Design Optimization of an Integrated E-Type Multilink Suspension Wheel-Side Drive System and Improvement of Vehicle Ride Comfort

Distributed-drive electric vehicles constitute an important research direction for the future development of electric vehicles. In this regard, the integrated suspension wheel-side drive system has considerable development potential because it can address the lack of driving smoothness and the grounding deterioration caused by the excessive unsprung mass of the distributed-drive system. However, a complete and systematic description of the design of such a system is not available in the literature. Therefore, this paper proposes a design process for an integrated E-type multilink suspension wheel-side drive system and a method to improve the vehicle ride comfort. Based on a configuration analysis of the E-type multilink suspension using the orientation feature set method, the ADAMS platform was used to optimize the hard point coordinates of the suspension with the integrated E-type multilink suspension wheel-side drive system as the object, and the spring stiffness and damper were designed considering the driving smoothness and the grounding of the vehicle. The bushing stiffnesses were determined through tests, and the feasibility of each bushing installation was determined via elastic kinematic simulation of the integrated E-type multilink wheel-side drive system; then, optimization design of bushing stiffness was carried out for ride smoothness. Then, a lightweight design of the gears’ reducer was performed. Finally, the specific structural design and strength verification of the key components of the designed system were conducted. The results indicated that the strength of each component of the wheel-side drive system met the requirements. Thus, the overall design process of the integrated suspension wheel-side drive system was improved. This study can therefore serve as a reference for the integrated design and vehicle ride comfort improvement of wheel-side drive systems and suspensions.

No fruits without color: Cross-modal priming and EEG reveal different roles for different features across semantic categories

Category-specific impairments witnessed in patients with semantic deficits have broadly dissociated into natural and artificial kinds. However, how the category of food (more specifically, fruits and vegetables) fits into this distinction has been difficult to interpret, given a pattern of deficit that has inconsistently mapped onto either kind, despite its intuitive membership to the natural domain. The present study explores the effects of a manipulation of a visual sensory (i.e., color) or functional (i.e., orientation) feature on the consequential semantic processing of fruits and vegetables (and tools, by comparison), first at the behavioral and then at the neural level. The categorization of natural (i.e., fruits/vegetables) and artificial (i.e., utensils) entities was investigated via cross–modal priming. Reaction time analysis indicated a reduction in priming for color-modified natural entities and orientation-modified artificial entities. Standard event-related potentials (ERP) analysis was performed, in addition to linear classification. For natural entities, a N400 effect at central channel sites was observed for the color-modified condition compared relative to normal and orientation conditions, with this difference confirmed by classification analysis. Conversely, there was no significant difference between conditions for the artificial category in either analysis. These findings provide strong evidence that color is an integral property to the categorization of fruits/vegetables, thus substantiating the claim that feature-based processing guides as a function of semantic category.

Visual Security Assessment via Saliency-Weighted Structure and Orientation Similarity for Selective Encrypted Images

Selective encryption has been widely used in image privacy protection. Visual security assessment is necessary for the effectiveness and practicability of image encryption methods, and there have been a series of research studies on this aspect. However, these methods do not take into account perceptual factors. In this paper, we propose a new visual security assessment (VSA) by saliency-weighted structure and orientation similarity. Considering that the human visual perception is sensitive to the characteristics of selective encrypted images, we extract the structure and orientation feature maps, and then similarity measurements are conducted on these feature maps to generate the structure and orientation similarity maps. Next, we compute the saliency map of the original image. Then, a simple saliency-based pooling strategy is subsequently used to combine these measurements and generate the final visual security score. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public encryption databases, and the results demonstrate the superiority and robustness of our proposed VSA compared with the existing most advanced work.

Inherent Importance of Early Visual Features in Attraction of Human Attention

Local contrasts attract human attention to different areas of an image. Studies have shown that orientation, color, and intensity are some basic visual features which their contrasts attract our attention. Since these features are in different modalities, their contribution in the attraction of human attention is not easily comparable. In this study, we investigated the importance of these three features in the attraction of human attention in synthetic and natural images. Choosing 100% percent detectable contrast in each modality, we studied the competition between different features. Psychophysics results showed that, although single features can be detected easily in all trials, when features were presented simultaneously in a stimulus, orientation always attracts subject’s attention. In addition, computational results showed that orientation feature map is more informative about the pattern of human saccades in natural images. Finally, using optimization algorithms we quantified the impact of each feature map in construction of the final saliency map.

Object-based grouping benefits without integrated feature representations in visual working memory

Visual working memory (VWM) is typically considered to represent complete objects—that is, separate parts of an object are maintained as bound objects. Yet it remains unclear whether and how the features of disparate parts are integrated into a whole-object memory representation. Using a change detection paradigm, the present study investigated whether VWM performance varies as a function of grouping strength for features that either determine the grouped object (orientation) or that are not directly grouping relevant (color). Our results showed a large grouping benefit for grouping-relevant orientation features and, additionally, a much smaller, albeit reliable, benefit for grouping-irrelevant color features when both were potentially task relevant. By contrast, when color was the only task-relevant feature, no grouping benefit from the orientation feature was revealed both under lower or relatively high demands for precision. Together, these results indicate that different features of an object are stored independently in VWM; and an emerging, higher-order grouping structure does not automatically lead to an integrated representation of all available features of an object. Instead, an object benefit depends on the specific task demands, which may generate a linked, task-dependent representation of independent features.

No fruits without color: Cross-modal priming and EEG reveal different roles for different features across semantic categories

Category-specific impairments witnessed in patients with semantic deficits have broadly dissociated into natural and artificial kinds. However, how the category of food (more specifically, fruits and vegetables) fits into this distinction has been difficult to interpret, given a pattern of deficit that has inconsistently mapped onto either kind, despite its intuitive membership to the natural domain. The present study explores the effects of a manipulation of a visual sensory (i.e., color) or functional (i.e., orientation) feature on the consequential semantic processing of fruits and vegetables (and tools, by comparison), first at the behavioral and then at the neural level. The categorization of natural (i.e., fruits/vegetables) and artificial (i.e., utensils) entities was investigated via cross–modal priming. Reaction time analysis indicated a reduction in priming for color-modified natural entities and orientation-modified artificial entities. Standard event-related potentials (ERP) analysis was performed, in addition to linear classification. For natural entities, a N400 effect at central channel sites was observed for the color-modified condition compared relative to normal and orientation conditions, with this difference confirmed by classification analysis. Conversely, there was no significant difference between conditions for the artificial category in either analysis. These findings provide strong evidence that color is an integral property to the categorization of fruits/vegetables, thus substantiating the claim that feature-based processing guides as a function of semantic category.