Built upon the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Everything (IoE) acknowledges the importance of data quality within sensor-based systems, alongside with people, processes and Things. Nevertheless, the impact of many technologies and paradigms that pertain to the IoE is still unknown regarding Quality of Observation (QoO). This paper proposes to study experimental results from three IoE-related deployment scenarios in order to promote the QoO notion and raise awareness about the need for characterizing observation quality within sensor-based systems. We specifically tailor the definition of QoO attributes to each use case, assessing observation accuracy within Smart Cities, observation rate for virtual sensors and observation freshness within post-disaster areas. To emulate these different experiments, we rely on a custom-developed integration platform for the assessment of QoO as a service called iQAS. We show that QoO attributes should be used to specify what is an observation of “good quality”, that virtual sensors may have specific and limiting capabilities impacting QoO and that network QoS and QoO are two complementary quality dimensions that should be used together to improve the overall service provided to end-users

The design of a new GNSS signal is always a trade-off between improving performance and increasing complexity, or even between improving different performance criteria. Position accuracy, receiver sensitivity (acquisition, tracking or data demodulation thresholds) or the Time-To-First-Fix (TTFF) are examples of those GNSS receivers performance criteria. Within the framework of Galileo 2nd Generation (G2G), adding a new signal component dedicated to aid the acquisition process on E1 can help to improve performance of GNSS receivers with respect to these criteria as it was shown in [1]. In order to create this new component, various aspects such as the spreading modulation, the data navigation content, the channel coding or the Pseudo-Random Noise (PRN) codes must be studied. To this end, this paper firstly proposes the study of new spreading modulations, and secondly, we investigate on PRN codes that can be well suited to the proposed Acquisition-Aiding signal.

The well-known conventional Least Squares (LS) and Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) are one of the most widely used algorithms in science and particularly in localization with GNSS measurements. However, these estimators are not optimal when the GNSS measurements become contaminated by non-Gaussian errors including multipath (MP) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) biases. On the other hand, this kind of ranging measurements errors occurs generally in urban areas where GNSS-based potitionning applications require more accuracy and reliability. In this paper, we use additional information of the environment consisting of bias prediction from a 3D model and a GNSS simulator to exploit constructively NLOS measurements. We use this 3D GNSS simulator to predict lower and upper bounds of these biases. Then, we integrate this information in the position estimation problem by considering these biases as additive error and exploiting the bounds to end-up with a constrained state estimation problem that we resolve with existing Constrained Least Squares (CLS) and Constrained EKF (CEFK) algorithms. Experimental results using real GPS signals in Down-Town Toulouse show that the proposed estimator is capable of improving the positioning acuracy compared to conventional algorithms. Theoretical conditions have been established to determine the acceptable bias prediction error allowing better positioning performance than conventional estimators. Tests are conducted then to validate these conditions and investigate the influence of the bias prediction error on the localization performance by proposing new acuracy metrics.

Hyperspectral unmixing is a blind source separation problem which consists in estimating the reference spectral signatures contained in a hyperspectral image, as well as their relative contribution to each pixel according to a given mixture model. In practice, the process is further complexified by the inherent spectral variability of the observed scene and the possible presence of outliers. More specifically, multi-temporal hyperspectral images, i.e., sequences of hyperspectral images acquired over the same area at different time instants, are likely to simultaneously exhibit moderate endmember variability and abrupt spectral changes either due to outliers or to significant time intervals between consecutive acquisitions. Unless properly accounted for, these two perturbations can significantly affect the unmixing process. In this context, we propose a new unmixing model for multitemporal hyperspectral images accounting for smoothtemporalvariations,construedasspectralvariability,and abrupt spectral changes interpreted as outliers. The proposed hierarchical Bayesian model is inferred using a Markov chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) method allowing the posterior of interest to be sampled and Bayesian estimators to be approximated. A comparison with unmixing techniques from the literature on synthetic and real data allows the interest of the proposed approach to be appreciated.

This paper introduces a new method for cardiac motion estimation in 2-D ultrasound images. The motion estimation problem is formulated as an energy minimization, whose data fidelity term is built using the assumption that the images are corrupted by multiplicative Rayleigh noise. In addition to a classical spatial smoothness constraint, the proposed method exploits the sparse properties of the cardiac motion to regularize the solution via an appropriate dictionary learning step. The proposed method is evaluated on one data set with available ground-truth, including four sequences of highly realistic simulations. The approach is also validated on both healthy and pathological sequences of in vivo data. We evaluate the method in terms of motion estimation accuracy and strain errors and compare the performance with state-of-the-art algorithms. The results show that the proposed method gives competitive results for the considered data. Furthermore, the in vivo strain analysis demonstrates that meaningful clinical interpretation can be obtained from the estimated motion vectors.

In signal processing, spectral analysis is widely used but, whereas computing the power spectral density (PSD) by Fourier approaches is relatively easy, its analysis and reading are much more demanding espe- cially for spectrally rich signals. This paper presents an original method which automatically picks out and estimates the relevant spectral structures of an unknown random stationary process, embedded in an unknown non-white Gaussian noise. First, a statistical hypothesis test is applied to each local max- imum value of the estimated PSD to detect the potential spectral peaks of interest. Second, an original feature space is proposed for classifying and characterizing the detected structures. Then, one key idea of the proposed strategy is to use not only one spectral estimator but to combine the results of different ones, taking benefits of their good properties. Therefore the detection and classification steps are ap- plied to different spectral estimations. A last fusion step outputs a complete attribute vector, including a confidence index, for each detected structure. Another key idea of this data-driven approach is that all parameters are automatically set up without a priori knowledge. This approach is fully adapted to the preventive maintenance of complex systems, as illustrated in the paper.

In the framework of satellite-to-ground laser downlinks, an analytical model describing the variations of the instantaneous coupled flux into a single-mode fiber after correction of the incoming wavefront by partial adaptive optics (AO) is presented. Expressions for the probability density function and the cumulative distribution function as well as for the average fading duration and fading duration distribution of the corrected coupled flux are given. These results are of prime interest for the computation of metrics related to coded transmissions over correlated channels, and they are confronted by end-to-end wave-optics simulations in the case of a geosynchronous satellite (GEO)-to-ground and a low earth orbit satellite (LEO)-to-ground scenario. Eventually, the impact of different AO performances on the aforementioned fading duration distribution is analytically investigated for both scenarios.

The Oscillatory Failure Case (OFC) is the name given to a class of failures in the actuator servo loop that cause undesired oscillation of the control surface. The term undesired refers to the fact that these oscillations, even if they are extremely rare, could be coupled with a structural mode and thus must be taken into account for load computation. The structural design is influenced by the OFC amplitude and detection time and so, if we are able to detect quickly smaller and smaller OFC amplitudes we can reduce the overall structural weight with all the related benefits. The current Airbus servo loop principle is shown in Figure 1. The faulty behaviour of an electronic component or a mechanical failure inside the actuator control loop could lead to an OFC. In this study we simulated the OFC effects through the injection of a periodic signal at two specific points of the control loop: the …

Detecting skin lentigo in reflectance confocal microscopy images is an important and challenging problem. This imaging modality has not yet been widely investigated for this problem and there are a few automatic processing techniques. They are mostly based on machine learning approaches and rely on numerous classical image features that lead to high computational costs given the very large resolution of these images. This paper presents a detection method with very low computational complexity that is able to identify the skin depth at which the lentigo can be detected. The proposed method performs multiresolution decomposition of the image obtained at each skin depth. The distribution of image pixels at a given depth can be approximated accurately by a generalized Gaussian distribution whose parameters depend on the decomposition scale, resulting in a very-low-dimension parameter space. SVM classifiers are then investigated to classify the scale parameter of this distribution allowing real-time detection of lentigo. The method is applied to 45 healthy and lentigo patients from a clinical study, where sensitivity of 81.4% and specificity of 83.3% are achieved. Our results show that lentigo is identifiable at depths between 50μm and 60μm, corresponding to the average location of the the dermoepidermal junction. This result is in agreement with the clinical practices that characterize the lentigo by assessing the disorganization of the dermoepidermal junction.

This paper deals with the characterization and the classification of reflectance confocal microscopy images of human skin. The aim is to identify and characterize the skin lentigo, a phenomenon that originates at the dermo-epidermic junction. High resolution images are acquired at different depths of the skin. In this paper, an analysis of confocal images is performed for each depth and the histogram of pixel intensities in the image is determined. It is modeled by a generalized gamma distribution parameterized by a translation, scale and shape parameters ( , and ). These parameters are estimated using the natural gradient descent algorithm and used to achieve the classification between healthy and lentigo patients of clinical images. The obtained results show that the scale and shape parameters (beta and rho) are good features to identify and characterize the presence of lentigo in skin tissues.