Recently there has been a growing interest in category-level object pose and size estimation, and prevailing methods commonly rely on single view RGB-D images. However, one disadvantage of such methods is that they require accurate depth maps which cannot be produced by consumer-grade sensors. Furthermore, many practical real-world situations involve a moving camera that continuously observes its surroundings, and the temporal information of the input video streams is simply overlooked by single-view methods. We propose a novel solution that makes use of RGB video streams. Our framework consists of three modules: a scale-aware monocular dense SLAM solution, a lightweight object pose predictor, and an object-level pose graph optimizer. The SLAM module utilizes a video stream and additional scale-sensitive readings to estimate camera poses and metric depth. The object pose predictor then generates canonical object representations from RGB images. The object pose is estimated through geometric registration of these canonical object representations with estimated object depth points. All per-view estimates finally undergo optimization within a pose graph, culminating in the output of robust and accurate canonical object poses. Our experimental results demonstrate that when utilizing public dataset sequences with high-quality depth information, the proposed method exhibits comparable performance to state-of-the-art RGB-D methods. We also collect and evaluate on new datasets containing depth maps of varying quality to further quantitatively benchmark the proposed method alongside previous RGB-D based methods. We demonstrate a significant advantage in scenarios where depth input is absent or the quality of depth sensing is limited.

Random number generation is essential for applications in simulation, numerical analysis, and data encryption. The ubiquitous presence of system-on-chip (SoC) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) embedded devices in critical sectors necessitates robust random number generators (RNGs) that operate within these specialized environments. Traditional RNGs in GNU/Linux systems derive entropy from peripheral hardware events, which are scarce in SoC FPGA platforms lacking standard PC peripherals. Addressing this challenge, this paper proposes a novel random number generator named NDSTRNG that leverages the unique hardware structure of the SoC FPGA and the inherent randomness of GNU/Linux. The proposed generator employs a non-deterministic sampling model to circumvent reliance on various peripherals while ensuring unbiased output via a linear feedback shift register (LFSR)-based post-processing method. We implement this random number generator in SoC FPGA GNU/Linux using minimal FPGA resources and only one Linux task for sampling. NDSTRNG achieved a throughput exceeding 700 Kbps. Moreover, the entropy source of the generator is evaluated using NIST SP 800-90B, while the quality of the generated random numbers is assessed through ENT, NIST SP 800-22, and DIEHARDER. The results confirm that NDSTRNG meets the stringent criteria for both high-quality and high-speed random number generation, making it suitable for deployment in communication, defense, and medical domains where reliable RNGs are indispensable.

Pre-copy-based Virtual Machine (VM) live migration seamlessly migrates the running VM to the target physical server by pre-copying memory pages and realizing updates through loop iterations. This method, which has high reliability and robustness, can effectively achieve load balancing and reduce energy consumption. It is widely used in the industry to manage server cluster resources. However, it also involves many problems, such as many dirty memory pages resulting from repeated transmission and convergence failure of iterative transmission. Hence, pre-copy live migration cannot efficiently allocate server cluster resources. To resolve these problems, a VM pre-copy live migration technology based on the similarity of dirty memory pages is proposed in this paper. The access priority of historical dirty memory pages was determined by calculating the similarity weight based on the Hamming distance. A priority-based delay transmission scheme for high dirty pages and low dirty pages was used to decrease the frequent transmission of high dirty memory pages, increase the convergence speed of the live-migration iterative copy process, and reduce the overall migration time of VMs. A comparative analysis of experimental results based on six dimensions showed that the proposed method achieved better migration efficiency than the conventional live migration strategy.

Safety-critical systems play a significant role in industrial domains, and their complexity is increasing with advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). To provide efficient services, safety-critical systems that integrate AI applications are always built based on Linux, where Linux offers massive amounts of features and an incredibly perfect software ecosystem for AI applications. Since Linux is a pre-existing complex software system, different research programmes aim to pave the way for developing Linux-based safety-critical systems. Still, only some focus on the system calls for file operations. However, the execution path of a system call is effectively non-deterministic in Linux kernel space, which challenges the test coverage-based verification recommended by the functional safety standards. This research analyzes the influence of system state on Linux kernel path variability from two perspectives: file system type and system load. Therefore, an online data collection system for system call execution paths was constructed based on Ftrace, network file system (NFS), and MD5 hash function, uniquely identifying the system call execution path. The collected data were processed and analysed in this study. Evaluations show that the number of function execution paths of the system calls relevant to file systems increased with the increase in system load but would eventually be stable. Additionally, the function execution paths of the system call varied in different file systems. Based on the evaluations, the results of this work can provide advice for analyzing Linux-based safety-critical systems. In addition, the method introduced in this research can also provide support for the verification of Linux-based safety-critical systems.

The latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard achieves a significant compression efficiency improvement over the H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard, but with a much higher computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for software-based H.264/AVC to HEVC transcoding, integrated with tools such as wavefront parallel processing that are useful for achieving higher levels of parallelism on multicore processors and distributed systems. By utilizing information extracted from the input H.264/AVC bitstream, the transcoding process can be greatly accelerated with a visual quality loss that is modest for many applications. Based on the HEVC HM 14.0 reference software and using standard HEVC test bitstreams, the proposed transcoder can achieve up to 60× speedup on a Quad Core 8-thread server over decoding-re-encoding based on FFMPEG and the HM software with a BD-rate loss of 15%-20%. By implementing a group of picture-level task distribution on a distributed system with nine processing units, the proposed software transcoder can achieve a speed for transcoding 720 p at 30 Hz in real time.

The emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard achieves significant performance improvement over H.264/AVC standard at a cost of much higher complexity. In this paper, we propose a ultra fast H.264/AVC to HEVC transcoder for multi-core processors implementing Wave front Parallel Processing (WPP) and SIMD acceleration, along with expedited motion estimation (ME) and mode decision (MD) by utilizing information extracted from the input H.264/AVC stream. Experiments using standard HEVC test bit streams show that the proposed transcoder achieves 70x speed up over the HEVC HM 8.1 reference software (including H.264 encoding) at very small rate distortion (RD) performance loss.