A Binary Particle Swarm Optimization for IC Floorplanning

Background: In the field of IC physical design, there is a big problem in the IC floorplanning to find the early feedback to estimate the area, wire length, delay, etc. before IC fabrication. Objective: In this paper, minimization of the area and total wire length on the IC has been done using Binary Particle Swarm Optimization with sequence pair representation. Methods: Optimization of the IC floorplan works in two phases. In the first phase, the floorplan is constructed by sequence pair representation without any overlapping of the modules on IC floorplan. In the second phase, Binary Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm explores the packing of all modules in floorplan to find better optimal performances i.e. area and wire length. Results: The results obtained were compared with the solutions derived from other meta-heuristic algorithms, the area is improved maximum up to 10% and the wire length was improved maximum up to 28%. Conclusion: The Experimental results on Microelectronic Center of North Carolina benchmark circuits show that Binary Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm gives better convergence for the area and wire length optimization than other algorithms.

A Novel Approach to Face Verification Based on Second-Order Face-Pair Representation

Face representation and matching are two essential issues in face verification task. Various approaches have been proposed focusing on these two issues. However, few of them addressed the joint optimal solutions of these two issues in a unified framework. In this paper, we present a second-order face representation method for face pair and a unified face verification framework, in which the feature extractors and the subsequent binary classification model design can be selected flexibly. Our contributions can be summarized in the following aspects. First, a novel face-pair representation method that employs the second-order statistical property of the face pairs is proposed, which retains more information compared to the existing methods. Second, a flexible binary classification model, which differs from the conventionally used metric learning, is constructed based on the new face-pair representation. Finally, we verify that our proposed face-pair representation can benefit from large training datasets. All the experiments are carried out on Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) to verify the algorithm’s effectiveness against challenging uncontrolled conditions.

Psychophysical aspects of contrast sensitivity

This paper reviews the psychophysical aspects of contrast sensitivity which concerns components of visual stimuli and the behavioural responses and methods used in contrast sensitivity testing. Some discussion is included of the different types of contrast sensitivity charts available as well as a brief background on the different types of graphical representations of contrast sensitivity and contrast visual acuities. Two illustrations alsodemonstrate stereo-pair representation of contrast visual acuities in the context of diabetic eyes. The doctoral research of the first author (AYS) that applies similar idea to understanding both inter- and intra-ocular variation of contrast visual acuities.