The augmented reality (AR) applications have been widely used in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) because of good immersion experience for users, but their ultralow delay demand and high energy consumption bring a huge challenge to the current communication system and terminal power. The emergence of mobile-edge computing (MEC) provides a good thinking to solve this challenge. In this article, we study an energy-efficient task offloading and resource allocation scheme for AR in both the single-MEC and multi-MEC systems. First, a more specific and detailed AR application model is established as a directed acyclic graph according to its internal functionality. Second, based on this AR model, a joint optimization problem of task offloading and resource allocation is formulated to minimize the energy consumption of each user subject to the latency requirement and the limited resources. The problem is a mixed multiuser competition and cooperation problem, which involves the task offloading decision, uplink/downlink transmission resources allocation, and computing resources allocation of users and MEC server. Since it is an NP-hard problem and the communication environment is dynamic, it is difficult for genetic algorithms or heuristic algorithms to solve. Therefore, we propose an intelligent and efficient resource allocation and task offloading algorithm based on the deep reinforcement learning framework of multiagent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) in a dynamic communication environment. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can greatly reduce the energy consumption of each user terminal.

Transformer holds significance in deep learning (DL) research. Node embedding (NE) and positional encoding (PE) are usually two indispensable components in a Transformer. The former can excavate hidden correlations from the data, while the latter can store locational relationships between nodes. Recently, the Transformer has been applied for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification because the model can capture long-range dependencies to aggregate global features for representation learning. In an HSI, adjacent pixels tend to be homogeneous, while the NE does not identify the positional information of pixels. Therefore, PE is crucial for Transformers to understand locational relationships between pixels. However, in this area, most Transformer-based methods randomly generate PEs without considering their physical meaning, which leads to weak representations. This article proposes a new graph generative structure-aware Transformer (GraphGST) to solve the above-mentioned PE problem when implementing HSI classification. In our GraphGST, a new absolute PE (APE) is established to acquire pixels’ absolute positional sequences (APSs) and is integrated into the Transformer architecture. Moreover, a generative mechanism with self-supervised learning is developed to achieve cross-view contrastive learning (CL), aiming to enhance the representation learning of the Transformer. The proposed GraphGST model can capture local-to-global correlations, and the extracted APSs can complement the spectral features of pixels to assist in NE. Several experiments with real HSIs are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our GraphGST. The proposed method demonstrates very competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches. Our source codes will be provided in the following link https://github.com/yuanchaosu/TGRS-graphGST .

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has become an indispensable part of the era of the intelligent manufacturing industry 4.0. In the smart city, computation-intensive tasks can be offloaded to the MEC server or the central cloud server for execution. However, the privacy disclosure issue may arise when the raw data is migrated to other MEC servers or the central cloud server. Since federated learning has the characteristics of protecting the privacy and improving training performance, it is introduced to solve the issue. In this article, we formulate the joint optimization problem of task offloading and resource allocation to minimize the energy consumption of all Internet of Things (IoT) devices subject to delay threshold and limited resources. A two-timescale federated deep reinforcement learning algorithm based on Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) framework (FL-DDPG) is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can greatly reduce the energy consumption of all IoT devices.

In a free space optical communication system, the beacon light will lose most of its energy after long-distance transmission, and the background light from the universe will strongly interfere with it. The four-quadrant detector (4QD) has been widely used in optical communication systems as a high-precision spot position detection sensor. However, if the light signal falling on the 4QD is too weak, the electrical signal of the output position will be very weak, and it will easily be affected by or even submerged in noise. To solve this problem, we propose a method for improving the spot position detection accuracy. First, we analyzed the solution relationship between the actual position of the spot and the output signal of the 4QD, with a Gaussian spot as the incident light model. The output current signal of the detector was then transimpedance-amplified by an analog circuit and the output voltage signal with noise was digitally filtered. An error compensation factor and the gap size of the detector were introduced into the traditional spot position detection model. High-precision spot position information for the 4QD in a complex environment was then obtained using the improved spot position detection model. Experimental results show that the maximum spot position detection error for this method was only 0.0277 mm, and the root mean square error was 0.0065 mm, when the 4QD was in a high background noise environment. The spot position detection accuracy was significantly improved compared with traditional detection algorithms. Real-time detection can therefore be achieved in practical applications.

In video communication, the quality of video is mainly determined by bitrate in general. Moreover, the effect of video contents and their visual perception on video quality assessment (VQA) is often overlooked. However, in fact, for different videos, although the bitrates are the same, their VQA scores are still significantly different. Hence, it is assumed that the bitrate, video contents, and human visual characteristics mainly affect the VQA. Based on the above three aspects, in this paper, we designed a bitrate-based no-reference (NR) VQA metric combining the visual perception of video contents, namely, BRVPVC. In this metric, first an initial VQA model was proposed by only considering the bitrate alone. Then, the visual perception model for video contents was designed based on the texture complexity and local contrast of image, temporal information of video, and their visual perception features. Finally, two models were synthesized by adding certain weight coefficients into an overall VQA metric, namely, BRVPVC. Furthermore, ten reference videos and 150 distorted videos in the LIVE video database were used to test the metric. Moreover, based on the results of evaluating the videos in LIVE, VQEG, IRCCyN, EPFL-PoliMI, IVP, CSIQ, and Lisbon databases, the performance of BRVPVC is respectively compared with that of six full-reference (FR) metrics and ten NR VQA metrics. The results show that our VQA metric has a higher accuracy than six common FR VQA metrics and eight NR VQA metrics, and it is close to other two NR VQA metrics in accuracy. The corresponding values of Pearson linear correlation coefficient and Spearman rank order correlation coefficient reached 0.8547 and 0.8260, respectively. In addition, the computational complexity of proposed VQA metric is lower than video signal-to-noise ratio, video quality model, motion-based video integrity evaluation, spatiotemporal most apparent distortion, V-BLINDS, and V-CORNIA metrics. Moreover, the proposed metric has a better generalization property than these metrics.