In this paper, we analyze recurrence relations generalized from the Tower of Hanoi problem of the form T(n,α,β) = min 1 ≤ t ≤ n {αT(n-t,α,β) + βS(t,3)} , where S(t,3) = 2t - 1 is the optimal total number of moves for the 3-peg Tower of Hanoi problem. It is shown that when α and β are natural numbers, the sequence of differences of T(n,α,β)'s, i.e., {T(n,α,β) - T(n-1,α,β)}, consists of numbers of the form β 2i αj (i, j ≥ 0) lined in the increasing order.

A CMOS detection procedure for ultra-wideband impulse radio (UWB-IR) communication system, employing Bi-Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) modulation scheme, is presented here. The chip was designed and fabricated in a 180 nm CMOS process and it requires a supply voltage of 1.8 V, with a die area of 0.01 mm2. A train of Gaussian Monocycle Pulses (GMP), modulated by a random data sequence of 1 Gb/s, has been detected successfully by the detector. Ability to process differential data without using conventional blocks like mixer, correlator etc. while consuming a very low power (3.8 pJ/bit for a data rate of 1 Gb/s) is the novelty of this work. The detection scheme employing a simple architecture with a noncoherent detection mechanism is well suited for UWB-IR communication system.

A group key exchange (GKE) protocol allows a group of parties communicating over a public network to establish a common secret key. As group-oriented applications gain popularity over the Internet, a number of GKE protocols have been suggested to provide those applications with a secure multicast channel. In this work, we investigate the security of Wu and Zhu's password-authenticated GKE protocol presented recently in FC'08. Wu and Zhu's protocol is efficient, supports dynamic groups, and can be constructed generically from any password-authenticated 2-party key exchange protocol. However, despite its attractive features, the Wu-Zhu protocol should not be adopted in its present form. Due to a flaw in its design, the Wu-Zhu protocol fails to achieve authenticated key exchange. We here report this security problem with the Wu-Zhu protocol and show how to solve it.

This letter investigates the effects of spatial correlation on several multiple antenna schemes in multiuser environments. Using an order statistics upper bound on achievable capacity, we quantify the interaction among spatial correlation, spatial diversity, spatial multiplexing and multiuser diversity. Also, it is verified that the upper bound is tighter than asymptotic capacity when the number of users is relatively small.

Background subtraction is widely used in detecting moving objects; however, changing illumination conditions, color similarity, and real-time performance remain important problems. In this paper, we introduce a sequential method for adaptively estimating background components using Kalman filters, and a novel method for detecting objects using margined sign correlation (MSC). By applying MSC to our adaptive background model, the proposed system can perform object detection robustly and accurately. The proposed method is suitable for implementation on a graphics processing unit (GPU) and as such, the system realizes real-time performance efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed system.

Thin films of a divinyl derivative of tetraphenyldiaminobiphenyl DvTPD were prepared by vapor deposition followed by annealing. After annealing at 200°C for 1 h, the film became practically insoluble to organic solvents due to polymerization. Electrical characteristics of the films were measured by current-voltage measurement, time-of-flight measurement, and dielectric measurement. It was found that the hole mobility of DvTPD decreases when the film is polymerized. As a consequence of the decrease of hole mobility, carrier balance in the emissive layer of an organic light emitting diode (OLED) was improved, leading to a higher quantum efficiency and a pure emission spectrum. The dielectric measurement also confirmed the high thermal stability of the polymerized film.

Frequency estimation of a complex single-tone in additive white Gaussian noise from irregularly-spaced samples is addressed. In this Letter, we study the periodogram and weighted phase averager, which are standard solutions in the uniform sampling scenarios, for tackling the problem. It is shown that the estimation performance of both approaches can attain the optimum benchmark of the Cramér-Rao lower bound, although the former technique has a smaller threshold signal-to-noise ratio.

Four-wave mixing (FWM) compensation using digital coherent detection is experimentally demonstrated. Two lights and the induced FWM components are combined with phase-locked local oscillator lights and received individually. The received signals are combined electrically and the signal-to-FWM crosstalk ratio is improved to more than 30 dB by backward propagation.

Over the recent years, a great deal of effort has been made to estimate age from face images. It has been reported that age can be accurately estimated under controlled environment such as frontal faces, no expression, and static lighting conditions. However, it is not straightforward to achieve the same accuracy level in a real-world environment due to considerable variations in camera settings, facial poses, and illumination conditions. In this paper, we apply a recently proposed machine learning technique called covariate shift adaptation to alleviating lighting condition change between laboratory and practical environment. Through real-world age estimation experiments, we demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed method.

In this letter, we analyze the effect of the size of observed data on the performance of time delay estimation (TDE) in the chirp spread spectrum (CSS) system. By adjusting the size of observed data, we reduce the effect of DC offsets, which would otherwise degrade the performance of TDE based on CSS, and we optimize the performance of TDE in CSS system. Finally, we derive the optimal size of observed data of TDE in CSS system.

The active shape model (ASM) has been widely adopted by automated bone segmentation approaches for radiographic images. In radiographic images of the distal radius, multiple edges are often observed in the near vicinity of the bone, typically caused by the presence of thin soft tissue. The presence of multiple edges decreases the segmentation accuracy when segmenting the distal radius using ASM. In this paper, we propose an enhanced distal radius segmentation method that makes use of a modified version of ASM, reducing the number of segmentation errors. To mitigate segmentation errors, the proposed method emphasizes the presence of the bone edge and downplays the presence of a soft tissue edge by making use of Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). To verify the effectiveness of the proposed segmentation method, experiments were performed with 30 distal radius patient images. For the images used, compared to ASM-based segmentation, the proposed method improves the segmentation accuracy with 47.4% (from 0.974 mm to 0.512 mm).

We propose a user authentication scheme with user anonymity for wireless communications. Previous works have some weaknesses such as (1) user identity can be revealed from the login message, and (2) after a smart card is no longer valid or is expired, users having the expired smart cards can generate valid login messages under the assumption that the server does not maintain the user information. In this letter, we propose a new user authentication scheme for providing user anonymity. In the proposed scheme, the server is capable of detecting forged login messages by users having only expired smart cards and their passwords without storing user information on the server.

This work presents a two-stage ordinal optimization theory-based approach for solving the throughput maximization problems with power constraints of sub-carrier assignment and power allocation in multi-user orthogonal frequency division multiplexing uplink systems. In the first stage, a crude but efficient model is employed to evaluate the performance of a sub-carrier assignment pattern and the genetic algorithm is used to search through the huge solution space. In the second stage, an exact model is employed to evaluate s best sub-carrier assignment patterns obtained in stage 1 and form the select subset. Finally, the best one of the select subset is the good enough solution that we seek. Via numerous tests, this work demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed algorithm and compares it with those of other heuristic methods.

The turn of the century is witnessing radical changes in the way information services are spreading due to the progress of IT and the constantly increase in the number of users of the WWW. Therefore, the business market is changing its strategy for a modern online business environment. Autonomous Decentralized Database System (ADDS), based on autonomous coordinating subsystems, has been proposed as a system architecture in order to meet the innovative e-business requirements for consistency and high response among distributed database systems. Autonomy and decentralization of subsystems help achieving high response time in highly competitive situation and autonomous Mobile Agent based coordination has been proposed to achieve flexibility in a highly dynamic environment. In this paper, it is analyzed the case in which the system size increases; and a multi agent coordination, the same number of mobile agents and sites coexist in the system, is proposed for achieving the timeliness property. The response time in the system is conformed by those transactions that require coordination and those that can be satisfied immediately. In accordance, the distribution of the data in the system for coordination is a medullar issue for the improvement of the response time. A trade-off exits between these two kind of transactions depending on the coordination of the Mobile Agents, the capacity of allocating data among the sites, and as well as the distribution of the data and user requests in the system. In this sense, since the system requires high response time, a data allocation technology in which each mobile agent autonomously determine its own capacity for adjusting data among the sites is proposed. Thus, the system will adapt itself to the dynamic environment. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture and technologies are evaluated by simulation.

This paper discusses speaker verification (SV) using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), where only utterances of enrolled speakers are required. Such an SV system can be realized using artificially generated cohorts instead of real cohorts from speaker databases. This paper presents a rational approach to set GMM parameters for artificial cohorts based on statistics of GMM parameters for real cohorts. Equal error rates for the proposed method are about 10% less than those for the previous method, where GMM parameters for artificial cohorts were set in an ad hoc manner.

In this paper, a new adaptive online price control scheme is formalized based on the Stackelberg game model. To provide the most desirable network performance, the proposed scheme consists of two different control mechanisms; user-based and operator-based mechanisms. By using the hierarchical interaction strategy, control decisions in each mechanism act cooperatively and collaborate with each other to satisfy conflicting performance criteria. With a simulation study, the proposed scheme can adaptively adjust the network price to approximate an optimized solution under widely diverse network situations.

This paper presents an unsupervised learning-based method for selection of feature points and object category classification without previous setting of the number of categories. Our method consists of the following procedures: 1)detection of feature points and description of features using a Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), 2)selection of target feature points using One Class-Support Vector Machines (OC-SVMs), 3)generation of visual words of all SIFT descriptors and histograms in each image of selected feature points using Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), 4)formation of labels using Adaptive Resonance Theory-2 (ART-2), and 5)creation and classification of categories on a category map of Counter Propagation Networks (CPNs) for visualizing spatial relations between categories. Classification results of static images using a Caltech-256 object category dataset and dynamic images using time-series images obtained using a robot according to movements respectively demonstrate that our method can visualize spatial relations of categories while maintaining time-series characteristics. Moreover, we emphasize the effectiveness of our method for category classification of appearance changes of objects.

We present a new methodology for constructing an efficient identification scheme, and based on it, we propose a lightweight identification scheme whose computational and storage costs are sufficiently low even for cheap devices such as RFID tags. First, we point out that the efficiency of a scheme with statistical zero-knowledgeness can be significantly improved by enhancing its zero-knowledgeness to perfect zero-knowledge. Then, we apply this technique to the Girault-Poupard-Stern (GPS) scheme which has been standardized by ISO/IEC. The resulting scheme shows a perfect balance between communication cost, storage cost, and circuit size (computational cost), which are crucial factors for implementation on RFID tags. Compared to GPS, the communication and storage costs are reduced, while the computational cost is kept sufficiently low so that it is implementable on a circuit nearly as small as GPS. Under standard parameters, the prover's response is shortened 80 bits from 275 bits to 195 bits and in application using coupons, storage for one coupon is also reduced 80 bits, whereas the circuit size is estimated to be larger by only 335 gates. Hence, we believe that the new scheme is a perfect solution for fast authentication of RFID tags.

ICA (Independent Component Analysis) has a remarkable capability of separating mixtures of stochastic random signals. However, we often face problems of separating mixtures of deterministic signals, especially sinusoidal signals, in some applications such as radar systems and communication systems. One may ask if ICA is effective for deterministic signals. In this paper, we analyze the basic performance of ICA in separating mixtures of complex sinusoidal signals, which utilizes the fourth order cumulant as a criterion of independency of signals. We theoretically show that ICA can separate mixtures of deterministic sinusoidal signals. Then, we conduct computer simulations and radio experiments with a linear array antenna to confirm the theoretical result. We will show that ICA is successful in separating mixtures of sinusoidal signals with frequency difference less than FFT resolution and with DOA (Direction of Arrival) difference less than Rayleigh criterion.

Channel-factorization aided detector (CFAD) is one of the important low-complexity detectors used in multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) receivers. Through channel factorization, this method transforms the original MIMO system into an equivalent system with a better-conditioned channel where detection is performed with a low-complexity detector; the estimate is then transferred back to the original system to obtain the final decision. Traditionally, the channel factorization is done with the lattice reduction algorithms such as the Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovasz (LLL) and Seysen's algorithms with no consideration of the low-complexity detector used. In this paper, we propose a different approach: the channel factorization is designed specifically for the minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) detector that is a popular low-complexity detector in CFADs. Two new types of factorization algorithms are proposed. Type-I is LLL based, where the well-known DLLL-extended algorithm, the LLL algorithm working on the dual matrix of the extended channel matrix, is a member of this type but with a higher complexity. DLLL-extended is the best-performed factorization algorithm found in the literature, Type-II is greedy-search based where its members are differentiated with different algorithm's parameters. Type-II algorithms can provide around 0.5-1.0 dB gain over Type-I algorithms and have a fixed computational complexity which is advantageous in hardware implementation.