著者

Hiroshi YASUDA Ryota KAIHARA Suguru SAITO Masayuki NAKAJIMA

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E91.D, no.4, pp.1159-1167, 2008-04-01 (Released:2010-03-01)

参考文献数

20

被引用文献数

10

---

Because motion capture system enabled us to capture a number of human motions, the demand for a method to easily browse the captured motion database has been increasing. In this paper, we propose a method to generate simple visual outlines of motion clips, for the purpose of efficient motion data browsing. Our method unfolds a motion clip into a 2D stripe of keyframes along a timeline that is based on semantic keyframe extraction and the best view point selection for each keyframes. With our visualization, timing and order of actions in the motions are clearly visible and the contents of multiple motions are easily comparable. In addition, because our method is applicable for a wide variety of motions, it can generate outlines for a large amount of motions fully automatically.

著者

Wei GAO Lin HAN Rongcai ZHAO Yingying LI Jian LIU

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E100.D, no.1, pp.91-106, 2017-01-01 (Released:2017-01-01)

参考文献数

32

---

Single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) extension provides an energy-efficient platform to scale the performance of media and scientific applications while still retaining post-programmability. However, the major challenge is to translate the parallel resources of the SIMD hardware into real application performance. Currently, all the slots in the vector register are used when compilers exploit SIMD parallelism of programs, which can be called sufficient vectorization. Sufficient vectorization means all the data in the vector register is valid. Because all the slots which vector register provides must be used, the chances of vectorizing programs with low SIMD parallelism are abandoned by sufficient vectorization method. In addition, the speedup obtained by full use of vector register sometimes is not as great as that obtained by partial use. Specifically, the length of vector register provided by SIMD extension becomes longer, sufficient vectorization method cannot exploit the SIMD parallelism of programs completely. Therefore, insufficient vectorization method is proposed, which refer to partial use of vector register. First, the adaptation scene of insufficient vectorization is analyzed. Second, the methods of computing inter-iteration and intra-iteration SIMD parallelism for loops are put forward. Furthermore, according to the relationship between the parallelism and vector factor a method is established to make the choice of vectorization method, in order to vectorize programs as well as possible. Finally, code generation strategy for insufficient vectorization is presented. Benchmark test results show that insufficient vectorization method vectorized more programs than sufficient vectorization method by 107.5% and the performance achieved by insufficient vectorization method is 12.1% higher than that achieved by sufficient vectorization method.

著者

Takuya MIYASAKA Yuichiro HEI Takeshi KITAHARA

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E104.D, no.5, pp.617-627, 2021-05-01 (Released:2021-05-01)

参考文献数

37

被引用文献数

1

---

Application-aware Traffic Engineering (TE) plays a crucial role in ensuring quality of services (QoS) for recently emerging applications such as AR, VR, cloud gaming, and connected vehicles. While a deterministic application-aware TE is required for these mission-critical applications, a negotiation procedure between applications and network operators needs to undergo major simplification to fulfill the scalability of the application based on emerging microservices and container-based architecture. In this paper, we propose a NetworkAPI framework which allows an application to indicate a desired TE behavior inside IP packets by leveraging Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6). In the NetworkAPI framework, the TE behavior provided by the network operator is expressed as an SRv6 Segment Identifier (SID) in the form of a 128-bit IPv6 address. Because the IPv6 address of an SRv6 SID is distributed using IP anycast, the application can utilize the unchanged SRv6 SID regardless of the application's location, as if the application controls an API on the transport network. We implement a prototype of the NetworkAPI framework on a Linux kernel. On the prototype implementation, a basic packet forwarding performance is evaluated to demonstrate the feasibility of our framework.

著者

Satoshi MIZOGUCHI Yuki SAITO Shinnosuke TAKAMICHI Hiroshi SARUWATARI

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E104-D, no.11, pp.1971-1980, 2021-11-01

被引用文献数

1

---

We propose deep neural network (DNN)-based speech enhancement that reduces musical noise and achieves better auditory impressions. The musical noise is an artifact generated by nonlinear signal processing and negatively affects the auditory impressions. We aim to develop musical-noise-free speech enhancement methods that suppress the musical noise generation and produce perceptually-comfortable enhanced speech. DNN-based speech enhancement using a soft mask achieves high noise reduction but generates musical noise in non-speech regions. Therefore, first, we define kurtosis matching for DNN-based low-musical-noise speech enhancement. Kurtosis is the fourth-order moment and is known to correlate with the amount of musical noise. The kurtosis matching is a penalty term of the DNN training and works to reduce the amount of musical noise. We further extend this scheme to standardized-moment matching. The extended scheme involves using moments whose orders are higher than kurtosis and generalizes the conventional musical-noise-free method based on kurtosis matching. We formulate standardized-moment matching and explore how effectively the higher-order moments reduce the amount of musical noise. Experimental evaluation results 1) demonstrate that kurtosis matching can reduce musical noise without negatively affecting noise suppression and 2) newly reveal that the sixth-moment matching also achieves low-musical-noise speech enhancement as well as kurtosis matching.

著者

Kenya TAJIMA Yoshihiro HIROHASHI Esmeraldo ZARA Tsuyoshi KATO

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E104-D, no.11, pp.1923-1929, 2021-11-01

---

The multi-category support vector machine (MC-SVM) is one of the most popular machine learning algorithms. There are numerous MC-SVM variants, although different optimization algorithms were developed for diverse learning machines. In this study, we developed a new optimization algorithm that can be applied to several MC-SVM variants. The algorithm is based on the Frank-Wolfe framework that requires two subproblems, direction-finding and line search, in each iteration. The contribution of this study is the discovery that both subproblems have a closed form solution if the Frank-Wolfe framework is applied to the dual problem. Additionally, the closed form solutions on both the direction-finding and line search exist even for the Moreau envelopes of the loss functions. We used several large datasets to demonstrate that the proposed optimization algorithm rapidly converges and thereby improves the pattern recognition performance.

著者

Yang OU Kyung Hyune RHEE

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E93.D, no.5, pp.1020-1030, 2010-05-01 (Released:2010-05-01)

参考文献数

50

被引用文献数

3 6

---

The traditional cryptographic hash functions are sensitive to even one-bit difference of the input message. While multimedia data always undergo compression or other signal processing operations, which lead to the unsuitability of multimedia authentication using cryptographic hash. The image hashing has emerged recently which captures visual essentials for robust image authentication. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey of image hashing. We present an overview of various image hashing schemes and discuss their advantages and limitations in terms of security, robustness, and discrimination under different types of operations on the image.

著者

ZHANG Wei REN Huan JIANG Qingshan

出版者

一般社団法人 電子情報通信学会

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.99, no.4, pp.1062-1070, 2016

被引用文献数

6

---

Phishing attacks target financial returns by luring Internet users to exposure their sensitive information. Phishing originates from e-mail fraud, and recently it is also spread by social networks and short message service (SMS), which makes phishing become more widespread. Phishing attacks have drawn great attention due to their high volume and causing heavy losses, and many methods have been developed to fight against them. However, most of researches suffered low detection accuracy or high false positive (FP) rate, and phishing attacks are facing the Internet users continuously. In this paper, we are concerned about feature engineering for improving the classification performance on phishing web pages detection. We propose a novel anti-phishing framework that employs feature engineering including feature selection and feature extraction. First, we perform feature selection based on genetic algorithm (GA) to divide features into critical features and non-critical features. Then, the non-critical features are projected to a new feature by implementing feature extraction based on a two-stage projection pursuit (PP) algorithm. Finally, we take the critical features and the new feature as input data to construct the detection model. Our anti-phishing framework does not simply eliminate the non-critical features, but considers utilizing their projection in the process of classification, which is different from literatures. Experimental results show that the proposed framework is effective in detecting phishing web pages.

著者

ETO Masashi TANAKA Tomohide SUZUKI Koei SUZUKI Mio INOUE Daisuke NAKAO Koji

出版者

一般社団法人 電子情報通信学会

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.98, no.4, pp.788-795, 2015

被引用文献数

1

---

A number of network monitoring sensors such as honeypot and web crawler have been launched to observe increasingly-sophisticated cyber attacks. Based on these technologies, there have been several large scale network monitoring projects launched to fight against cyber threats on the Internet. Meanwhile, these projects are facing some problems such as Difficulty of collecting wide range darknet, Burden of honeypot operation and Blacklisting problem of honeypot address. In order to address these problems, this paper proposes a novel proactive cyber attack monitoring platform called GHOST sensor, which enables effective utilization of physical and logical resources such as hardware of sensors and monitoring IP addresses as well as improves the efficiency of attack information collection. The GHOST sensor dynamically allocates targeted IP addresses to appropriate sensors so that the sensors can flexibly monitor attacks according to profiles of each attacker. Through an evaluation in a experiment environment, this paper presents the efficiency of attack observation and resource utilization.

著者

Takafumi KUBOTA Kenji KONO

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E104.D, no.1, pp.126-137, 2021-01-01 (Released:2021-01-01)

参考文献数

52

---

Build systems are essential tools for developing large software projects. Traditionally, build systems have been designed for high incremental-build performance. However, the longer build times of recent large C++ projects have imposed a requirement on build systems: i.e., unity builds. Unity builds are a build technique for speeding up sequential compilation of many source files by bundling multiple source files into one. Unity builds lead to a significant reduction in build time through removal of redundant parsing of shared header files. However, unity builds have a negative effect on incremental builds because each compiler task gets larger. Our previous study reported existing unity builds overlook many better bundle configurations that improve unity-build performance without increasing the incremental-build time. Motivated by the problem, we present a novel build system for better performance in unity builds. Our build system aims to achieve competitive unity-build performance in full builds with mitigating the negative effect on incremental builds. To accomplish this goal, our build system uses sophisticated bundle strategies developed on the basis of hints extracted from the preprocessed code of each source file. Thanks to the strategies, our build system finds better bundle configurations that improve both of the full-build performance and the incremental-build performance in unity builds. For example, in comparison with the state-of-the-art unity builds of WebKit, our build system improves build performance by 9% in full builds, by 39% in incremental builds, and by 23% in continuous builds that include both types of the builds.

著者

Takaaki SAEKI Yuki SAITO Shinnosuke TAKAMICHI Hiroshi SARUWATARI

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E104-D, no.7, pp.1002-1016, 2021-07-01

被引用文献数

2

---

This paper proposes two high-fidelity and computationally efficient neural voice conversion (VC) methods based on a direct waveform modification using spectral differentials. The conventional spectral-differential VC method with a minimum-phase filter achieves high-quality conversion for narrow-band (16 kHz-sampled) VC but requires heavy computational cost in filtering. This is because the minimum phase obtained using a fixed lifter of the Hilbert transform often results in a long-tap filter. Furthermore, when we extend the method to full-band (48 kHz-sampled) VC, the computational cost is heavy due to increased sampling points, and the converted-speech quality degrades due to large fluctuations in the high-frequency band. To construct a short-tap filter, we propose a lifter-training method for data-driven phase reconstruction that trains a lifter of the Hilbert transform by taking into account filter truncation. We also propose a frequency-band-wise modeling method based on sub-band multi-rate signal processing (sub-band modeling method) for full-band VC. It enhances the computational efficiency by reducing sampling points of signals converted with filtering and improves converted-speech quality by modeling only the low-frequency band. We conducted several objective and subjective evaluations to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed methods through implementation of the real-time, online, full-band VC system we developed, which is based on the proposed methods. The results indicate that 1) the proposed lifter-training method for narrow-band VC can shorten the tap length to 1/16 without degrading the converted-speech quality, and 2) the proposed sub-band modeling method for full-band VC can improve the converted-speech quality while reducing the computational cost, and 3) our real-time, online, full-band VC system can convert 48 kHz-sampled speech in real time attaining the converted speech with a 3.6 out of 5.0 mean opinion score of naturalness.

著者

Keika MORI Takuya WATANABE Yunao ZHOU Ayako AKIYAMA HASEGAWA Mitsuaki AKIYAMA Tatsuya MORI

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E103.D, no.7, pp.1541-1555, 2020-07-01 (Released:2020-07-01)

参考文献数

33

被引用文献数

1 2

---

This work aims to determine the propensity of password creation through the lens of language spheres. To this end, we consider four different countries, each with a different culture/language: China/Chinese, United Kingdom (UK) and India/English, and Japan/Japanese. We first employ a user study to verify whether language and culture are reflected in password creation. We found that users in India, Japan, and the UK prefer to create their passwords from base words, and the kinds of words they are incorporated into passwords vary between countries. We then test whether the findings obtained through the user study are reflected in a corpus of leaked passwords. We found that users in China and Japan prefer dates, while users in India, Japan, and the UK prefer names. We also found that cultural words (e.g., “sakura” in Japan and “football” in the UK) are frequently used to create passwords. Finally, we demonstrate that the knowledge on the linguistic background of targeted users can be exploited to increase the speed of the password guessing process.

著者

Seok-Oh YUN Jung Hoon LEE Jin LEE Choul-Young KIM

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E102.D, no.5, pp.1115-1118, 2019-05-01 (Released:2019-05-01)

参考文献数

12

被引用文献数

1 7

---

Real-time monitoring of heart rate (HR) and body temperature (BT) is crucial for the prognosis and the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease and healthcare. Since current monitoring systems are too rigid and bulky, it is not easy to attach them to the human body. Also, their large current consumption limits the working time. In this paper, we develop a wireless sensor patch for HR and BT by integrating sensor chip, wireless communication chip, and electrodes on the flexible boards that is covered with non-toxic, but skin-friendly adhesive patch. Our experimental results reveal that the flexible wireless sensor patch can efficiently detect early diseases by monitoring the HR and BT in real time.

著者

Koichiro YAMANAKA Keita TAKAHASHI Toshiaki FUJII Ryuraroh MATSUMOTO

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E104.D, no.5, pp.785-788, 2021-05-01 (Released:2021-05-01)

参考文献数

15

被引用文献数

3

---

Thanks to the excellent learning capability of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), CNN-based methods have achieved great success in computer vision and image recognition tasks. However, it has turned out that these methods often have inherent vulnerabilities, which makes us cautious of the potential risks of using them for real-world applications such as autonomous driving. To reveal such vulnerabilities, we propose a method of simultaneously attacking monocular depth estimation and optical flow estimation, both of which are common artificial-intelligence-based tasks that are intensively investigated for autonomous driving scenarios. Our method can generate an adversarial patch that can fool CNN-based monocular depth estimation and optical flow estimation methods simultaneously by simply placing the patch in the input images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to achieve simultaneous patch attacks on two or more CNNs developed for different tasks.

著者

Tuan Duong NGUYEN Marthinus Christoffel DU PLESSIS Takafumi KANAMORI Masashi SUGIYAMA

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E97.D, no.7, pp.1822-1829, 2014 (Released:2014-07-01)

参考文献数

22

被引用文献数

2 4

---

We address the problem of estimating the difference between two probability densities. A naive approach is a two-step procedure that first estimates two densities separately and then computes their difference. However, such a two-step procedure does not necessarily work well because the first step is performed without regard to the second step and thus a small error in the first stage can cause a big error in the second stage. Recently, a single-shot method called the least-squares density-difference (LSDD) estimator has been proposed. LSDD directly estimates the density difference without separately estimating two densities, and it was demonstrated to outperform the two-step approach. In this paper, we propose a variation of LSDD called the constrained least-squares density-difference (CLSDD) estimator, and theoretically prove that CLSDD improves the accuracy of density difference estimation for correctly specified parametric models. The usefulness of the proposed method is also demonstrated experimentally.

著者

Masashi SUGIYAMA

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E93.D, no.10, pp.2690-2701, 2010-10-01 (Released:2010-10-01)

参考文献数

36

被引用文献数

20 36

---

Kernel logistic regression (KLR) is a powerful and flexible classification algorithm, which possesses an ability to provide the confidence of class prediction. However, its training—typically carried out by (quasi-)Newton methods—is rather time-consuming. In this paper, we propose an alternative probabilistic classification algorithm called Least-Squares Probabilistic Classifier (LSPC). KLR models the class-posterior probability by the log-linear combination of kernel functions and its parameters are learned by (regularized) maximum likelihood. In contrast, LSPC employs the linear combination of kernel functions and its parameters are learned by regularized least-squares fitting of the true class-posterior probability. Thanks to this linear regularized least-squares formulation, the solution of LSPC can be computed analytically just by solving a regularized system of linear equations in a class-wise manner. Thus LSPC is computationally very efficient and numerically stable. Through experiments, we show that the computation time of LSPC is faster than that of KLR by two orders of magnitude, with comparable classification accuracy.

著者

Hiroto SAIGO Hisashi KASHIMA Koji TSUDA

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E96.D, no.8, pp.1766-1773, 2013-08-01 (Released:2013-08-01)

参考文献数

22

---

Apriori-based mining algorithms enumerate frequent patterns efficiently, but the resulting large number of patterns makes it difficult to directly apply subsequent learning tasks. Recently, efficient iterative methods are proposed for mining discriminative patterns for classification and regression. These methods iteratively execute discriminative pattern mining algorithm and update example weights to emphasize on examples which received large errors in the previous iteration. In this paper, we study a family of loss functions that induces sparsity on example weights. Most of the resulting example weights become zeros, so we can eliminate those examples from discriminative pattern mining, leading to a significant decrease in search space and time. In computational experiments we compare and evaluate various loss functions in terms of the amount of sparsity induced and resulting speed-up obtained.

著者

ZHANG Chen XIA ShiXiong LIU Bing ZHANG Lei

出版者

一般社団法人 電子情報通信学会

雑誌

IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.96, no.8, pp.1745-1753, 2013

被引用文献数

7

---

Maximum margin clustering (MMC) is a newly proposed clustering method that extends the large-margin computation of support vector machine (SVM) to unsupervised learning. Traditionally, MMC is formulated as a nonconvex integer programming problem which makes it difficult to solve. Several methods rely on reformulating and relaxing the nonconvex optimization problem as semidefinite programming (SDP) or second-order cone program (SOCP), which are computationally expensive and have difficulty handling large-scale data sets. In linear cases, by making use of the constrained concave-convex procedure (CCCP) and cutting plane algorithm, several MMC methods take linear time to converge to a local optimum, but in nonlinear cases, time complexity is still high. Since extreme learning machine (ELM) has achieved similar generalization performance at much faster learning speed than traditional SVM and LS-SVM, we propose an extreme maximum margin clustering (EMMC) algorithm based on ELM. It can perform well in nonlinear cases. Moreover, the kernel parameters of EMMC need not be tuned by means of random feature mappings. Experimental results on several real-world data sets show that EMMC performs better than traditional MMC methods, especially in handling large-scale data sets.

著者

Tadachika OKI Satoshi TAOKA Toshiya MASHIMA Toshimasa WATANABE

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E95-D, no.3, pp.769-777, 2012-03-01

被引用文献数

1

---

The k-edge-connectivity augmentation problem with bipartition constraints (kECABP, for short) is defined by “Given an undirected graph G=(V, E) and a bipartition π = {VB, VW} of V with VB ∩ VW = ∅, find an edge set Ef of minimum cardinality, consisting of edges that connect VB and VW, such that G'=(V, E ∪ Ef) is k-edge-connected.” The problem has applications for security of statistical data stored in a cross tabulated table, and so on. In this paper we propose a fast algorithm for finding an optimal solution to (σ + 1)ECABP in O(|V||E| + |V2|log |V|) time when G is σ-edge-connected (σ > 0), and show that the problem can be solved in linear time if σ ∈ {1, 2}.

著者

Sho KANAMARU Kazushi KAWAMURA Shu TANAKA Yoshinori TOMITA Nozomu TOGAWA

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E104-D, no.2, pp.226-236, 2021-02-01

被引用文献数

3

---

Ising machines have attracted attention, which is expected to obtain better solutions of various combinatorial optimization problems at high speed by mapping the problems to natural phenomena. A slot-placement problem is one of the combinatorial optimization problems, regarded as a quadratic assignment problem, which relates to the optimal logic-block placement in a digital circuit as well as optimal delivery planning. Here, we propose a mapping to the Ising model for solving a slot-placement problem with additional constraints, called a constrained slot-placement problem, where several item pairs must be placed within a given distance. Since the behavior of Ising machines is stochastic and we map the problem to the Ising model which uses the penalty method, the obtained solution does not always satisfy the slot-placement constraint, which is different from the conventional methods such as the conventional simulated annealing. To resolve the problem, we propose an interpretation method in which a feasible solution is generated by post-processing procedures. We measured the execution time of an Ising machine and compared the execution time of the simulated annealing in which solutions with almost the same accuracy are obtained. As a result, we found that the Ising machine is faster than the simulated annealing that we implemented.

著者

Koji KAMMA Toshikazu WADA

出版者

The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

雑誌

IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.E104-D, no.1, pp.194-202, 2021-01-01

被引用文献数

1

---

This paper presents a pruning method, Reconstruction Error Aware Pruning (REAP), to reduce the redundancy of convolutional neural network models for accelerating their inference. In REAP, we have the following steps: 1) Prune the channels whose outputs are redundant and can be reconstructed from the outputs of other channels in each convolutional layer; 2) Update the weights of the remaining channels by least squares method so as to compensate the error caused by pruning. This is how we compress and accelerate the models that are initially large and slow with little degradation. The ability of REAP to maintain the model performances saves us lots of time and labors for retraining the pruned models. The challenge of REAP is the computational cost for selecting the channels to be pruned. For selecting the channels, we need to solve a huge number of least squares problems. We have developed an efficient algorithm based on biorthogonal system to obtain the solutions of those least squares problems. In the experiments, we show that REAP can conduct pruning with smaller sacrifice of the model performances than several existing methods including the previously state-of-the-art one.