Entropy has been a common index to quantify the complexity of time series in a variety of fields. Here, we introduce an increment entropy to measure the complexity of time series in which each increment is mapped onto a word of two letters, one corresponding to the sign and the other corresponding to the magnitude. Increment entropy (IncrEn) is defined as the Shannon entropy of the words. Simulations on synthetic data and tests on epileptic electroencephalogram (EEG) signals demonstrate its ability of detecting abrupt changes, regardless of the energetic (e.g., spikes or bursts) or structural changes. The computation of IncrEn does not make any assumption on time series, and it can be applicable to arbitrary real-world data.

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Depth information has been used in many fields because of its low cost and easy availability, since the Microsoft Kinect was released. However, the Kinect and Kinect-like RGB-D sensors show limited performance in certain applications and place high demands on accuracy and robustness of depth information. In this paper, we propose a depth sensing system that contains a laser projector similar to that used in the Kinect, and two infrared cameras located on both sides of the laser projector, to obtain higher spatial resolution depth information. We apply the block-matching algorithm to estimate the disparity. To improve the spatial resolution, we reduce the size of matching blocks, but smaller matching blocks generate lower matching precision. To address this problem, we combine two matching modes (binocular mode and monocular mode) in the disparity estimation process. Experimental results show that our method can obtain higher spatial resolution depth without loss of the quality of the range image, compared with the Kinect. Furthermore, our algorithm is implemented on a low-cost hardware platform, and the system can support the resolution of 1280 × 960, and up to a speed of 60 frames per second, for depth image sequences.

This paper presents a manageable overlay network architecture SVCP2P for live scalable media streaming. Every peer in SVCP2P periodically exchanges data availability information with one of distributed central servers which act as the centralized index for storing peer list, program list and buffer information of peers. An efficient scheduling algorithm is proposed, which achieves real-time and continuous transmission of the scalable streaming. There are three characteristics of this architecture: 1) easy management; 2) efficient to heterogeneous network because of the scalable media streaming adapting to the heterogeneous demand; and 3) robust and resilient. We have examined the SVCP2P which has been implemented based on the IP Internet over LAN, and the results demonstrate the efficiency of SVCP2P.