A quick evaluation method is proposed to obtain stability robustness measures in polynomial coefficient space based on knowledge of coefficients of a Hurwitz stable nominal polynomial. Two norms are employed: l- and l2-norm, which correspond to the stability hypercube and hyperball in the space, respectively. Just inverting Hurwitz matrix for the nominal polynomial immediately yields closed-form estimates for the size of the hypercube and hyperball.

This paper proposes a lossless scalable audio coding scheme and quality enhancement processing at the decoder to compensate for some missing scalable units of information. The bit rate scalability is achieved by combining high-compression coding, such as MPEG-4, and horizontal bit slicing of the PCM-coded error signal between the original waveform and the locally reconstructed MPEG-4 signal. The horizontally sliced stream may be transported through an IP network with priority. Even if some units are missing at the decoder, reasonable quality waveform can be reconstructed by means of preserving the important packets. In addition, quality enhancement procedures including scale adjustment and post-processing have been proposed. The scale adjustment eliminates unnecessary zero's, and the post-processing recovers the spectral envelope characteristics of the original input signal. As a result of objective quality evaluation, the two techniques are confirmed to be useful for quality enhancement when lower priority packets are lost. This scheme enables graceful degradation by supporting lossless, near lossless, and high-compression coding within a single scalable framework, and is useful for narrowband to broadband audio streaming.

This paper presents extended-domain Golomb (XDG) code, an extension of Golomb code for sparse geometric sources as well as a generalization of extended-domain Golomb-Rice (XDGR) code, based on the idea of almost instantaneous fixed-to-variable length (AIFV) codes. Showing that the XDGR encoding can be interpreted as extended usage of the code proposed in the previous works, this paper discusses the following two facts: The proposed XDG code can be constructed as an AIFV code relating to Golomb code as XDGR code does to Rice code; XDG and Golomb codes are symmetric in the sense of relative redundancy. The proposed XDG code can be efficiently used for losslessly compressing geometric sources too sparse for the conventional Golomb and Rice codes. According to the symmetry, its relative redundancy is guaranteed to be as low as Golomb code compressing non-sparse geometric sources. Awing to this fact, the parameter of the proposed XDG code, which is more finely tunable than the conventional XDGR code, can be optimized for given inputs using the conventional techniques. Therefore, it is expected to be more useful for many coding applications that deal with geometric sources at low bit rates.

This letter addresses stability problems of interval matrices stemming from robustness issues in control theory. A quick overview is first made pertaining to methods to obtain stability conditions of interval matrices, putting particular emphasis upon one of them, regularity condition approach. Then, making use of this approach, several new stability criteria, for both Hurwitz and Schur stability, are derived.

An extension is made for a set of systems that have a quadratic Lyapunov function in common for the purpose of analysis and design. The nominal set of system matrices comprises stable symmetric matricies, which admit a hyperspherical Lyapunov function. Based on stability robustness results, sets of matrices are constructed so that they share the same Lyapunov function with the nominal ones.

New equivalent characterizations are derived for Schur stability property of real polynomials. They involve a single scalar parameter, which can be regarded as a freedom incorporated in the given polynomials so long as the stability is concerned. Possible applications of the expressions are suggested to the latest results for stability robustness analysis in parameter space. Further, an extension of the characterizations is made to the matrix case, yielding one-parameter expressions of Schur matrices.

Monotonic condition, a well-known sufficient condition for Schur stability of real polynomials, is relaxed. The condition reads that a series of strictly and monotonically decreasing positive coefficients of the polynomials yields Schur stability. It is shown by inspecting the original proof that equalities are allowed in all the inequalities but two which are located at appropriate positions.

For a real Schur polynomial, estimates are derived for a Schur stability margin in terms of matrix entries or tableau entries in some stability test methods. An average size of the zeros of the polynomial is also estimated. These estimates enable us to obtain more information than stability once a polynomial is tested to be stable via the established Schur stability criterion for real polynomials.

A stability of convex combinations of polynomials and a stability margin of stable polynomials are studied using Hermite matrices for continuous-time systems. Available results are found to give a heavy computational burden especially in checking the stability of a polytope of polynomials by means of "the edge theorem". We propose alternate stability conditions and margin which reduce the computational burden. In our approach, the stability condition reported by Bialas and Garloff can be derived readily.

A remote auscultation support system was developed that compresses and records in real time the patient's breath sound and heart sound, obtained using a stethoscope, and sends this data to an attending doctor at a hospital via network. For real-time recording of the breath sound and heart sound, special-purpose, high-quality sound coding technology was developed and incorporated in the system. This sound coding technology enables the amount of data to be reduced to about 1/18 with virtually no deterioration of the properties of the auscultation sound, high-speed transmission of this data using network, and remote diagnosis of the auscultation sound by a medical specialist. The auscultation locations of each patient, together with the doctor, stethoscoper, and patient database are input into the system in advance at the hospital. At the patient's home or sanatorium, the auscultation sound is recorded according to a human body display that shows auscultation locations, and then sent to the hospital. To ensure patient confidentiality when the auscultation data is transmitted via network, the system scrambles the auscultation data and allows only the attending doctor to play and diagnose the auscultation sound. These features not only support an understanding of the condition of patients being treated at home, but they also enable the construction of an auscultation database for electronic charts that allows auscultation results to be shared within the hospital. When this remote auscultation support system was manufactured and its performance was assessed, virtually the same waveform was obtained for the recorded and played breath sound as for the original breath sound. Results showed that even at a sampling frequency of 11 kHz, remote diagnosis by a medical specialist was in fact possible. Furthermore, if auscultation data of 10 seconds per location for 10 locations is sent, the amount of data sent is only about 120 Kbytes. Since this amount of data converts to only about 25 pages of electronic mail text, even via the existing mobile network the auscultation sounds of many patients can be sent efficiently.

For a discrete Lyapunov matrix equation, we present another such equation that shares the solution to the original one. This renders some existing lower bounds for measures of the size of the solution meaningful, when they yield only trivial bounds. A generalization of this result is suggested.

A speech coding scheme at 3.6 kbit/s has been proposed. The scheme is based on CELP (Code Excited Linear Prediction) with pitch synchronous innovation, which means even random codevectors as well as adaptive codevectors have pitch periodicity. The quality is comparable to 6.7 kbit/s VSELP coder for the Japanese cellular radio standard.

A trained sparse conjugate codebook is proposed for improving the speech quality of CELP-based coding in a noisy environment. Although CELP coding provides high quality at a low bit rate in a silent environment (creating clean speech), it cannot provide a satisfactory quality in a noisy environment because the conventional fixed codebook is designed to be suitable for clean speech. The proposed codebook consists of two sub-codebooks; each sub-codebook consists of a random component and a trained component. Each component has excitation vectors consisting of a few pulses. In the random component, pulse position and amplitude are determined randomly. Since the radom component does not depend on the speech characteristics, it handles noise better than the trained one. The trained component maintains high quality for clean speech. Since excitation vector is the sum of the two sub-excitation vectors, this codebook handles various speech conditions by selecting a sub-vector from each component. This codebook also reduces the computational complexity of a fixed codebook search and memory requirements compared with the conventional codebook. Subjective testing (absolute category rating (ACR) and degradation category rating (DCR)) indicated that this codebook improves speech quality compared with the conventional trained codebook for noisy speech. The ACR test showed that the quality of the 8 kbit/s CELP coder with this codebook is equivalent to that of the 32 kbit/s ADPCM for clean speech.

It has been recognized that there exist some disparities between properties of continuous control systems and those of discrete ones which are obtained from their continuous counterparts by use of a sampler and zero order hold. This still remains true even if the sampling rate becomes fast enough and sometimes causes unfavorable effects in control systems design. To reconcile with this conflict, use of delta operator has been proposed in place of z-operator recently. This note formulates a delta domain Lyapunov matrix equation and shows that the equation actually mediates the discrete Lyapunov equation and its continuous counterpart.

The reduction of coupling between two wire antennas operating at different frequencies on an infinite ground plane is considered. An impedance loaded slot is introduced between the two antennas. A coupling coefficient and a transmission coefficient are used to evaluate the coupling behavior. It is found that by an appropriate choice of the slot length, location and load impedance the coupling coefficient can be reduced significantly. The problem is analyzed by the method of moments. Port parameters are used to relate a feed port, load ports on the two wire antennas and a load port on the slot. In so doing, a large amount of computation time is saved in calculating the antenna characteristics for various loads on the slot.

The purpose of the paper is to show that boundary implication results hold for complex-valued uncertain linear time-delay systems. The results are derived by the Lambert W function and yield tractable robust stability criteria for simultaneously triangularizable linear time-delay systems. The setting is similar to a recently reported extreme-point result, but the assumed uncertainty sets can be much more free in shape.

The purpose of this study was to examine an efficient interval encoding method with a slow-frame-rate image sensor, and show that the encoding can work to capture heart rates from multiple persons. Visible light communication (VLC) with an image sensor is a powerful method for obtaining data from sensors distributed in the field with their positional information. However, the capturing speed of the camera is usually not fast enough to transfer interval information like the heart rate. To overcome this problem, we have developed an event timing (ET) encoding method. In ET encoding, sensor units detect the occurrence of heart beat event and send their timing through a sequence of flashing lights. The first flash signal provides the rough timing and subsequent signals give the precise timing. Our theoretical analysis shows that in most cases the ET encoding method performs better than simple encoding methods. Heart rate transfer from multiple persons was examined as an example of the method's capabilities. In the experimental setup, the developed system successfully monitored heart rates from several participants.

Coupling between two slot antennas on an infinite ground plane and radiation patterns on a finite ground plane are calculated. We introduce a parasitic wire between slot antennas to reduce coupling. Two typical cases with a monopole or a half-loop are considered in this paper. Numerical results show that the reduction of 13.9 dB is obtained by adjusting a monopole height to about a quarter wavelength of the operating frequency. Also a properly adjusted parasitic half-loop reduces the coupling coefficient by 24 dB. Radiation patterns of the antennas on a 365 mm 465 mm ground plane at 1.5 GHz are calculated where the diffracted fields are taken into account. It is found that the parasitic elements little affect the antenna patterns around the +z-axis that is perpendicular to the ground plane although the reduction of coupling between slot antennas is obtained.

This paper studies the problem of the relations between existence conditions of common quadratic and those of common infinity-norm Lyapunov functions for sets of discrete-time linear time-invariant (LTI) systems. Based on the equivalence between the robust stability of a class of time-varying systems and the existence of a common infinity-norm Lyapunov function for the corresponding set of LTI systems, the relations are determined. It turns out that although the relation is an equivalent one for single stable systems, the existence condition of common infinity-norm type is strictly implied by that of common quadratic type for the set of systems. Several existence conditions of a common infinity-norm Lyapunov functions are also presented for the purpose of easy checking.

Low bit-rate speech and audio codings are key technologies for multimedia communications. A number of coding scheme have been developed for various applications. In Internet application, good speech and audio quality at very low bit-rate (8-16 kb/s) is valuable. Two recently proposed speech and audio-coding schemes, CS-ACELP (Conjugate Structure Algebraic Code Excited Linear Prediction, standardized by the ITU-T in Recommendation G. 729) and TwinVQ (Transform-domain Weighted INterleave Vector Quantization, one of the candidates for MPEG-4 audio) were compared from the viewpoints of coding schemes and quality. Although there are significant differences in their basic structures and frame lengths, this paper describes that both use the same compression techniques, such as LPC (Linear Predictive Coding)-analysis pitch-period estimation and vector quantization. While CS-ACELP provides toll quality for speech at 8 kb/s, the quality it provides for music signals is insufficient. The TwinVQ transform coder is based on LPC and vector quantization and is also capable of operating at 8 kb/s. Evaluation of these two schemes in terms of their fundamental technologies, quality, delay, and complexity showed that the quality of TwinVQ for music signals is better than that of CS-ACELP, and that the quality of CS-ACELP is better for speech signals. Therefore, TwinVQ may be better suited for one-directional Internet applications, and CS-ACELP may be better for two-directional communication.