope that is compatible with phones from multiple manufacturers. We demonstrate that quantitative microscopy with micron-scale spatial resolution can be carried out with multiple phones and that image linearity, distortion, and color can be corrected as needed. Using all versions of the iPhone and a selection of Android phones released between 2007 and 2012, we show that phones with greater than 5 MP are capable of nearly diffraction-limited resolution over a broad range of magnifications, including those relevant for single cell imaging. We find that automatic focus, exposure, and color gain standard on mobile phones can degrade image resolution and reduce accuracy of color capture if uncorrected, and we devise procedures to avoid these barriers to quantitative imaging. By accommodating the differences between mobile phone cameras and the scientific cameras, mobile phone microscopes can be reliably used to increase access to quantitative imaging for a variety of medical and scientific applications.

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Quantitative imaging with a mobile phone microscope.

Physcomitrella patens is well known because of its importance in the study of plant systematics and evolution. The tolerance of P. patens for high-salinity environments also makes it an ideal candidate for studying the molecular mechanisms by which plants respond to salinity stresses. We measured changes in the proteome of P. patens gametophores that were exposed to high-salinity (250, 300, and 350 mM NaCl) using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE) via liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Sixty-five protein spots were significantly altered by exposure to the high-salinity environment. Among them, 16 protein spots were down-regulated and 49 protein spots were up-regulated. These proteins were associated with a variety of functions, including energy and material metabolism, protein synthesis and degradation, cell defense, cell growth/division, transport, signal transduction, and transposons. Specifically, the up-regulated proteins were primarily involved in defense, protein folding, and ionic homeostasis. In summary, we outline several novel insights into the response of P. patens to high-salinity; (1) HSP70 is likely to play a significant role in protecting proteins from denaturation and degradation during salinity stress, (2) signaling proteins, such as 14-3-3 and phototropin, may work cooperatively to regulate plasma membrane H+-ATPase and maintain ion homeostasis, (3) an increase in photosynthetic activity may contribute to salinity tolerance, and (4) ROS scavengers were up-regulated suggesting that the antioxidative system may play a crucial role in protecting cells from oxidative damage following exposure to salinity stress in P. patens.

/pdf/proteomic-analysis-of-the-response-to-high-salinity-stress-34vyzi4nae.pdf

Proteomic analysis of the response to high-salinity stress in Physcomitrella patens

Image compression based on block-based Discrete Cosine Transform (BDCT) inevitably produces annoying blocking artifacts because each block is transformed and quantized independently. This paper proposes a new deblocking method for BDCT compressed images based on sparse representation. To remove blocking artifacts, we obtain a general dictionary from a set of training images using the K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD) algorithm, which can effectively describe the content of an image. Then, an error threshold for orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) is automatically estimated to use the dictionary for image deblocking by the compression factor of compressed image. Consequently, blocking artifacts are significantly reduced by the obtained dictionary and the estimated error threshold. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is very effective in dealing with the image deblocking problem from compressed images.

Image deblocking via sparse representation

Proteomic identification of small, copper-responsive proteins in germinating embryos of Oryza sativa.

This paper presents an advanced video camera system with robust automatic focus (AF), automatic white-balance (AWB), and enhanced zoom tracking. The proposed system can achieve accurate zoom tracking with significantly reduced system memory. It can also find accurate in-focus state even when the camera shoots at a CRT monitor or a light source. The proposed AWB technique compensates the luminance intensity of color components without degrading the image.

A video camera system with enhanced zoom tracking and auto white balance

Physcomitrella patens is a model plant for studying gene function using a knockout strategy. To establish a proteome database for P. patens, we resolved over 1,500 soluble proteins from gametophore and protonema tissues by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) and obtained peptide mass fingerprints (PMFs) by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-time of flight-mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS). Using expressed sequence tags (ESTs), we were able to predict the identities of 90 protein spots. Most of these were related to energy or primary metabolism. Comparative proteome analysis was used to identify proteins specific for each of the tissue types. One of these was a metallothionein type-2 (PpMT2) protein that was highly upregulated in gametophore tissue. PpMT2 was induced in both the gametophore and protonema following culture on solid media and in response to various abiotic stresses such as copper, cadmium, cold, indole-3-acetic acid, and ethylene. We suggest that PpMT2 is not only involved in metal binding and detoxification, but also in many biological aspects as a metal messenger or a protein with additional functions.

Proteome analysis of gametophores identified a metallothionein involved in various abiotic stress responses in Physcomitrella patens

In this paper, we present a novel postprocessing technique based on the theory of the projection onto convex sets (POCS) in order to reduce the blocking artifacts in digital high definition television (HDTV) images. By detecting and eliminating the undesired high-frequency components, mainly caused by blocking artifacts, we propose a new smoothness constraint set (SCS) and its projection operator in the DCT domain. In addition, we propose an improved quantization constraint set (QCS) using the correlation of DCT coefficients between adjacent blocks. In the proposed technique, the range of the QCS is efficiently reduced as close to the original DCT coefficient as possible to yield better performance of the projection onto the QCS. Computer simulation results indicate that the proposed schemes perform better than conventional algorithms. Furthermore, we introduce a fast implementation method of the proposed algorithm. The conventional POCS-based postprocessing techniques require the forward/inverse discrete cosine transform (DCT/IDCT) operations with a heavy computational burden. To reduce the computational complexity we introduce a fast implementation method of the proposed algorithm that does not perform DCT/IDCT operations. Estimates of computation savings vary between 41% and 64% depending on the task.

Fast POCS based post-processing technique for HDTV

We propose a measurement based TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) that adjusts the coding rates according to the channel characteristics of the wireless-to-wired network. To avoid the throughput degradation of multimedia flows traveling through wireless link, the proposed rate control system employs a new loss differentiation algorithm using packet loss statistics. This method can eliminate the effect of wireless losses in flow control and substantially reduce the abrupt quality degradation of the video streaming caused by the unreliable wireless link status. Experimental results show that the proposed rate control system produces the TCP-friendly rates while sharing the backbone bandwidth with TCP flows. Moreover, error resilient coding methods can be easily applied to the proposed TFRC by using the packet loss statistics.

Wireless measurement based resource allocation for QoS provisioning over IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

A real-time frame-layer rate control algorithm is proposed for low bit rate video coding over IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN). The proposed rate control method performs bit allocation at the frame level to minimize the average distortion over an entire sequence as well as variations in distortion between frames. A new frame-layer rate-distortion model is derived, and a non-iterative optimization method is used for low computational complexity. The proposed algorithm produces low encoding time delay, and is suitable for real-time low-complexity video encoder. Experimental results indicate that the proposed control method provides better visual and PSNR performance than the existing TMN8 rate control method.

Yoon Kim

Papers

A video camera system with enhanced zoom tracking and auto white balance

Proteome analysis of gametophores identified a metallothionein involved in various abiotic stress responses in Physcomitrella patens

Fast POCS based post-processing technique for HDTV

Wireless measurement based resource allocation for QoS provisioning over IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

Efficient real-time frame layer rate control technique for low bit rate video over WLAN