This brief presents the novel PHY layer technique, attachment transmission, which provides an extra control panel with minimum overhead. In addition to describing the basic mechanisms of this technique, this brief also illustrates the challenges, the theoretical model, implementation and numerous applications of attachment transmission. Extensive experiments demonstrate that attachment transmission is capable of exploiting and utilizing channel redundancy to deliver control information and thus it can provide significant support to numerous higher layer applications. The authors also address...

This brief focuses on the current research on security and privacy preservation in smart grids. Along with a review of the existing works, this brief includes fundamental system models, possible frameworks, useful performance, and future research directions. It explores privacy preservation demand response with adaptive key evolution, secure and efficient Merkle tree based authentication, and fine-grained keywords comparison in the smart grid auction market. By examining the current and potential security and privacy threats, the author equips readers to understand the developing issues in...

This work is the definitive guide for IT managers and agile practitioners. It elucidates the principles of agile risk management and how these relate to individual projects. Explained in clear and concise terms, this synthesis of project risk management and agile techniques is illustrated using the major methodologies such as XP, Scrum and DSDM. Although the agile community frequently cites risk management, research suggests that risk is often narrowly defined and, at best, implicitly treated, which in turn leads to an inability to make informed decisions concerning risk and reward and a...

This work opens with an accessible introduction to computer networks, providing general definitions of commonly used terms in networking. This is followed by a detailed description of the OSI model, including the concepts of connection-oriented and connectionless communications. The text carefully elaborates the specific functions of each layer, along with what is expected of protocols operating at each layer. Next, the journey of a single packet, from source to destination, is described in detail. The final chapter is devoted to the TCP/IP model, beginning with a discussion of IP protocols...

This SpringerBrief presents key enabling technologies and state-of-the-art research on delivering efficient content distribution services to fast moving vehicles. It describes recent research developments and proposals towards the efficient, resilient and scalable content distribution to vehicles through both infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less vehicular networks. The authors focus on the rich multimedia services provided by vehicular environment content distribution including vehicular communications and media playback, giving passengers many infotainment applications. Common...

This work proposes strategies and solutions to tackle the problem of building photo-mosaics of very large underwater optical surveys, presenting contributions to the image preprocessing, enhancing and blending steps, and resulting in an improved visual quality of the final photo-mosaic. The text opens with a comprehensive review of mosaicing and blending techniques, before proposing an approach for large scale underwater image mosaicing and blending. In the image preprocessing step, a depth dependent illumination compensation function is used to solve the non-uniform illumination appearance...

This Springer Brief examines the combination of computer vision techniques and machine learning algorithms necessary for humanoid robots to develop "true consciousness." It illustrates the critical first step towards reaching "deep learning," long considered the holy grail for machine learning scientists worldwide. Using the example of the iCub, a humanoid robot which learns to solve 3D mazes, the book explores the challenges to create a robot that can perceive its own surroundings. Rather than relying solely on human programming, the robot uses physical touch to develop a neural map of its...

This SpringerBrief reveals the latest techniques in computer vision and machine learning on robots that are designed as accurate and efficient military snipers. Militaries around the world are investigating this technology to simplify the time, cost and safety measures necessary for training human snipers. These robots are developed by combining crucial aspects of computer science research areas including image processing, robotic kinematics and learning algorithms. The authors explain how a new humanoid robot, the iCub, uses high-speed cameras and computer vision algorithms to track the...

Action recognition technology has many real-world applications in human-computer interaction, surveillance, video retrieval, retirement home monitoring, and robotics. The commoditization of depth sensors has also opened up further applications that were not feasible before. This text focuses on feature representation and machine learning algorithms for action recognition from depth sensors. After presenting a comprehensive overview of the state of the art, the authors then provide in-depth descriptions of their recently developed feature representations and machine learning techniques,...