Discriminant embedding by sparse representation and nonparametric discriminant analysis for face recognition

A novel supervised dimensionality reduction algorithm, named discriminant embedding by sparse representation and nonparametric discriminant analysis(DESN), was proposed for face recognition. Within the framework of DESN, the sparse local scatter and multi-class nonparametric between-class scatter were exploited for within-class compactness and between-class separability description, respectively. These descriptions, inspired by sparse representation theory and nonparametric technique, are more discriminative in dealing with complex-distributed data. Furthermore, DESN seeks for the optimal projection matrix by simultaneously maximizing the nonparametric between-class scatter and minimizing the sparse local scatter. The use of Fisher discriminant analysis further boosts the discriminating power of DESN. The proposed DESN was applied to data visualization and face recognition tasks, and was tested extensively on the Wine, ORL, Yale and Extended Yale B databases. Experimental results show that DESN is helpful to visualize the structure of high-dimensional data sets, and the average face recognition rate of DESN is about 9.4%, higher than that of other algorithms.

Grey Wolf Optimization Based Tuning of Terminal Sliding Mode Controllers for a Quadrotor

The research on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAV)has intensified considerably thanks to the recent growth in the fields of advanced automatic control,artificial intelligence,and miniaturization.In this paper,a Grey Wolf Optimization(GWO)algorithm is proposed and successfully applied to tune all effective parameters of Fast Terminal Sliding Mode(FTSM)controllers for a quadrotor UAV.A full control scheme is first established to deal with the coupled and underactuated dynamics of the drone.Controllers for altitude,attitude,and position dynamics become separately designed and tuned.To work around the repetitive and time-consuming trial-error-based procedures,all FTSM controllers’parameters for only altitude and attitude dynamics are systematically tuned thanks to the proposed GWO metaheuristic.Such a hard and complex tuning task is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem under operational constraints.The performance and robustness of the GWO-based control strategy are compared to those based on homologous metaheuristics and standard terminal sliding mode approaches.Numerical simulations are carried out to show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed GWO-tuned FTSM controllers for the altitude and attitude dynamics’stabilization and tracking.Nonparametric statistical analyses revealed that the GWO algorithm is more competitive with high performance in terms of fastness,non-premature convergence,and research exploration/exploitation capabilities.

THE TRANSFORMED NONPARAMETRIC FLOOD FREQUENCY ANALYSIS

The nonparametric kernel estimation of probability density function (PDF) pro-vides a uniform and accurate estimate of flood frequency-magnitude relationship.However, the kernel estimate has the disadvantage that the smoothing factor h is estimate empirically and is not locally adjusted, thus possibly resulting in deteri oration of density estimate when PDF is not smooth and is heavy-tailed. Such a problem can be alleviate by estimating the density of a transformed random vari able, and then taking the inverse transform. A new and efficient circular transform is proposed and investigated in this paper