Counting individuals or entities from a set of images is one of the most fundamental tasks for obtaining the properties on animal behaviors and ecology. However, most of this work has been conducted manually on many subjects, which lead to be time-consuming and error-prone tasks. In this paper, we present a scheme for automatic counting of target individual and investigate its performance on counting honey workers.

In this paper, we address a design problem of a community energy management system, in particular a control problem of power consumers. A control system including a large number of consumers is inevitably affected by their decisions, which can cause undesirable behavior or instability of the system. We aim to construct a stable control system that is consistent with consumers’ “preferences”. To this end, we describe the preferences as cost functions to propose a control structure that achieves an optimal allocation of the power consumption. In general, the assumption that the cost functions of all consumers are available for the control system design, is too severe for practical system design and implementation. This paper contributes to find a special class of the cost functions and to propose a cost function-free design of the allocation system. Finally, the usefulness of the proposed allocation system is confirmed through numerical example.

This paper is concerned with the analysis of discrete-time LTI systems via construction of associated externally positive systems. Recently, the authors established a construction method of an externally positive system whose impulse response is given by the square of the original discrete-time LTI SISO system to be analyzed. This externally positive system allows us to characterize the H₂ norm of the original system by means of the closed-form l_∞-induced norm characterization of externally positive systems. It is nonetheless true that, for the original system of order n, the order of the resulting externally positive system is n², incurring a drastic increase in computational burden of computer-aided analysis and synthesis. With this important issue in mind, in this paper, we show that the order can be reduced down to n(n+1)/2 by using the elimination and duplication matrices that are intensively studied by J. R. Magnus in the 80’s. In addition to the computational complexity reduction for the aforementioned H₂ analysis, we show that such construction of externally positive systems with reduced order is quite effective in semidefinite-programming-based peak value analysis of impulse responses of general LTI systems.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify initial configuration conditions of multi-agent systems that converge to evenly spacing points on the unit circle embedded in the control space. The agents can converge to points on the submanifold by the gradient method to maximize the distance between the agents that are mutually connected. This paper considers the cycle graph as the communication topology and the unit circle as the submanifold on the plane. Then the paper introduces the first integral of the arguments of the agents and gives a necessary and sufficient condition that the agents converge to evenly spaced points on the unit circle with the order of the cycle graph provided that the agents converge to the unit circle by the gradient method. Finally, numerical examples confirm the final configuration of the agents that satisfy the proposed initial configuration condition.