This paper examines the retransmission probability and throughput characteristics of slow-frequency-hopping spread spectrum transmission in Rayleigh fading indoor channels of multi-cell environments. Because signal strength in a Rayleigh fading indoor channel changes slowly, retransmission probability is little influenced by the retransmission unit length and error correction capability when retransmission unit length is shorter than the fading period. With the 83.5MHz bandwidth of the 2.4GHz ISM (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) band in the USA, quaternary phase shift keying (QPSK) is expected to provide a throughput of nearly 1Mbps in each cell when we assume a shadowing margin of 18.1dB and we use 4 cells, 100 hopping frequencies, a transmission power of 600mW, and a transmission distance of 20m. And also with the 26MHz bandwidth of the 2.4GHz ISM band in Japan, QPSK is expected to provide a throughput of nearly 1Mbps in each cell under similar conditions but with 26 hopping frequencies and a transmission power of 260mW.

An adaptive LMS filtering system is proposed for computing the Discrete Walsh Transform (DWT). The signal to be transformed serves as the 'desired signal' for the adaptive filter, while a set of periodic Walsh sequences serve as the input signal vector for the adaptive filter. The weights of the adaptive filter provide the DWT. The given approach is more efficient in terms of the required computations and memory locations compared with the direct approach. In contract with existing Fast DWT algorithm, the proposed solution provides more flexibility as far as the signal block length is concerned. In other words, the proposed approach is not restricted to a block length N to be of power 2.

Wide-band, low-ripple underwater transducers with high-power acoustic radiation capability have been designed on the basis of multiple-mode filter synthesis theory. They are composed of triple acoustic matching plates and double backing plates with optimized specific acoustic impedances,besides piezoelectric ceramic elements. One of the backing plates employs a Fe damping-alloy to suppress unwanted response peaks in the frequency range above the passband region. Two 33 array transducers were fabricated, each with a center frequency of 200 kHz, one as a transmitter and the other as a receiver. The two transducers show high-sensitivity, low-ripple and wide-band transmitting and receiving responses. Then, the transducers were applied in a color video picture digital transmission system.Clear color video pictures, composed of 256240 pixels, were successfully received within one second.

In direct connection with the signal information processing, a practical method of identification and probabilistic prediction for sound insulation systems is theoretically proposed in the object-oriented expression forms by introducing a few functional system parameters. Concretely, a trial of identification of the above functional system parameters and the output probabilistic prediction for a panel thickness change of double-wall type sound insulation system, especially, under the existence of a strong background noise inside of the reception room, is newly proposed based on one of wide sense digital filters and SEA (Statistical Energy Analysis) method. Finally, by using the actual music sound of an arbitrary distribution type, the effectiveness of the proposad method is confirmed experimentally by applying it to some problems of predicting the cumulative probability distribution of the transmitted sound level fluctuation.

The factored state space approach (FSS) can be a powerful mathematical tool for the synthesis and analysis of non state space digital filters. In the following letter, this technique is used for the rederivation of some classes of low sensitivity filters described by a II-cascade two-pair structure. This method leads to a simplified synthesis algorithm (with applications to automated synthesis procedures for many classes of non state space digital filters) as well as a straightforward analysis of roundoff noise and norm scaling problems.

This paper reviews two topics of nonlinear system analysis done in Japan. The first half of this paper concerns with nonlinear system analysis through the nondeterministic operator theory. The nondeterministic operator is a set-valued or fuzzy set valued operator by K. Horiuchi. From 1975 Horiuchi has developed fixed point theorems for nondeterministic operators. Using such fixed point theorems, he developed a unique theory for nonlinear system analysis. Horiuchi's theory provides a fundamental view point for analysis of fluctuations in nonlinear systems. In this paper, it is pointed out that Horiuchi's theory can be viewed as an extension of the interval analysis. Next, Urabe's theory for nonlinear boundary value problems is discussed. From 1965 Urabe has developed a method of computer assisted existence proof for solutions of nonlinear boundary value problems. Urabe has presented a convergence theorem for a certain simplified Newton method. Urabe's theorem is essentially based on Banach's contraction mapping theorem. In this paper, reformulation of Urabe's theory using the interval analysis is presented. It is shown that sharp error estimation can be obtained by this reformulation. Both works discussed in this paper have been done independently with the interval analysis. This paper points out that they have deep relationship with the interval analysis. Moreover, it is also pointed out that these two works suggest future directions of the interval analysis.

It is of significantly importance in relation to the problem of diagnosis of deviation faults in linear analog circuits to check whether or not it is possible to uniquely determine the element-values in a given linear analog circuit from the node-voltage measurements at its accessible nodes and then of giving a method for actual computation of the element-values if it is possible, under the assumption that i) the circuit is of known topology (and of known element-kinds if possible) and ii) the actual value of each element-value of the circuit almost always deviates from the design value and is not known exactly. In this paper, the problem of checking the unique determinability of the element-values is called the element-value determinability problem, and its solutions which have been obtained until now are reviewed in perspectives to designing a publicly available user-oriented analog circuit diagnosis system.

In digital control, it is essential to make the delay time for a large number of multiply-additions small because of sensor feedback. To meet the requirement, an architecture of the reconfigurable parallel processor using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is proposed. Although the performance is drastically increased in the full custom VLSI implementation, even the reconfigurable parallel processor using FPGAs becomes useful for many practical digital control applications. The performance evaluation shows that the delay time for the resolved acceleration cotrol computation of a twelve-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) redundant manipulator becomes about 70 µs which is about seventeen times faster than that of a parallel processor approach using conventional digital signal processors (DSPs).

We study robot navigation in unknown environment with rectangular obstacles aligned with the x and y axes. We propose a strategy called the modified-bian heuristic, and analyze its efficiency. Let n be the distance between the start point and the target of robot navigation, and let k be the maximum side length among the obstacles in a scene. We show that if k=(o(n) and if the summation of the widths of the obstacles on the line crossing the target and along the y axis is o(n), then ratio of the total distance walked by the robot to the shortest path length between the start point and the target is at most arbitrarily close to 1+k/2, as n grows. For the same restrictions as above on the sizes of the obstacles, the ratio is also at most arbitrarily close to 1+3/4n, as n grows, where is the summation of lengths of the obstacles in y axis direction.

This paper proposes a request-grant-type multiple access control called bandwidth-request labeled-slot multiple access (BLMA) for wireless LANs. BLMA employs slotted ALOHA in the request stage and has an algorithm to avoid unfair access due to the capture effect in this stage. In BLMA, terminals transmit data using fixed length slots called fragment slots in the transmission stage. The base station assigns the fragment slots one by one to terminals for peer-to-peer communication in which terminals communicate directly. It also controls the retransmission based on the stop and wait automatic repeat request scheme. The base station retransmits data for the source terminal as much as it can. BLMA provides simple and fair access control, efficient link utilization, and easy implementation. It also allows modes to be easily changed automatically from peer-to-peer communication to store-and-forward communication in which terminals communicate via the base station. Design concepts of a wireless MAC discussed and details of BLMA are described. The evaluation results of the BLMA are also shown.

A new design method for 2-D IIR digital filters, having a separable denominator,in the spatial domain is presented. The modified Gauss Method is applied in the iterating calculation of the filter coefficients. Also, the 1-D state space representation of the denominator is utilized in determining the impulse response of the designed IIR transfer function and its partial derivatives systematically while the numerator is expressed by a nonseparable polynomial. The error criterion function, which also includes the response outside the given region of support, is minimized in the least square sense. Convergence, together with the stability of the resulting filttr, are guaranteed.

An efficient algorithm is presented for solving nonlinear resistive networks. In this algorithm, the techniques of the piecewise-linear homotopy method are introduced to the Katzenelson algorithm, which is known to be globally convergent for a broad class of piecewise-linear resistive networks. The proposed algorithm has the following advantages over the original Katzenelson algorithm. First, it can be applied directly to nonlinear (not piecewise-linear) network equations. Secondly, it can find the accurate solutions of the nonlinear network equations with quadratic convergence. Therefore, accurate solutions can be computed efficiently without the piecewise-linear modeling process. The proposed algorithm is practically more advantageous than the piecewise-linear homotopy method because it is based on the Katzenelson algorithm that is very popular in circuit simulation and has been implemented on several circuit simulators.

This paper presents an algorithm for string searching in a character lattice. A character lattice, which is obtained through a character recognition process, is a general and flexible data structure that represents many hypothesized strings in a document image. In this paper, the authors propose a simple and efficient algorithm; it consists of a single loop of some set-operations and scans the character lattice only once. The authors also describe two actual implementations of the algorithm; one uses Bit-Arrays and the other a Trie. Owing to its bir parallelism, the Bit-Array approach is able to search for a single pattern faster than the Trie approach, and is easily extended to complex matchings such as an approximate one. It is suited for document retrieval systems that need to search for a keyword as fast as possible. A hashed compact version of the character lattice is also useful to increase the speed of the search for a single pattern. In contrast, the Trie approach is able to search for a large number of patterns simultaneously, and is suited for document understanding systems that need to extract words from the character lattice. The experimental results have shown that both approaches achieve high performance.

We apply neural networks to implement a line shape recognition/classification system. The purpose of employing neural networks is to eliminate target-specific algorithms from the system and to simplify the system. The system needs only to be trained by samples. The shapes are captured by the following operations. Lines to be processed are segmented at inflection points. Each segment is extended from both ends of it in a certain percentage. The shape of each extended segment is captured as an approximate curvature. Curvature sequence is normalized by size in order to get a scale-invariant measure. Feeding this normalized curvature date to a neural network leads to position-, rotation-, and scale-invariant line shape recognition. According to our experiments, almost 100% recognition rates are achieved against 5% random modification and 50%-200% scaling. The experimental results show that our method is effective. In addition, since this method captures shape locally, partial lines (caused by overlapping etc.) can also be recognized.

In this paper, radio propagation in the medium-scale building is investigated at 2.5GHz band. In order to predict the propagation loss in any place, four major modes of propagation are considered: low-loss in line-of-sight (LOS) wave, corridor guided wave, direct transmission wave through obstructions, and the reentered wave. Based on the measured results of attenuation characteristics, the macroscopic parameters for the above mentioned modes of wave propagation are determined. Using these parameters, signal strengths are predicted with average standard deviation of 4.5dB. The fading characteristics are studied by measuring the Rician parameter and the correlation coefficient for 2-branch diversity antennas separated by 50cm. The Rician parameters are 2 in case of the LOS propagation, and 1 in case of the no LOS propagation. The two branch correlation coefficients are less than 0.5 within coverage of 80-95% in almost all the locations.

This paper proposes a new burst coherent demodulator that improves transmission quality of microcellular TDMA/TDD systems for personal communications and has configuration suitable for low power consumption with LSIC-implementation. To achieve the better transmission quality, the proposed demodulator employs coherent detection with a unique carrier recovery scheme that can operate without any preamble for carrier recovery. In addition, the demodulator uses a clock recovery scheme with clock phase estimation using twice differentiation, which eliminates hangup and attains fast clock acquisition at 2 samples/symbol. Experimental results clarify the superiority of the proposed coherent demodulator for microcellular TDMA/TDD systems. The proposed coherent demodulator reduces the irreducible frame error rate by 40%, and achieves 4dB improvement at the frame error rate of 10% compared with differential detection under the Rayleigh fading (fD/fs=810-5, τrms/Ts=510-2) typical of personal communication environments.

A system for segmentation of document image and ordering text areas is described, and applied to complex printed page layouts of both Japanese and English. There is no need to make any assumptions about the shape of blocks, hence the segmentation technique can handle not only skewed images without skew-correction but also documents where columns are not rectangular. In this technique, based on the bottom-up strategy, the connected components are extracted from the reduced image, and classiferd according to their local information. The connected components calssified as characters are then merged into lines, and the lines are merged into areas. Extracted text areas are classified as body, caption, header or footer. A tree graph of the layout of the body texts is made, and the texts ordered by preorder traversal on the graph. We introduce the concept of an influence range of each node, a procedure for handling titles, thus obtaining good results on various documents. The total system is fast and compact.

A feedback pattern recognition method using an inverse recall neural network model is proposed. The feedback method can adjust processing parameter values adaptively to individual patterns so as to produce reliable recognition results. In order to apply an adaptive control technique to such pattern recognition processings, the evaluation value for recognition uncertainty is determined to be a function with regard to an input pattern and processing parameters. In its feedback phase, the input pattern is fixed and processing parameters are adjusted to decrease the recognition uncertainty. The proposed neural network model implements two functions in this feedback recognition method. One is a discrimination as a kind of multi-layer feedforward model. The other is to generate an input modification so as to decrease the recognition uncertainty. The modification values indicate parts which are important for more certain recognition but are missed in the original input to the nerwork. The proposed feedback method can adjust prcessing parameter values in order to detect the important parts shown by the inverse recall network model. As explained in this paper, feature extraction parameter values are adaptively adjusted by this feedback method. After the inverse recall model and the feedback function are implemented, features are extracted again by using the modified feature extraction parameter values. The feature is classified by the feedforward function of the network model. The feedforward and feedback processings are repeated until a certain recognition result is obtained. This method was examined for hadwritten alpha-numerics with rotation distortion. The feedback method was found to decrease the rejection ratio at the same substitution error ratio with high efficiency.

The issue about document structure recognition and document understanding is today one of interesting subjects from a viewpoint of practical applications. The research objective is to extract the meaningful data from document images interpretatively and also classify them as the predefined item data automatically. In comparison with the traditional image-processing-based approaches, the knowledge-based approaches, which make use of various knowledge in order to interpret structural/constructive features of documents, have been currently investigated as more flexible and applicable methods. In this paper, we propose a totally integrated paradigm for understanding table-form documents from a viewpoint of the architectural framework.