A normal-distribution-function-shaped superconducting tunnel junction (NDF-STJ) which consists of Nb/Al-AlOx/Al/Nb has been fabricated as an X-ray detector. Current - voltage characteristics were measured at 0.4 K using three kinds of STJs, which have the dispersion parameters σ of 0.25, 0.45 and 0.75. These STJs showed very low subgap leakage current of about 5 nA. By irradiating with 5.9 keV X-rays, we obtained the spectrum of these NDF-STJs. They showed good energy resolution with small magnetic fields of below 3 mT, which is about one-tenth of those for conventional-shaped STJs.

In this paper, Integration of Fractional Gaussian Window transform (IFRGWT) is proposed for the parameter estimation of linear FM (LFM) signal; the proposal is based on the integration of the Fractional Fourier transform modified by Gaussian Window. The peak values can be detected by adjusting the standard deviation of Gaussian function and locating the optimal rotated angles. And also the parameters of the signal can be estimated well. As an application, detection and parameter estimation of multiple LFM signals are investigated in low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The analytic results and simulations clearly demonstrate that the method is effective.

Distributed Video Coding (DVC), based on the theorems proposed by Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv, is attracting attention as a new paradigm for video compression. Some of the DVC systems use intra-frame compression based on discrete cosine transform (DCT). Unfortunately, conventional DVC systems have low affinity with DCT. In this paper, we propose a wavelet-based DVC scheme that utilizs current JPEG 2000 standard. Accordingly, the scheme has scalability with regard to resolution and quality. In addition, we propose two methods to increase the coding gain of the new DVC scheme. One is the introduction of a Gray code, and the other method involves optimum quantization. An interesting point is that though our proposed method uses Gray code, it still achieves quality scalability. Tests confirmed that the PSNR is increased about 5 [dB] by the two methods, and the PSNR of the new scheme (with methods) is about 1.5-3 [dB] higher than that of conventional JPEG 2000.

A highly accurate measurement method of parameters of MZ-type LN optical intensity modulators is presented. In this method, a CW optical signal is input to an optical terminal and small CW RF signal is applied to an electrode of the modulator. Then sideband levels of an output optical signal at different bias points are measured by using optical spectrum analyzer. By using 1st order sideband levels which are measured at two different bias conditions, and using a compensation method to measured levels, we can obtain accurate chirp parameter even when very small power of RF signal is applied to the modulator. In this method, the chirp parameter can be obtained in good accuracy when the input RF voltage is only 3% of the halfwave voltage.

We suggest a new minimum credit method for the dynamic bandwidth allocation in EPON. In the suggested method, to eliminate the unused transmission time-slot, each ONU requests no more than a predetermined maximum. We analyze the upstream channel resource wastage when traffic is light. Based on the analysis, we derive a minimum credit that eliminate the upstream channel resource wastage. The OLT estimates a traffic load and grants a minimum credit when the request is smaller than the minimum credit and traffic is light. Using simulation, we show the minimum credit discipline is superior than the existing methods in the mean delay and the frame loss rate.

Let G be any graph with property P (for example, general graph, directed graph, etc.) and S be nonnegative and non-decreasing integer sequence(s). The prescribed degree sequence problem is a problem to determine whether there is a graph G having S as the prescribed sequence(s) of degrees or outdegrees of the vertices. From 1950's, P has attracted wide attentions, and its many extensions have been considered. Let P be the property satisfying the following (1) and (2):(1) G is a directed graph with two disjoint vertex sets A and B. (2) There are r11 (r22, respectively) directed edges between every pair of vertices in A(B), and r12 directed edges between every pair of vertex in A and vertex in B. Then G is called an (r11, r12, r22)-tournament ("tournament", for short). The problem is called the score sequence pair problem of a "tournament" (realizable, for short). S is called a score sequence pair of a "tournament" if the answer of the problem is "yes." In this paper, we propose the characterizations of a score sequence pair of a "tournament" and an algorithm for determining in linear time whether a pair of two integer sequences is realizable or not.

We compare the convergence performance of different numerical schemes for computing the fundamental matrix from point correspondences over two images. First, we state the problem and the associated KCR lower bound. Then, we describe the algorithms of three well-known methods: FNS, HEIV, and renormalization. We also introduce Gauss-Newton iterations as a new method for fundamental matrix computation. For initial values, we test random choice, least squares, and Taubin's method. Experiments using simulated and real images reveal different characteristics of each method. Overall, FNS exhibits the best convergence properties.

This paper presents a motion-based boundary tracking method for a moving deformable object in an image sequence using a parametric active contour model. Deciding the local converging directions of the contour points is essential for correctly extracting the boundary of a moving deformable object. Thus, a new energy function for a parametric active contour model is proposed based on the addition of a directional energy term using a frame difference map to the greedy snake. The frame difference map is used to obtain motion information on an object with fast and non-rigid motion. Plus, updating rules for the frame difference map are also developed to encourage the stable convergence of the contour points. Experiments on a set of synthetic and real image sequences show that the proposed method could fully track a speedy deformable object while exactly extracting the boundary of the object in every frame.

In this letter, we evaluate the capacity of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services over high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), in which frame-bundling (FB) is incorporated to reduce the effect of relatively large headers in the IP/UDP/RTP layers. Also, a modified proportional pair (PF) packet scheduler design supporting for VoIP service is provided. The main focus of this work is the effect of FB on system outage based on delay budget in radio access networks. Simulation results show that VoIP system performance with FB scheme is highly sensitive to delay budget. We also conclude that HSDPA is attractive for transmission of VoIP if compared to the circuit switched (CS) voice that is used in WCDMA (Release'99).

We propose a simple initial frame timing acquisition algorithm for cellular OFDMA systems. The proposed algorithm utilizes the 9 dB boost in preamble power set by the IEEE 802.16e standard. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm succeeds in acquiring the starting point of a frame under not only single cell but also multi-cell environments, while the conventional autocorrelation-based method fails under multi-cell environment.

In the design of an active integrated antenna, it is necessary to analyze problems such as unwanted emissions or mutual coupling between elements. In this paper, we clarify the problems in implementing S-parameters for an FDTD analysis. Cubic spline interpolation is suitable for the construction of the S-parameter data. The implementation methods of terminal resistors and vias are examined. The proposed FDTD analysis becomes stable after correcting the discrete time lag in the formation of the incident wave. The validity of the proposed method is verified in its application to the low pass filter and the frequency tunable band pass filter.

Frequency-variation method (FVM), reported in [1], was further studied for simultaneously measuring the both complex permittivity and complex permeability by intentionally changing the test frequency to obtain different reflections. An enhanced coaxial-probe-based in-situ measurement system has been established. The spectral domain full-wave model is derived to take place of the quasi-static one. A novel coaxial probe is designed so that the one-port calibration could be performed with Agilent-supplied precise cal-kit instead of the liquid standard. Criterions for a right order of the interpolation polynomial used to approximate the frequency-dependent EM parameters; measures to reduce the residual mismatch errors and random error in reflection measurements and to suppress the ambiguities in solving the transcendent equation system were experimentally studied to resolve the problems and improve the accuracy in dispersive absorbing materials' test. Several typical dispersive absorbing coatings have been tested via FVM. The good comparison between the measured results and reference ones validate the feasibility of the proposed improved technique.

This paper proposes a method to determine a single frequency for interconnect RL extraction. Resistance and inductance of interconnects depend on frequency, and hence the extraction frequency strongly affects the modeling accuracy of interconnects. The proposed method determines an extraction frequency based on the transfer characteristic of interconnects. By choosing the frequency where the transfer characteristic becomes maximum, the extracted RL values achieve the accurate modeling of the waveform. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides accurate transition waveforms over various interconnect topologies.

As a result of the growth of sensor-enabled mobile devices, in recent years, users can utilize diverse digital contents everywhere and anytime. However, the interfaces of mobile applications are often unnatural due to limited computational capability, miniaturized input/output controls, and so on. To complement the poor user interface (UI) and fully utilize mobility as feature of mobile devices, we explore possibilities for a new UI of mobile devices. This paper describes the method for recognizing and analyzing a user's continuous action including the user's various gestures and postures. The application example we created is mobile game called AM-Fishing game on mobile devices that employ the accelerometer as the main interaction modality. The demonstration shows the evaluation for the system usability.

In this paper, a coefficient-parameter embedding method into Motion-JPEG2000 (MJP2) is proposed for invertible deinterlacing with variable coefficients. Invertible deinterlacing, which the authors have developed before, can be used as a preprocess of frame-based motion picture codec, such as MJP2, for interlaced videos. When the conventional field-interleaving is used instead, comb-tooth artifacts appear around edges of moving objects. On the other hand, the invertible deinterlacing technique allows us to suppress the comb-tooth artifacts and also guaranties recovery of original pictures. As previous works, the authors have developed a variable coefficient scheme with a motion detector, which realizes adaptability to local characteristics of given pictures. However, when this deinterlacing technique is applied to a video codec, coefficient parameters have to be sent to receivers for original picture recovery. This paper proposes a parameter-embedding technique in MJP2 and constructs a standard stream which consists both of picture data and the parameters. The parameters are embedded into the LH1 component of wavelet transform domain through the ROI (region of interest) function of JPEG2000 without significant loss in the performance of comb-tooth suppression. Some experimental results show the feasibility of our proposed scheme.

This paper introduces a common database, an evaluation framework, and its baseline recognition results for in-car speech recognition, CENSREC-3, as an outcome of the IPSJ-SIG SLP Noisy Speech Recognition Evaluation Working Group. CENSREC-3, which is a sequel to AURORA-2J, has been designed as the evaluation framework of isolated word recognition in real car-driving environments. Speech data were collected using two microphones, a close-talking microphone and a hands-free microphone, under 16 carefully controlled driving conditions, i.e., combinations of three car speeds and six car conditions. CENSREC-3 provides six evaluation environments designed using speech data collected in these conditions.

Object caching is a common feature in the scalable distributed object systems. Fine-grained replication optimizes the performance and resource utilization in object caching by enabling a remote object-oriented application to be partially and incrementally on-demand replicated in units of cluster. Despite these benefits, the lack of common and simple implementation framework makes the fine-grained replication scheme not extensively used. This paper proposes the novel frameworks for dynamic, transparent, partial and automatically incremental replication of distributed Java objects based on three techniques that are lazy-object creation, proxy and hook. One framework enables the fine-grained replication of server-side stateful in-memory application, and the other framework enables the fine-grained replication of server-side stateless in-memory application, client-side program, or standalone application. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the efficiency in terms of response time of both frameworks are relatively practical to the extent of a local method invocation.

In this paper, we propose a method to estimate affine motion parameters from consecutive images with the assumption that the motion in progress can be characterized by an affine model. The motion may be caused either by a moving camera or moving object. The proposed method first extracts motion vectors from a sequence of images and then processes them by adaptive robust estimation to obtain affine parameters. Typically, a robust estimation filters out outliers (velocity vectors that do not fit into the model) by fitting velocity vectors to a predefined model. To filter out potential outliers, our adaptive robust estimation defines a flexible weight function based on a sigmoid function. During the estimation process, we tune the sigmoid function gradually to its hard-limit as the errors between the input data and the estimation model are decreased, so that we can effectively separate non-outliers from outliers with the help of the finally tuned hard-limit form of the weight function. The experimental results show that the suggested approach is very effective in estimating affine parameters.

There are several methods for mining communities on the Web using hyperlinks. One of the well-known ones is a max-flow based method proposed by Flake et al. The method adopts a page-oriented framework, that is, it uses a page on the Web as a unit of information, like other methods including HITS and trawling. Recently, Asano et al. built a site-oriented framework which uses a site as a unit of information, and they experimentally showed that trawling on the site-oriented framework often outputs significantly better communities than trawling on the page-oriented framework. However, it has not been known whether the site-oriented framework is effective in mining communities through the max-flow based method. In this paper, we first point out several problems of the max-flow based method, mainly owing to the page-oriented framework, and then propose solutions to the problems by utilizing several advantages of the site-oriented framework. Computational experiments reveal that our max-flow based method on the site-oriented framework is very effective in mining communities, related to the topics of given pages, in comparison with the original max-flow based method on the page-oriented framework.

A set of three optical filters was designed and a camera system was developed using these filters in order to capture high-fidelity colors within the gamut of vision. Photographs of a number of highly saturated colors and a combination of the Macbeth chart and 18 pieces of clothing samples of various colors were taken. A 39 matrix was used to convert the camera output signals into XYZ tristimulus data. The tristimulus values of the colors were compared with those of the images captured by the camera. The average color difference, ΔE, for these samples were found to be 2.16 and 1.18, respectively.