In this paper, a novel covariance spectrum sensing approach used in cognitive radio (CR) networks which is based on the dynamical stochastic resonance (SR) technique is proposed. When the optimal SR technique is introduced as the pre-processing method for the covariance-based detection and after it has been realized, it can increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the primary user (PU) signal and accordingly increase the mean value of the decision statistic of the covariance-based detection, so that the detection probability of the proposed approach can be improved under constant false alarm rate (CFAR). Computer simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared with the traditional spectrum sensing methods.

Registration of multidate or multisensor images is an essential process in many image processing applications including remote sensing, medical image analysis, and computer vision. Control point (CP) and intensity are the two basic features used separately for image registration in the literature. In this paper, an exact maximum likelihood (EML) registration method, which combines both CP and intensity, is proposed for image alignment. The EML registration method maximizes the likelihood function based CP and intensity to estimate the registration parameters, including affine transformation and CP coordinates. The explicit formulas of the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) are also derived for the proposed EML and conventional image registration algorithms. The performances of these image registration techniques are evaluated with the CRBs.

The fusion of multiple sensory information plays a key role in cooperative driving for flexible platooning of automated vehicles over a couple of lanes within a short intervehicle distance. In this paper, the problem of online sensor fusion with spatially and temporally misaligned dissimilar sensors is considered. A spatial-temporal registration model for the popular intelligent vehicular sensors including radar, global positioning system, inertial navigation system, and camera is first developed for sensor alignment. An unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is proposed here to fuse and register these sensors that are installed on a platoon of vehicles simultaneously. When the road geometry information is available from a digital map database, a constrained UKF is further developed to improve the fusion accuracy. The effect of spatial-temporal sensor misalignment upon the vehicle-state estimation is also analyzed theoretically. Simulations show that the proposed UKF method not only can align the dissimilar vehicular sensors properly with both spatial and temporal biases, but can also obtain accurate fused tracks of vehicles in a platoon.