Ferromagnetic Co77Cr20Ta3 layers were deposited on a Pt seed layer by a facing targets sputtering apparatus. The Co-Cr-Ta and Pt crystallites revealed better c-axis orientation at a substrate temperature Ts above 200C. Relatively high perpendicular coercivity Hc⊥ of 2.5 kOe was obtained for the bilayered film with a Co-Cr-Ta layer thickness, δCo, of 50 nm deposited at Ts of 250C. Although the Co-Cr-Ta/Pt medium with δCo of 100 nm exhibited lower recording density than a Co-Cr-Ta/Cr longitudinal one, its noise level became small at the high-density recording range. Measurement of the anomalous Hall voltage clarified that the bilayered film with δCo as small as 30 nm revealed larger perpendicular magnetization than the single layer. The Pt seed layer is effective for depositing thin ferromagnetic Co-Cr-Ta layers below 100 nm in thickness.

Secure communications via chaotic synchronization is experimentally demonstrated using 3-pieces of commercial integrated circuit phase-locked loops, MC14046. Different from the conventional chaotic synchronization secure communication systems where one channel is used, our system uses two channels to send one signal to be concealed. Namely, one channel is used to send a synchronizing chaotic signal. The other channel is used to send the informational signal superimposed on the chaotic masking signal at transmitter side. The synchronizing chaotic signal is applied as a common input to two identical PLL's located at both transmitter and receiver sides. It has been shown previously by us that the VCO inputs of almost identical two PLL's driven by a common chaotic signal become chaotic, and synchronized with each other. This synchronization is only possible for those who knows exact internal configuration and exact parameter values of the PLL at transmitter side. Therefore, we can use the synchronized VCO input signal as a masking signal which can be used as a key for secure communications. The advantage of this method compared to the previous one channel method is that informational signal frequency range does not affect the quality of recovered signal. Our experiments demonstrate good masking and recovery characteristics for sinusoidal, triangular, and square waves.

This paper proposes a new face recognition method based on mutual projection of feature distributions. The proposed method introduces a new robust measurement between two feature distributions. This measurement is computed by a harmonic mean of two distance values obtained by projection of each mean value into the opposite feature distribution. The proposed method does not require eigenvalue analysis of the two subspaces. This method was applied to face recognition task of temporal image sequence. Experimental results demonstrate that the computational cost was improved without degradation of identification performance in comparison with the conventional method.