Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Spectral Indices for Assessing Fire Severity in Australian Temperate Forests

Spectral indices derived from optical remote sensing data have been widely used for fire-severity classification in forests from local to global scales. However, comparative analyses of multiple indices across diverse forest types are few. This represents an information gap for fire management agencies in areas like temperate south-eastern Australia, which is characterised by a diversity of natural forests that vary in structure, and in the fire-regeneration strategies of the dominant trees. We evaluate 10 spectral indices across eight areas burnt by wildfires in 1998, 2006, 2007, and 2009 in south-eastern Australia. These wildfire areas encompass 13 forest types, which represent 86% of the 7.9M ha region’s forest area. Forest types were aggregated into six forest groups based on their fire-regeneration strategies (seeders, resprouters) and structure (tree height and canopy cover). Index performance was evaluated for each forest type and forest group by examining its sensitivity to four fire-severity classes (unburnt, low, moderate, high) using three independent methods (anova, separability, and optimality). For the best-performing indices, we calculated index-specific thresholds (by forest types and groups) to separate between the four severity classes, and evaluated the accuracy of fire-severity classification on independent samples. Our results indicated that the best-performing indices of fire severity varied with forest type and group. Overall accuracy for the best-performing indices ranged from 0.50 to 0.78, and kappa values ranged from 0.33 (fair agreement) to 0.77 (substantial agreement), depending on the forest group and index. Fire severity in resprouter open forests and woodlands was most accurately mapped using the delta Normalised Burnt ratio (dNBR). In contrast, dNDVI (delta Normalised difference vegetation index) performed best for open forests with mixed fire responses (resprouters and seeders), and dNDWI (delta Normalised difference water index) was the most accurate for obligate seeder closed forests. Our analysis highlighted the low sensitivity of all indices to fire impacts in Rainforest. We conclude that the optimal spectral index for quantifying fire severity varies with forest type, but that there is scope to group forests by structure and fire-regeneration strategy to simplify fire-severity classification in heterogeneous forest landscapes.
Characterizing the reciprocal adaptation in physical human-robot interaction to address the inter-joint coordination in neurorehabilitation. (Caractérisation de l'adaptation réciproque dans l'interaction physique homme-robot pour aborder la coordination inter-articulaire en neuroréhabilitation)

While many robotic exoskeletons have been developed for stroke rehabilitation in recent years, there were not yet improvements to the traditional therapy. A key to unleash the potentiality of robotics is to adapt the assistance provided by the robot in order to maximize the subject engagement and effort, by having the robotic therapy evolving with the patient recovery. For this reason, we aim at better understanding the process of reciprocal adaptation in a context of physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). We first developed a new adaptive controller, which assists the subject "as-needed", by regulating its interaction to maximize the human involvement. We further compared different signals driving this adaptation, to better following the functional recovery level of the patients. While the control is performed by the robot, the subject is also adapting his movements, and this adaptation has not yet been studied when dealing with 3D movements and exoskeletons. Therefore, we exposed human motions to distributed force fields, generated by the exoskeleton at the joint level, to produce specific inter-joint coordination and to analyse the effects of this exposition. With healthy participants, we observed important inter-individual difference, with adaptation to the fields in 21% of the participants, but post-effects and persisting retention of these in time in 85% of the subjects, together with spatial generalization, and, preliminarily, transfer of the effects outside of the exoskeleton context. This work towards understanding pHRI could provide insights on innovative ways to develop new controllers for improving stroke motor recovery with exoskeletons.
Joint Iterative Decoding of Spatially Coupled Low-Density Parity-Check Codes for Position Errors in Racetrack Memories

SUMMARY Racetrack memory (RM) has attracted much attention. In RM, insertion and deletion (ID) errors occur as a result of an unstable reading process and are called position errors. In this paper, we ﬁrst deﬁne a probabilistic channel model of ID errors in RM with multiple read-heads (RHs). Then, we propose a joint iterative decoding algorithm for spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes over such a channel. We investigate the asymptotic behaviors of SC-LDPC codes under the pro-poseddecodingalgorithmusingdensityevolution(DE). WithDE,wereveal therelationshipbetweenthenumberofRHsandachievableinformationrates,alongwiththeiterativedecodingthresholds.Theresultsshowthat increasingthenumberofRHsprovideshigherdecodingperformances,al-thoughtheproposeddecodingalgorithmrequireseachcodewordbittobe readonlyonceregardlessofthenumberofRHs.Moreover,weshowtheperformanceimprovementproducedbyadjustingtheorderoftheSC-LDPC codewordbitsinRM.
A Novel Speech Enhancement System Based on the Coherence-Based Algorithm and the Differential Beamforming

SUMMARY This letter proposes a novel speech enhancement system based on the ‘L’ shaped triple-microphone. The modiﬁed coherence-based algorithm and the ﬁrst-order di ﬀ erential beamforming are combined to ﬁl-ter the spatial distributed noise. The experimental results reveal that the proposed algorithm achieves signiﬁcant performance in spatial ﬁltering under di ﬀ erent noise scenarios.
Mapping Ecological Production and Benefits from Water Consumed in Agricultural and Natural Landscapes: A Case Study of the Pangani Basin

Scarcity of information on the water productivity of different water, land, and other ecosystems in Africa, hampers the optimal allocation of the limited water resources. This study presents an innovative method to quantify the spatial variability of biomass production, crop yield, and economic water productivity, in a data scarce landscape of the Pangani Basin. For the first time, gross return from carbon credits and other ecosystem services are considered, in the concept of Economic Water Productivity. The analysis relied on the MODIS satellite data of 250 m and eight-day resolutions, and the SEBAL model, utilizing Monteith’s framework for ecological production. In agriculture, irrigated sugarcane and rice achieved the highest water productivities in both biophysical and economic values. Rainfed and supplementary irrigated banana and maize productivities were significantly lower than the potential values, reflecting a wide spatial variability. In natural landscapes, forest and wetland showed the highest biomass production. However, the transition to economic productivity was low but showed the potential to increase significantly when non-market goods and services were considered. Spatially explicit information, from both biophysical and economic water productivity, provides a holistic outlook of the socio-environmental and the economic water values of a land-use activity, and can identify areas for improvement, and trade-offs in river basins.
Long-Term Arctic Snow/Ice Interface Temperature from Special Sensor for Microwave Imager Measurements

The Arctic sea ice region is the most visible area experiencing global warming-induced climate change. However, long-term measurements of climate-related variables have been limited to a small number of variables such as the sea ice concentration, extent, and area. In this study, we attempt to produce a long-term temperature record for the Arctic sea ice region using Special Sensor for Microwave Imager (SSM/I) Fundamental Climate Data Record (FCDR) data. For that, we developed an algorithm to retrieve the wintertime snow/ice interface temperature (SIIT) over the Arctic Ocean by counting the effect of the snow/ice volume scattering and ice surface roughness on the apparent emissivity (the total effect is referred to as the correction factor). A regression equation was devised to predict the correction factor from SSM/I brightness temperatures (TBs) only and then applied to SSM/I 19.4 GHz TB to estimate the SIIT. The obtained temperatures were validated against collocated Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) ice mass balance (IMB) drifting buoy-measured temperatures at zero ice depth. It is shown that the SSM/I retrievals are in good agreement with the drifting buoy measurements, with a correlation coefficient of 0.95, bias of 0.1 K, and root-mean-square error of 1.48 K on a daily time scale. By applying the algorithm to 24-year (1988–2011) SSM/I FCDR data, we were able to produce the winter-time temperature at the sea ice surface for the 24-year period.
Highly Efficient Mobile Visual Search Algorithm

SUMMARY In this paper, we propose a highly e ﬃ cient mobile visual search algorithm. For descriptor extraction process, we propose a low complexity feature detection which utilizes the detected local key points of the coarse octaves to guide the scale space construction and feature detection in the ﬁne octave. The Gaussian and Laplacian operations are skipped for the unimportant area, and thus the computing time is saved. Besides, feature selection is placed before orientation computing to further reduce the complexity of feature detection by pre-discarding some unim-portant local points. For the image retrieval process, we design a high-performance reranking method, which merges both the global descriptor matching score and the local descriptor similarity score (LDSS). In the calculating of LDSS, the tf-idf weighted histogram matching is performed to integrate the statistical information of the database. The results show that the proposed highly e ﬃ cient approach achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art for mobile visual search, while the descriptor extraction complexity is largely reduced.
A Robust Algorithm for Deadline Constrained Scheduling in IaaS Cloud Environment

The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds are emerging as a promising platform for the execution of resource demanding and computation intensive workflow applications. Scheduling the execution of scientific applications expressed as workflows on IaaS Clouds involves many uncertainties due to the variable and unpredictable performance of Cloud resources. These uncertainties are modeled by probability distribution functions in past researches or totally ignored in some cases. In this paper, we propose a novel robust deadline constrained workflow scheduling algorithm which handles the uncertainties in scheduling workflows in the IaaS Cloud environment. Our proposal is a static scheduling algorithm aimed at addressing the uncertainties related to: the estimation of task execution times; and, the delay in provisioning computational Cloud resources. The workflow scheduling problem was considered as a costoptimized, deadline-constrained optimization problem. Our uncertainty handling strategy was based on the consideration of knowledge of the interval of uncertainty, which we used to modeling the execution times rather than using a known probability distribution function or precise estimations which are known to be very sensitive to variations. Experimental evaluations using CloudSim with synthetic workflows of various sizes show that our proposal is robust to fluctuations in estimates of task runtimes and is able to produce high quality schedules that have deadline guarantees with minimal penalty cost trade-off depending on the length of the interval of uncertainty. Scheduling solutions for varying degrees of uncertainty resisted against deadline violations at runtime as against the static IC-PCP algorithm which could not guarantee deadline constraints in the face of uncertainty. key words: handling resource performance uncertainty, deadlineconstrained workflow scheduling, IaaS cloud environment, robust scheduling, uncertain processing time
An Improved Algorithm for Discriminating Soil Freezing and Thawing Using AMSR-E and AMSR2 Soil Moisture Products

Discriminating between surface soil freeze/thaw states with the use of passive microwave brightness temperature has been an effective approach so far. However, soil moisture has a direct impact on the brightness temperature of passive microwave remote sensing, which may result in uncertainties in the widely used dual-index algorithm (DIA). In this study, an improved algorithm is proposed to identify the surface soil freeze/thaw states based on the original DIA in association with the AMSR-E and AMSR2 soil moisture products to avoid the impact of soil moisture on the brightness temperature derived from passive microwave remotely-sensed soil moisture products. The local variance of soil moisture (LVSM) with a 25-day interval was introduced into this algorithm as an effective indicator for selecting a threshold to update and modify the original DIA to identify surface soil freeze/thaw states. The improved algorithm was validated against in-situ observations of the Soil Moisture/Temperature Monitoring Network (SMTMN). The results suggest that the temporal and spatial variation characteristics of LVSM can significantly discriminate between surface soil freeze/thaw states. The overall discrimination accuracy of the improved algorithm was approximately 89% over a remote area near the town of Naqu on the East-Central Tibetan Plateau, which demonstrated an obvious improvement compared with the accuracy of 82% derived with the original DIA. More importantly, the correct classification rate for the modified pixels was over 96%.
Syntax-Based Context Representation for Statistical Machine Translation

SUMMARY Learning semantic representation for translation context is beneﬁcial to statistical machine translation ( SMT ). Previous e ﬀ orts have focused on implicitly encoding syntactic and semantic knowledge in translation context by neural networks, which are weak in capturing explicit structural syntax information. In this paper, we propose a new neural network with a tree-based convolutional architecture to explicitly learn structural syntax information in translation context, thus improving translation prediction. Speciﬁcally, we ﬁrst convert parallel sentences with source parse trees into syntax-based linear sequences based on a minimum syntax subtree algorithm, and then deﬁne a tree-based convolutional network over the linear sequences to learn syntax-based context representation and translation prediction jointly. To verify the e ﬀ ectiveness, the proposed model is integrated into phrase-based SMT. Experiments on large-scale Chinese-to-English and German-to-English translation tasks show that the proposed approach can achieve a substantial and signiﬁcant improvement over several baseline systems.
Privacy Preserving Top-k Query Processing over Outsourced Data. (Préservation de la confidentialité des données externalisées dans le traitement des requêtes top-k)

Outsourcing corporate or individual data at a cloud provider, e.g. using Database-as-a-Service, is practical and cost-effective. But it introduces a major problem: how to preserve the privacy of the outsourced data, while supporting powerful user queries. A simple solution is to encrypt the data before it is outsourced. Then, to answer a query, the user client can retrieve the encrypted data from the cloud, decrypt it, and evaluate the query over plaintext (non encrypted) data. This solution is not practical, as it does not take advantage of the computing power provided by the cloud for evaluating queries.In this thesis, we consider an important kind of queries, top-k queries,and address the problem of privacy-preserving top-k query processing over encrypted data in the cloud.A top-k query allows the user to specify a number k, and the system returns the k tuples which are most relevant to the query. The relevance degree of tuples to the query is determined by a scoring function.We first propose a complete system, called BuckTop, that is able to efficiently evaluate top-k queries over encrypted data, without having to decrypt it in the cloud. BuckTop includes a top-k query processing algorithm that works on the encrypted data, stored at one cloud node,and returns a set that is proved to contain the encrypted data corresponding to the top-k results. It also comes with an efficient filtering algorithm that is executed in the cloud on encypted data and removes most of the false positives included in the set returned.When the outsourced data is big, it is typically partitioned over multiple nodes in a distributed system. For this case, we propose two new systems, called SDB-TOPK and SD-TOPK, that can evaluate top-k queries over encrypted distributed data without having to decrypt at the nodes where they are stored. In addition, SDB-TOPK and SD-TOPK have a powerful filtering algorithm that filters the false positives as much as possible in the nodes, and returns a small set of encrypted data that will be decrypted in the user side. We analyze the security of our system, and propose efficient strategies to enforce it.We validated our solutions through implementation of BuckTop , SDB-TOPK and SD-TOPK, and compared them to baseline approaches over synthetic and real databases. The results show excellent response time compared to baseline approaches. They also show the efficiency of our filtering algorithm that eliminates almost all false positives. Furthermore, our systems yieldsignificant reduction in communication cost between the distributed system nodes when computing the query result.
Automatic Prevention of Buffer Overflow Vulnerability Using Candidate Code Generation

SUMMARY The security of a software program critically depends on the prevention of vulnerabilities in the source code; however, conventional computer programs lack the ability to identify vulnerable code in another program. Our research was aimed at developing a technique capable of generating substitution code for the detection of bu ﬀ er overﬂow vulnerability in C / C ++ programs. The technique automatically veriﬁes and sanitizes code instrumentation by comparing the result of each candidate variable with that expected from the input data. Our results showed that statements containing bu ﬀ er overﬂow vulnerabilities could be detected and prevented by using a substitution variable and by sanitizing code vulnerabilities based on the size of the variables. Thus, faults can be detected prior to execution of the statement, preventing malicious access. Our approach is particularly useful for enhancing software security monitoring, and for designing retroﬁtting techniques in applications.
TomoSAR Imaging for the Study of Forested Areas: A Virtual Adaptive Beamforming Approach

Among the objectives of the upcoming space missions Tandem-L and BIOMASS, is the 3-D representation of the global forest structure via synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography (TomoSAR). To achieve such a goal, modern approaches suggest solving the TomoSAR inverse problems by exploiting polarimetric diversity and structural model properties of the different scattering mechanisms. This way, the related tomographic imaging problems are treated in descriptive regularization settings, applying modern non-parametric spatial spectral analysis (SSA) techniques. Nonetheless, the achievable resolution of the commonly performed SSA-based estimators highly depends on the span of the tomographic aperture; furthermore, irregular sampling and non-uniform constellations sacrifice the attainable resolution, introduce artifacts and increase ambiguity. Overcoming these drawbacks, in this paper, we address a new multi-stage iterative technique for feature-enhanced TomoSAR imaging that aggregates the virtual adaptive beamforming (VAB)-based SSA approach, with the wavelet domain thresholding (WDT) regularization framework, which we refer to as WAVAB (WDT-refined VAB). First, high resolution imagery is recovered applying the descriptive experiment design regularization (DEDR)-inspired reconstructive processing. Next, the additional resolution enhancement with suppression of artifacts is performed, via the WDT-based sparsity promoting refinement in the wavelet transform (WT) domain. Additionally, incorporation of the sum of Kronecker products (SKP) decomposition technique at the pre-processing stage, improves ground and canopy separation and allows for the utilization of different better adapted TomoSAR imaging techniques, on the ground and canopy structural components, separately. The feature enhancing capabilities of the novel robust WAVAB TomoSAR imaging technique are corroborated through the processing of airborne data of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), providing detailed volume height profiles reconstruction, as an alternative to the competing non-parametric SSA-based methods.
Space Subdivision of Indoor Mobile Laser Scanning Data Based on the Scanner Trajectory

State-of-the-art indoor mobile laser scanners are now lightweight and portable enough to be carried by humans. They allow the user to map challenging environments such as multi-story buildings and staircases while continuously walking through the building. The trajectory of the laser scanner is usually discarded in the analysis, although it gives insight about indoor spaces and the topological relations between them. In this research, the trajectory is used in conjunction with the point cloud to subdivide the indoor space into stories, staircases, doorways, and rooms. Analyzing the scanner trajectory as a standalone dataset is used to identify the staircases and to separate the stories. Also, the doors that are traversed by the operator during the scanning are identified by processing only the interesting spots of the point cloud with the help of the trajectory. Semantic information like different space labels is assigned to the trajectory based on the detected doors. Finally, the point cloud is semantically enriched by transferring the labels from the annotated trajectory to the full point cloud. Four real-world datasets with a total of seven stories are used to evaluate the proposed methods. The evaluation items are the total number of correctly detected rooms, doors, and staircases.
Empirical Bayes Estimation for L1 Regularization: A Detailed Analysis in the One-Parameter Lasso Model

Lasso regression based on the L1 regularization is one of the most popular sparse estimation methods. It is often required to set appropriately in advance the regularization parameter that determines the degree of regularization. Although the empirical Bayes approach provides an effective method to estimate the regularization parameter, its solution has yet to be fully investigated in the lasso regression model. In this study, we analyze the empirical Bayes estimator of the one-parameter model of lasso regression and show its uniqueness and its properties. Furthermore, we compare this estimator with that of the variational approximation, and its accuracy is evaluated. key words: lasso regression, empirical Bayes, Laplace prior, local variational approximation