16579361
A Theory of Reactive Components
We present a theory of reactive components. We identify a component by its provided services, and specify the individual services by a guarded-design, which enables one to separate the responsibility of clients from the commitment made by the component, and model the behaviour of a component by a set of failures and divergences. Protocols are introduced to coordinate the interactions between a component and its environment. We adopt the notion of process refinement to formalise the substitutivity of components, and provide a complete proof method based on the notion of simulations. We also study the algebraic properties of component combinators.
14189544
Verification, refinement and scheduling of real-time programs
Abstract A real-time program can be developed by refining a specification into program code. Verification of the timing properties of the program is then usually done at two levels: verification of the ordering of timed actions in the program and proof that execution of the program on a specific system will meet its timing requirements. Refinement is done within a formal model but the second step requires a different framework in which scheduling theory analysis is used and actual program execution times can be taken into account. The implementation of a program on a system is said to be feasible or schedulable if it will meet all the timing deadlines. This paper shows how the feasibility of scheduling a real-time program can also be proved as a step in the refinement of the program from its specification. Verification of this step of refinement makes use of methods from scheduling theory within a formal system development framework.
7323063
rCOS: Refinement of Component and Object Systems
We present a model of object-oriented and component-based refinement. For object-orientation, the model is class-based and refinement is about correct changes in the structure, methods of classes and the main program, rather than changes in the behaviour of individual objects. This allows us to prove refinement laws for both high level design patterns and low level refactoring. For component-based development, we focus on the separation of concerns of interface and functional contracts, leaving refinement of interaction protocols in future work. The model supports the specification of these aspects at different levels of abstractions and their consistency. 
 
Based on the semantics, we also provide a general definitional approach to defining different relational semantic models with different features and constraints.
39997807
Component-Based Software Engineering
We discuss some of the difficulties and significant issues that we need to consider when developing a formal method for component-based software engineering. We argue that to deal with the challenges, there is a need in research to link existing theories and methods of programming for effective support to component-based software engineering. We then present our initiative on a unified multi-view approach to modelling, design and analysis of component systems, emphasising the integration of models for different views.
5135154
Linking UML models of design and requirement
Both a UML model of requirement and a UML model of a design are defined as a pair of class diagram and a family of sequence diagrams. We then give an unified semantics for models of requirements and designs. We define the consistency between a design class diagram and the interaction diagrams and show how the removal of inconsistency can be treated as a model refinement. We then formally define the correctness of UML model of design with respect to the model of requirement.
16560725
rCOS: A refinement calculus of object systems
This article presents a mathematical characterization of object-oriented concepts by defining an observation-oriented semantics for a relational object-based language with a rich variety of features including subtypes, visibility, inheritance, type casting, dynamic binding and polymorphism. The language can be used to specify object-oriented designs as well as programs. We present a calculus that supports both structural and behavioural refinement of object-oriented designs. The design calculus is based on the predicate logic in Hoare and He's Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP).
6592348
Scheduling UET-UCT Series-Parallel Graphs on Two Processors
Abstract The scheduling of task graphs on two identical processors is considered. It is assumed that tasks have unit-execution-time, and arcs are associated with unit-communication-time delays. The problem is to assign the tasks to the two processors and schedule their execution in order to minimize the makespan. A quadratic algorithm is proposed to compute an optimal schedule for a class of series-parallel graphs, called SP1 graphs, which includes in particular in-forests and out-forests.
17193716
Detecting news reporting using audio/visual information
This paper proposes an integrated approach to discriminate news reporting from everything else in broadcast news data based on both audio and visual information. The separation of news reporting segments from others not only can provide useful indices for video streams but also serves as a pre-processing step for tasks such as speaker identification and speech recognition so that only speech segments are passed on for further processing. A set of audio and visual features are adopted that aim at capturing the intrinsic properties of the underlying classes. Four types of classifiers (threshold fuzzy, Gaussian Mixture Model based, and Support Vector Machine) are tested. Some of the experimental results are presented and discussed in the paper.
2023739
Joint video scene segmentation and classification based on hidden Markov model
Video classification and segmentation are fundamental steps for efficient accessing, retrieval and browsing of large amounts of video data. We have developed a scene classification scheme using a hidden Markov model (HMM) based classifier. By utilizing the temporal behaviors of different scene classes, the HMM classifier can effectively classify video segments into one of the pre-defined scene classes. In this paper, we describe two approaches for joint video classification and segmentation based on a HMM, which works by searching for the most likely class transition path utilizing the dynamic programming technique.
17111860
Texture segmentation using directional empirical mode decomposition
In this paper the technique of directional empirical mode decomposition (DEMD) and its application to texture segmentation are presented. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) decomposes signals by sifting and then analyzes the instantaneous frequency of the obtained components called intrinsic mode functions (IMF). As a new form of extending 1D EMD to the 2D case, DEMD considers the directional frequency and envelope at each point. One type of 2D Hilbert transform is introduced to compute the analytical functions for the frequency and envelope. The technique of selecting directions for DEMD based on texture's Wold theory is also presented. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the method for texture segmentation.
770365
Robust head motion computation by taking advantage of physical properties
Head motion determination is an important problem for many applications including face modeling and tracking. We present a new algorithm to compute the head motion between two views from the correspondences of five feature points (eye corners, mouth corners and nose tip), and zero or more additional image point matches. The algorithm takes advantage of the physical properties of the feature points, such as symmetry, and it significantly improves the robustness of head motion estimation. This is achieved by reducing the number of unknowns to be estimated, thus increasing information redundancy. This idea can be easily extended to any number of feature point correspondences.