Abstract: ISO 14143-1 specifies that a functional size measurement (FSM) method must provide measurement procedures to quantify the functional user requirements (FURs) of software. Such quantitative information, functional size, is typically used, for instance, in software estimation. One of the international standards for FSM is the COSMIC FSM method — ISO 19761 — which was designed to be applied both to the business application (BA) software domain and to the real-time software domain. A recurrent problem in FSM is the availability and quality of the inputs required for measurement purposes; that is, well documented FURs. Business process (BP) models, as they are commonly used to gather requirements from the early stages of a project, could be a valuable source of information for FSM. In a previous article, the feasibility of such an approach for the BA domain was analyzed using the Qualigram BP modeling notation. This paper complements that work by: (1) analyzing the use of BPMN for FSM in the BA domain; (2) presenting notation-independent guidelines for the BA domain; and (3) analyzing the possibility of using BP models to perform FSM in the real-time domain. The measurement results obtained from BP models are compared with those of previous FSM case studies.

Abstract: Placing data as close as possible to computation is a common practice of data intensive systems, commonly referred to as the data locality problem. By analyzing existing production systems, we confirm the benefit of data locality and find that data have different popularity and varying correlation of accesses. We propose DARE, a distributed adaptive data replication algorithm that aids the scheduler to achieve better data locality. DARE solves two problems, how many replicas to allocate for each file and where to place them, using probabilistic sampling and a competitive aging algorithm independently at each node. It takes advantage of existing remote data accesses in the system and incurs no extra network usage. Using two mixed workload traces from Facebook, we show that DARE improves data locality by more than 7 times with the FIFO scheduler in Hadoop and achieves more than 85% data locality for the FAIR scheduler with delay scheduling. Turnaround time and job slowdown are reduced by 19% and 25%, respectively.

Abstract: Multi-spectral RGB-NIR sensors have become ubiquitous in recent years. These sensors allow the visible and near-infrared spectral bands of a given scene to be captured at the same time. With such cameras, the acquired imagery has a compromised RGB color representation due to near-infrared bands (700–1100 nm) cross-talking with the visible bands (400–700 nm). This paper proposes two deep learning-based architectures to recover the full RGB color images, thus removing the NIR information from the visible bands. The proposed approaches directly restore the high-resolution RGB image by means of convolutional neural networks. They are evaluated with several outdoor images; both architectures reach a similar performance when evaluated in different scenarios and using different similarity metrics. Both of them improve the state of the art approaches.

Abstract: This paper presents a method for on-line human action recognition on video sequences. An analysis based on Mahalanobis distance is performed to identify the “idle” state, which defines the beginning and end of the person movement, for posterior patterns extraction based on Relative Wavelet Energy from sequences of invariant moments.

Abstract: This manuscript addresses the cross-spectral stereo correspondence problem. It proposes the usage of a dense flow field based representation instead of the original cross-spectral images, which have a low correlation. In this way, working in the flow field space, classical cost functions can be used as similarity measures. Preliminary experimental results on urban environments have been obtained showing the validity of the proposed approach.