IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics

Echo state network (ESN) is a new kind of recurrent neural network with a randomly generated reservoir structure and an adaptable linear readout layer. It has been widely employed in the field of time series prediction. However, when high-dimensional reservoirs are utilized to predict multivariate time series, there may be a collinearity problem. In this paper, to overcome the collinearity problem... View full abstract»

Since it first appeared, differential evolution (DE), one of the most successful evolutionary algorithms, has been studied by many researchers. Theoretical and empirical studies of the parameters and strategies have been conducted, and numerous variants have been proposed. Opposition-based DE (ODE), one of such variants, combines DE with opposition-based learning (OBL) to obtain a high-quality sol... View full abstract»

Event-triggered control (ETC) is a control strategy which can effectively reduce communication traffic in control networks. In the case where communication resources are scarce, ETC plays an important role in updating and communicating data. When network-induced delays are involved, two unsynchronized phenomena will appear if the existing ETC strategy, designed for networked control systems (NCSs)... View full abstract»

In the study of the behavior of human groups, it has been observed that there is a strong interaction between the cohesiveness of the group, its performance when the group has to solve a task, and the patterns of communication between the members of the group. Developing mathematical and computational tools for the analysis and design of task-solving groups that are not only cohesive but also perf... View full abstract»

Blur detection in a single image is challenging especially when the blur is spatially-varying. Developing discriminative blur features is an open problem. In this paper, we propose a new kernel-specific feature vector consisting of the information of a blur kernel and the information of an image patch. Specifically, the kernel specific-feature is composed of the multiplication of the variance of f... View full abstract»

Ge and Li proposed an alternative strategy to model and synchronize two totally different nonlinear systems in the end of 2011, which provided a new version for fuzzy modeling and has been applied to several fields to simplify their modeling works and solve the mismatch problems [1]-[17]. However, the proposed model limits the number of nonlinear terms in each equation so that this model could not... View full abstract»

The learning strategy in the canonical particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is often blamed for being the primary reason for loss of diversity. Population diversity maintenance is crucial for preventing particles from being stuck into local optima. In this paper, we present an improved PSO algorithm with an interswarm interactive learning strategy (IILPSO) by overcoming the drawbacks of the... View full abstract»

Hashing has been proved as an attractive solution to approximate nearest neighbor search, owing to its theoretical guarantee and computational efficiency. Though most of prior hashing algorithms can achieve low memory and computation consumption by pursuing compact hash codes, however, they are still far beyond the capability of learning discriminative hash functions from the data with complex inh... View full abstract»

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is used to evaluate deterioration of reinforced concrete bridge decks based on measuring signal attenuation from embedded rebar. The existing methods for obtaining deterioration maps from GPR data often require manual interaction and offsite processing. In this paper, a novel algorithm is presented for automated rebar detection and analysis. We test the process with ... View full abstract»

Social learning in particle swarm optimization (PSO) helps collective efficiency, whereas individual reproduction in genetic algorithm (GA) facilitates global effectiveness. This observation recently leads to hybridizing PSO with GA for performance enhancement. However, existing work uses a mechanistic parallel superposition and research has shown that construction of superior exemplars in PSO is ... View full abstract»

The security community has witnessed a significant increase in the number of different types of security threats. This situation calls for the design of new techniques that can be incorporated into security protocols to meet these challenges successfully. An important tool for developing new security protocols as well as estimating their effectiveness is game theory. This game theory framework usu... View full abstract»

This paper is concerned with the synchronization problem for a class of switched neural networks (SNNs) with time-varying delays. First, a new crucial lemma which includes and extends the classical exponential stability theorem is constructed. Then by using the lemma, new algebraic criteria of ψ-type synchronization (synchronization with general decay rate) for SNNs are established via the ... View full abstract»

This paper presents a saturated Nussbaum function based approach for robotic systems with unknown actuator dynamics. To eliminate the effect of the control shock from the traditional Nussbaum function, a new type of the saturated Nussbaum function is developed with the idea of time-elongation. Moreover, by exploiting properties of the proposed Nussbaum function, a promising theorem is established ... View full abstract»

This paper proposes a hierarchical image-based visual servoing (IBVS) strategy for dynamic positioning of a fully actuated underwater vehicle. In the kinematic loop, the desired velocity is generated by a nonlinear model predictive controller, which optimizes a cost function of the predicted image trajectories under the constraints of visibility and velocity. A velocity reference model, representi... View full abstract»

Recently, many biologically inspired visual computational models have been proposed. The design of these models follows the related biological mechanisms and structures, and these models provide new solutions for visual recognition tasks. In this paper, based on the recent biological evidence, we propose a framework to mimic the active and dynamic learning and recognition process of the primate vi... View full abstract»

We consider the control of formations of a leader-follower network, where the objective is to steer a team of multiple mobile agents into a formation of variable size. We assume that the shape description of the formation is known to all the agents, which is captured by a complex-valued Laplacian associated with the sensing graph, but the size scaling of the formation is not known or only known to... View full abstract»

This paper is concerned with the finite-time synchronization (FTS) issue of switched coupled neural networks with discontinuous or continuous activations. Based on the framework of nonsmooth analysis, some discontinuous or continuous controllers are designed to force the coupled networks to synchronize to an isolated neural network. Some sufficient conditions are derived to ensure the FTS by utili... View full abstract»

Clustering of big data has received much attention recently. In this paper, we present a new clusiVAT algorithm and compare it with four other popular data clustering algorithms. Three of the four comparison methods are based on the well known, classical batch k-means model. Specifically, we use k-means, single pass k-means, online k-means, and clustering using representatives (CURE) for numerical... View full abstract»

In this paper, the task-space cooperative tracking control problem of networked robotic manipulators without task-space velocity measurements is addressed. To overcome the problem without task-space velocity measurements, a novel task-space position observer is designed to update the estimated task-space position and to simultaneously provide the estimated task-space velocity, based on which an ad... View full abstract»