On March 11, 2011, a huge tsunami caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake destroyed all the electrical power facilities in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As a result, the reactors were badly damaged, and radioactive particles were widely scattered in the surrounding areas. In order to study the behavior of the radioactive particles emitted from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, different measurement tools were developed. This paper describes two types of wireless radiation sensor networks and a two-dimensional radiation-level mapping system using a radio-controlled multi-copter. The measurements were analyzed, and the following conclusions were made regarding the radioactive particle distribution and its variation with time.
(1) Radiation level has gradually decreased with time.
(2) The rate of decrease in radiation is faster than that calculated from the half-life.
(3) The radiation-level distribution is not uniform and sharply varies even within short distances such as tens of meters.
(4) The locations of the hot spots have not changed, and the peak radiation levels are constantly decreasing.
By using two-dimensional maps, the radiation levels can be lowered more effectively by selectively removing the highly radioactive materials. The residents can also use the map to reduce their exposure to radiation by avoiding hot spots.

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This study introduces an image sensor based visible light communication (VLC) and its application to pose, position, and range estimations. There are two types of visible-light receiver: a photodiode and an image sensor. A photodiode is usually used as a reception device of VLC, and an image sensor consisting of a large number of pixels can also be used as a VLC reception device. A photodiode detects the signal intensity of incoming light, while an image sensor not only detects the incoming signal intensity but also an accurate angle of arrival of light emitted from a visible light transmitter such as a white LED light. After angles of arrival of light are detected by an image sensor, positioning and data reception can be performed. The ability of an image sensor to detect an accurate angle of arrival will provide attractive applications of VLC such as pose, position calculation, and range estimation. Furthermore, because the image sensor has the ability to spatially separate sources, outdoor positioning even with strong sunlight is possible by discarding the associated pixels of noise sources.

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Activity recognition has recently been playing an important role in several research domains, especially within the healthcare system. It is important for physicians to know what their patients do in daily life. Nevertheless, existing research work has failed to adequately identify human activity because of the variety of human lifestyles. To address this shortcoming, we propose the high performance activity recognition framework by introducing a new user context and activity location in the activity log (AL²). In this paper, the user's context is comprised by context-aware infrastructure and human posture. We propose a context sensor network to collect information from the surrounding home environment. We also propose a range-based algorithm to classify human posture for combination with the traditional user's context. For recognition process, ontology-based activity recognition (OBAR) is developed. The ontology concept is the main approach that uses to define the semantic information and model human activity in OBAR. We also introduce a new activity log ontology, called AL² for investigating activities that occur at the user's location at that time. Through experimental studies, the results reveal that the proposed context-aware activity recognition engine architecture can achieve an average accuracy of 96.60%.

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This paper propose a novel method for obtaining statistical results such as averages, variances, and correlations without leaking any raw data values from data-holders by using multiple pseudonyms. At present, to obtain statistical results using a large amount of data, we need to collect all data in the same storage device. However, gathering real-world data that were generated by different people is not easy because they often contain private information. The authors split the roles of servers into publishing pseudonyms and collecting answers. Splitting these roles, different entities can more easily join as pseudonym servers than in previous secure multi-party computation methods and there is less chance of collusion between servers. Thus, our method enables data holders to protect themselves against malicious attacks from data users. We also estimated a typical problem that occurred with our method and added a pseudonym availability confirmation protocol to prevent the problem. We report our evaluation of the effectiveness of our method through implementation and experimentation and discuss how we incorporated the WebSocket protocol and MySQL Memoty Storage Engine to remove the bottleneck and improve the implementation style. Finally, we explain how our method can obtain averages, variances, and correlation from 5000 data holders within 50 seconds.

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The IEEE 802.11 distributed coordinated function (DCF) adopts carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) as its medium access control (MAC) protocol. In a wireless local area network (WLAN) stations (STAs) congested situation, the performance of the WLAN system is significantly degraded due to a collision between the STAs. In this paper, we propose a simple method that decreases the number of frame collisions. After a successful transmission, the proposed method refrains from transmission during certain time which is defined as post-inter-frame space (Post-IFS). This mechanism improves the system performance including the throughput characteristics and access delay by reducing the number of competing STAs. The length of the Post-IFS is a key factor in improving the system performance for the proposed method. If the access point (AP) can estimate the optimal value of the Post-IFS, collision-free operation similar to that in centralized control is performed. Even if the optimal Post-IFS is not estimated, the number of competing STAs and the collision probability are decreased. Computer simulations verify that the proposed method achieves 40% higher system throughput compared to the conventional CSMA/CA for a network with 50 STAs.

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Wide area virtualization of wireless transceivers by centrally managed software radio systems is a way to efficiently share the resources for supporting a variety of wireless protocols. In order to enable wide-area virtualization of wireless transceivers, the authors have developed a mechanism to deliver the radio space information which is quantized broadband radio wave information including the radio signals to the transceivers. Delivery mechanism consists of a distribution server which distributes radio space corresponding to the request of the client such as the center frequency and the bandwidth and a client which uses the radio space information. Accumulation of the distribution servers which deliver radio space information simultaneously to a large number of clients will contribute to build an infrastructure for any clients ubiquitously distributed over the globe. In this paper, scale-out architecture of a distribution server is proposed to deliver unlimitedly broadband radio space information to unlimited number of clients. Experimental implementation indicates the architecture to be a scale-out solution, while the number of clients is restricted by the computer resources of the distribution server. The band pass filter processing for individual client in the distribution server consumes the dominant part of the processing power, and the number of CPU cores is the upper limit of clients supportable for the distribution server in the current operating system implementation. The logical increase of the number of CPU cores by hardware multithreading does not contribute to relax this limit. We also discuss the guidance architecture or building server derived from these conclusions.

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Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have to work with low power and long lifetime to satisfy human biological safety requirements in e-health; therefore extremely low energy consumption is significant for WBANs. IEEE 802.15.6 standard has been published for wearable and implanted applications which provide communication technology requirements in WBANs. In this paper, the cross-layering optimization methodology is used to minimize the network energy consumption. Both the priority strategy and sleep mechanism in IEEE802.15.6 are considered. Macroscopic sleep model based on WBAN traffic priority and microscopic sleep model based on MAC structure are proposed. Then the network energy consumption optimization problem is solved by Lagrange dual method, the master problem are vertically decomposed into two sub problems in MAC and transport layers which are dealt with gradient method. Finally, a solution including self-adaption sleep mechanism and node rate controlling is proposed. The results of this paper indicate that the algorithm converges quickly and reduces the network energy consumption remarkably.

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Differential games are considered an extension of optimal control problems, which are used to formulate centralized control problems in smart grids. Optimal control theory is used to study systems consisting of one agent with one objective, whereas differential games are used to formulate systems consisting of multiple agents with multiple objectives. Therefore, a differential-game-theoretic approach is appropriate for formulating decentralized demand-side energy management systems where there are multiple decision-making entities interacting with each other. Moreover, in many smart grid applications, we need to obtain information for control via communication systems. To formulate the influence of communication availability, differential game theory is also promising because the availability of communication is considered as part of an information structure (i.e., feedback or open-loop) in differential games. The feedback information structure is adopted when information for control can be obtained, whereas the open-loop information structure is applied when the information cannot be obtained because of communication failure. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for evaluating the performance of demand-side actors in a demand-side management system using each control scheme according to both communication availability and sampling frequency. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed comprehensive framework allows for an analysis of trade-off for decentralized and centralized control schemes.

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Energy harvesting technology was introduced into wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to solve the problem of the short lifetimes of sensor nodes. The technology gives sensor nodes the ability to convert environmental energy into electricity. Sufficient electrical energy can lengthen the lifetime and improve the quality of service of a WSN. This paper proposes a novel use of mutual information to evaluate data transmission behavior in the energy harvesting WSNs. Data at a sink for a node deteriorates over time until the next periodic transmission from the node is received. In this paper, we suggest an optimized intermittent transmission method for WSNs that harvest energy. Our method overcomes the problem of information deterioration without increasing energy cost. We show that by using spatial correlation between different sensor nodes, our proposed method can mitigate information deterioration significantly at the sink.

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We discuss the division of radio resources in the time and frequency domains for wireless local area network (WLAN) devices powered with microwave energy. In general, there are two ways to avoid microwave power transmission (MPT) from influencing data communications: adjacent channel operation of continuous MPT and WLAN data transmission and co-channel operation of intermittent MPT and WLAN data transmission. Experimental results reveal that, even when we implement these methods, several problems arise because WLAN devices have been developed without supposing the existence of MPT. One problem clarified in our experiment is that adjacent channel operation at 2.4GHz does not necessarily perform well owing to the interference from MPT. This interference occurs regardless of the frequency separation at 2.4GHz. The other problem is that intermittent MPT could result in throughput degradation owing to the data rate control algorithm and the association scheme of the WLAN. In addition, the experimental results imply that a microwave energy source and a WLAN device should share information on the timings of intermittent MPT and data transmission to avoid buffer overflow.

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In this paper, we study the feasibility of a batteryless wireless sensor supplied with energy by using microwave power transmission (MPT). If we perform co-channel operation of MPT and wireless local area networks (WLANs) for the sake of spectral efficiency, a time division method for MPT and WLAN communications is required to avoid serious interference from MPT to WLAN data transmissions. In addition, to reduce the power consumption of a sensor, the use of power-save operation of the sensor is desirable. We proposed a scheduling scheme that allocates time for MPT and WLAN communications. Specifically, in the proposed scheduling system, an energy source transmits microwave power to a sensor station except when the sensor station transmits data frames or receives beacon frames. In addition, in the proposed scheduling system, we force the remaining energy of the sensor station to converge to a maximum value by adjusting the time interval of data transmission from the sensor station such that the power consumption of the sensor station is reduced. On the basis of the proposition, we implemented a scheduling system and then confirmed that it performed successfully in the conducted experiments. Finally, we discussed the feasibility of the proposed scheduling scheme by evaluating the coverage and then showed that the scheduling scheme can be applied to closed space or room.

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It is known that the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) provides various telecom services e.g., VoIP, instant messaging, and video conferencing. In the IMS, these services are provided with session initiation protocol (SIP) handled by call/session control function servers (CSCFs). Completing the SIP signaling call flow without delay is vital to provide satisfactory services to the users. For service continuity, previous studies redundantly synchronized session states of CSCFs with backup servers. This paper proposes an IMS restoration system that selectively stores the session states. This is achieved by utilizing the retransmission mechanism of SIP. Time-based simulation emulating the process of backup servers shows that the proposed system reduces the number of backup servers to less than 38% compared to the previous studies, without degrading the service quality.

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Despite the increasing use of mobile computing, exploiting its full potential is difficult due to its inherent characteristics such as error-prone transmission channels, diverse node capabilities, frequent disconnections and mobility. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a paradigm that is aimed at overcoming previous problems through integrating mobile devices with cloud computing. Mobile devices, in the traditional client-server architecture of MCC, offload their tasks to the cloud to utilize the computation and storage resources of data centers. However, along with the development of hardware and software technologies in mobile devices, researchers have begun to take into consideration local resource sharing among mobile devices themselves. This is defined as the cooperation based architecture of MCC. Analogous to the conventional terminology, the resource platforms that are comprised of surrounding surrogate mobile devices are called local resource clouds. Some researchers have recently verified the feasibility and benefits of this strategy. However, existing work has neglected an important issue with this approach, i.e., how to construct local resource clouds in dynamic mobile wireless networks. This paper presents the concept and design of a local resource cloud that is both energy and time efficient. Along with theoretical models and formal definitions of problems, an efficient heuristic algorithm with low computational complexity is also presented. The results from simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models and method.

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Researchers have developed several social-based routing protocols for delay tolerant networks (DTNs) over the past few years. Two main routing metrics to support social-based routing in DTNs are centrality and similarity metrics. These two metrics help packets decide how to travel through the network to achieve short delay or low drop rate. This study presents a new routing scheme called Community-Relevance based Opportunistic routing (CROP). CROP uses a different message forwarding approach in DTNs by combining community structure with a new centrality metric called community relevance. One fundamental change in this approach is that community relevance values do not represent the importance of communities themselves. Instead, they are computed for each community-community relationship individually, which means that the level of importance of one community depends on the packet's destination community. The study also compares CROP with other routing algorithms such as BubbleRap and SimBet. Simulation results show that CROP achieves an average delivery ratio improvement of at least 30% and can distribute packets more fairly within the network.

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In mobile wireless sensor networks, coverage and energy are two significant factors determining network performance. When taking both factors into account, the challenges include how to select and migrate nodes to keep coverage quality, how to forecast and prevent potential coverage holes and how to use energy control in mobile networks. In this paper, we propose a new Coverage Maintenance and Energy Control (CMEC) algorithm to achieve and keep high coverage quality and energy efficiency. For CMEC, we provide a new cost metric for selecting migration nodes. Our simulation results confirm that our algorithm improves coverage performance and lifetime of network.

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At present, vast numbers of information resources are available on the Internet. However, one emerging issue is how to search and exploit these information resources in an efficient and flexible manner with high scalability. In this study, we focused our attention on the design of a distributed hash table (DHT)-based search system that supports efficient scalable multi-attribute queries of information resources in a distributed manner. Our proposed system, named D-AVTree, is built on top of a ring-based DHT, which partitions a one-dimensional key space across nodes in the system. It utilizes a descriptive naming scheme, which names each resource using an attribute-value (AV) tree, and the resource names are mapped to d-bit keys in order to distribute the resource information to responsible nodes based on a DHT routing algorithm. Our mapping scheme maps each AV branch of a resource name to a d-bit key where AV branches that share a subsequence of AV pairs are mapped to a continuous portion of the key space. Therefore, our mapping scheme ensures that the number of resources distributed to a node is small and it facilitates efficient multi-attribute queries by querying only a small number of nodes. Further, the scheme has good compatibility with key-based load balancing algorithms for DHT-based networks. Our system can achieve both efficiency and a good degree of load balancing even when the distribution of AV pairs in the resource names is skewed. Our simulation results demonstrated the efficiency of our solution in terms of the distribution cost, query hit ratio, and the degree of load balancing compared with conventional approaches.

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With the phenomenal explosion in online services, social networks are becoming an emerging ubiquitous platform for numerous services where service consumers require the selection of trustworthy service providers before invoking services with the help of other intermediate participants. Under this circumstance, evaluation of the trustworthiness of the service provider along the social trust paths from the service consumer to the service provider is required and to this end, selection of the optimal social trust path (OSTP) that can yield the most trustworthy evaluation result is a pre-requisite. OSTP selection with multiple quality of trust (QoT) constraints has been proven to be NP-Complete. Heuristic algorithms with polynomial and pseudo-polynomial-time complexities are often used to deal with this problem. However, existing solutions cannot guarantee the search efficiency, that is, they have difficulty in avoiding suboptimal solutions during the search process. Quantum annealing uses delocalization and tunneling to avoid local minima without sacrificing execution time. Several recent studies have proven that it is a promising way to tackle many optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a novel quantum annealing based OSTP selection algorithm (QA_OSTP) for large-scale complex social networks. Experiments show that QA_OSTP has better performance than its heuristic counterparts.

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In this paper, compact reconfigurable wideband Inverted-F Antenna (IFA) elements are proposed for a Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile terminal. The proposed inverted-F antenna has a very simple planar arrangement. A capacitive coupling feed strip is employed to modify the input impedance matching. A chip inductor is connected in series to the feeding point to realize the wideband property. The whole Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna system consists of two similar inverted-F antenna elements. Antenna element #1 has a wideband property with a 6-dB bandwidth from 0.74 to 0.9GHz. To further expand the bandwidth, antenna element #2 has a reconfigurable property through the use of a Positive Intrinsic-Negative (PIN) diode. Antenna element #2 has a 6-dB bandwidth from 0.74 to 0.84GHz when the PIN diode is on and from 0.79 to 0.9GHz when the PIN diode is off. Moreover, the proposed MIMO antenna has a low radiation-pattern-based envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), which is less than 0.15 over LTE bands 4, 5, 13, and 14.

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This paper presents a method to seamlessly extend the coverage of energy supply field for wireless sensor networks in order to free sensors from wires and batteries, where the multi-point scheme is employed to overcome path-loss attenuation, while the carrier shift diversity is introduced to mitigate the effect of interference between multiple wave sources. As we focus on the energy transmission part, sensor or communication schemes are out of scope of this paper. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed wireless energy transmission, this paper conducts indoor experiments in which we compare the power distribution and the coverage performance of different energy transmission schemes including conventional single-point, simple multi-point and our proposed multi-point scheme. To easily observe the effect of the standing-wave caused by multipath and interference between multiple wave sources, 3D measurements are performed in an empty room. The results of our experiments together with those of a simulation that assumes a similar antenna setting in free space environment show that the coverage of single-point and multi-point wireless energy transmission without carrier shift diversity are limited by path-loss, standing-wave created by multipath and interference between multiple wave sources. On the other hand, the proposed scheme can overcome power attenuation due to the path-loss as well as the effect of standing-wave created by multipath and interference between multiple wave sources.

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In this paper, we consider multi-source multi-relay power allocation in cooperative wireless networks. A new intelligent optimization algorithm, multi-objective free search (MOFS), is proposed to efficiently allocate cooperative relay power to better support multiple sources transmission. The existence of Pareto optimal solutions is analyzed for the proposed multi-objective power allocation model when the objectives conflict with each other, and the MOFS algorithm is validated using several test functions and metrics taken from the standard literature on evolutionary multi-objective optimization. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively get the potential optimal solutions of multi-objective power allocation problem, and it can effectively optimize the tradeoff between network sum-rate and fairness in different applications by selection of the corresponding solution.

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Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) combined with time division multiplexing (OFDM/TDM) based on frequency domain equalization (FDE) has been proposed to reduce the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM and improve the bit error rate (BER) performance in comparison to the conventional OFDM. However, due to the nonlinearity of the high-power amplifier (HPA) at the transmitter and the fact that the PAPR problem is not completely eliminated, the nonlinear noise due to HPA saturation still degrades the BER performance. In this paper, we theoretically evaluate the effect of nonlinear HPA on the performance of MIMO-OFDM/TDM using a minimum-mean square-error frequency-domain equalizer (MMSE-FDE). We determine the equalization weights while taking into account the negative effect of HPA saturation and then evaluate the system performance in terms of average BER and ergodic capacity by way of both, numerical and computer simulation. Our simulation results have shown that appropriate system design can make MIMO-OFDM/TDM more robust against nonlinear degradation due to HPA saturation in comparison to MIMO-OFDM while reducing required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the given target BER.

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In this paper, a new analog signal transmission technique called analog single-carrier transmission with frequency-domain equalization (analog SC-FDE) is proposed. Analog SC-FDE applies discrete Fourier transform (DFT), frequency-domain spectrum shaping and mapping, inverse DFT (IDFT), and cyclic prefix (CP) insertion before transmission. At the receiver, one-tap FDE is applied to take advantage of frequency diversity. This paper considers, as an example, analog voice transmission. A theoretical analysis of the normalized mean square error (NMSE) performance is carried out to evaluate the transmission property of the proposed analog SC-FDE and is confirmed by computer simulation. We show that analog SC-FDE achieves better NMSE performance than conventional analog signal transmission scheme.

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In this paper, we propose a joint transmit and receive linear filtering based on minimum mean square error criterion (joint Tx/Rx MMSE filtering) for single-carrier (SC) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission. Joint Tx/Rx MMSE filtering transforms the MIMO channel to the orthogonal eigenmodes to avoid the inter-antenna interference (IAI) and performs MMSE based transmit power allocation to sufficiently suppress the inter-symbol interference (ISI) resulting from the severe frequency-selectivity of the channel. Rank adaptation and adaptive modulation are jointly introduced to narrow the gap of received signal-to-interference plus noise power ratio (SINR) among eigenmodes. The superiority of the SC-MIMO transmission with joint Tx/Rx MMSE filtering and joint rank adaptation/adaptive modulation is confirmed by computer simulation.

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This paper presents an efficient multi-service allocation scheme for the digital television terrestrial broadcasting systems in which the fixed service is modulated by orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and quadrature amplitude modulation (OFDM/QAM) with larger FFT size and the added mobile service is modulated by OFDM and offset quadrature amplitude modulation (OQAM) with smaller FFT size. The two different types of services share one 8MHz broadcasting channel. The isotropic orthogonal transform algorithm (IOTA) is chosen as the shaping filter for OQAM because of its isotropic convergence in time and frequency domain and the proper FFT size is selected to maximum the transmission capacity under mobile environment. The corresponding transceiver architecture is also proposed and analyzed. Simulations show that the newly added mobile service generates much less out-of-band interference to the fixed service and has a better performance under fast fading wireless channels.

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An accurate time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation method for isolated pulses positioning system is proposed in this paper. The method is based on a multi-level crossing timing (MCT) digitizer and least square (LS) criterion, namely LS-MCT method, in which TOA of the received signal is directly described as a parameterized combination of a set of MCT samples of the leading and trailing edges of the signal. The LS-MCT method performs a receiver training process, in which a GPS synchronized training pulse generator (TPG) is used to obtain training data and determine the parameters of the TOA combination. The LS method is then used to optimize the combination parameters with a minimization criterion. The proposed method is compared to the conventional TOA estimation methods such as leading edge level crossing discriminator (LCD), adaptive thresholding (ATH), and signal peak detection (PD) methods. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm leads to lower sensitivity to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and attains better TOA estimation accuracy than available TOA methods.

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H.264/AVC estimates the prediction mode from the modes of neighboring blocks in order to reduce the quantity of bits needed to represent the best mode. The estimated mode is known as Most Probable Mode (MPM). When QP changes, the probability of MPM increases. In this paper, we propose an adaptive mode signaling method based on the probability of MPM. According to the probability of MPM, a conventional MPM method and the proposed merging method are adaptively used to signal the intra prediction mode. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an average bit savings of 0.727% and an average PSNR gain of 0.041dB. In the low bit rate condition, the proposed method achieves an average bit savings of 1.795%, and a PSNR gain of 0.103dB, compared to H.264/AVC.

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