The optical access fiber network is spreading rapidly as a result of the progress made on optical communication technologies and the availability of a wide range of broadband Internet content. If the optical access network is not properly maintained, the service quality will decrease. This paper describes some effective technologies that have been researched and developed to maintain a high quality of service, and to achieve efficient maintenance and operation.

In this paper, we studied the use of common-mode noise reduction technique for in-vehicle electronic equipment in an actual instrument design. We have improved the circuit model of the common-mode noise that flows to the wire harness to add the effect of a bypass capacitor located near the LSI. We analyzed the improved circuit model using a circuit simulator and verified the effectiveness of the noise reduction condition derived from the circuit model. It was also confirmed that offsetting the impedance mismatch in the PCB section requires to make a circuit constant larger than that necessary for doing the impedance mismatch in the LSI section. An evaluation circuit board comprising an automotive microcomputer was prototyped to experiment on the common-mode noise reduction effect of the board. The experimental results showed the noise reduction effect of the board. The experimental results also revealed that the degree of impedance mismatch in the LSI section can be estimated by using a PCB having a known impedance. We further inquired into the optimization of impedance parameters, which is difficult for actual products at present. To satisfy the noise reduction condition composed of numerous parameters, we proposed a design method using an optimization algorithm and an electromagnetic field simulator, and confirmed its effectiveness.

The singular points of fingerprints, viz. core and delta, are important referential points for the classification of fingerprints. Several conventional approaches such as the Poincare index method have been proposed; however, these approaches are not reliable with poor-quality fingerprints. This paper proposes a new core and delta detection employing singular candidate analysis and an extended relational graph. Singular candidate analysis allows the use both the local and global features of ridge direction patterns and realizes high tolerance to local image noise; this involves the extraction of locations where there is high probability of the existence of a singular point. Experimental results using the fingerprint image databases FVC2000 and FVC2002, which include several poor-quality images, show that the success rate of the proposed approach is 10% higher than that of the Poincare index method for singularity detection, although the average computation time is 15%-30% greater.

In this paper, multiconductor transmission line (MTL) modelling is used to characterize the frequency response and dispersion of the low-voltage outdoor powerline channel. The analysis focuses on a single transmitter-to-receiver link and all the possible connection schemes associated with that link. By resorting to modal analysis, approximate analytical upper bounds of the channel frequency-response are derived for simplified but representative network configurations involving power cables with star-quad cross-section. Numerical solution of the MTL equations is used to validate the theoretical work and to show the dispersion of the channel frequency-responses, which results to be of the order of 20 dB.

A composite right/left-handed transmission line (CRLH-TL) using substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) with floating-conductor (SIW-type CRLH-TL) for microwave and millimeter wave frequencies has been proposed by the authors. This paper proposes a new configuration that is shield type of the SIW-type CRLH-TL, which can suppress the radiation from the exposed floating-conductors, and shows that even if the shielded structure is used, the SIW-type CRLH-TL supports the LH mode as well as the prototype. Proposed CRLH-TL consists of a SIW with slot apertures (part 1), a dielectric film with floating-conductors (part 2) and a SIW without lower conductor (part 3). A shielded SIW-type CRLH-TL for X--K band (with wide LH mode bandwidth of 6 GHz and transition frequency of 16 GHz) that satisfies the balance condition is designed. Dispersion diagram and S-parameters are derived numerically, and typical field distributions of RH and LH transmission and the zeroth-order resonance are shown. Measured result agrees well with theoretical result, by considering the accuracy performance and loss factors of the fabricated CRLH-TL. Proposed CRLH-TL has advantage of simple manufacturing, because the parts 1--3 are composed of simple planar periodic structure. It is expected to be one of the basic structure of CRLH-TL or components such as LH coupler above 10 GHz or millimeter wave frequency.

The ability to find the speaker's face region in a video is useful for various applications. In this work, we develop a novel technique to find this region within different time windows, which is robust against the changes of view, scale, and background. The main thrust of our technique is to integrate audiovisual correlation analysis into a video segmentation framework. We analyze the audiovisual correlation locally by computing quadratic mutual information between our audiovisual features. The computation of quadratic mutual information is based on the probability density functions estimated by kernel density estimation with adaptive kernel bandwidth. The results of this audiovisual correlation analysis are incorporated into graph cut-based video segmentation to resolve a globally optimum extraction of the speaker's face region. The setting of any heuristic threshold in this segmentation is avoided by learning the correlation distributions of speaker and background by expectation maximization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can detect the speaker's face region accurately and robustly for different views, scales, and backgrounds.

This paper presents an approach to implementing simulation models for SAM fuzzy controllers without the use of external components. The approach represents a fuzzy controller as a composition of simple simulation models which involve only basic operations.

For multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoded transmission that has individual constraints on the maximum power of each transmit antenna or a subset of transmit antennas, the transmit power optimization problem is a non-linear convex optimization problem with a high level of computational complexity. In this paper, assuming the use of the interior point method (IPM) to solve this problem, we propose two efficient techniques that reduce the computational complexity of the IPM by appropriately setting its parameters. Based on computer simulation, the achieved reductions in the level of the computational complexity are evaluated using the proposed techniques for both the fairness and the sum-rate maximization criteria assuming i.i.d Rayleigh fading MIMO channels and block diagonalization zero-forcing as a multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) precoder.

In this letter, a new approximation of log-likelihood ratio (LLR) for soft input channel decoding is proposed. Conventional simplified LLR using log-sum approximation can degrade the performance of bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) systems employing hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) at low SNR. The proposed LLR performs as well as the exact LLR, and at the same time, requires only a small number of elementary operations.

This letter proposes a low-complexity scheme for estimating the frequency of a complex sinusoid in flat fading channels. The proposed estimator yields an estimation performance that is comparable to the existing autocorrelation-based frequency estimator, while retaining the same frequency range. Its implementation complexity is much lower than the conventional scheme, thus this allows for fast estimation in real time.

For multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) spatial multiplexing, signal separation/detection is one of the most important signal processing parts, so that signal separation/detection schemes are being vigorously researched. As a promising signal separation/detection scheme, frequency-domain iterative soft interference cancellation (FD-SIC) has been proposed. Although iterative FD-SIC can provide the transmission performance close to lower bound for QPSK, the accuracy of signal separation/detection significantly degrades in case of high level data modulation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose layered soft interference cancellation (LSIC). We consider single-carrier (SC)-MIMO spatial multiplexing with frequency domain equalization (FDE). The achievable frame error rate (FER) performances with LSIC are evaluated by computer simulation to show that LSIC can provide better FER performance than iterative FD-SIC.

RC4 is the stream cipher proposed by Rivest in 1987, which is widely used in a number of commercial products because of its simplicity and substantial security. RC4 exploits shuffle-exchange paradigm, which uses a permutation S. Many attacks have been reported so far. No study, however, has focused on correlations in the Pseudo-Random Generation (PRGA) between two permutations S and S' with some differences, nevertheless such correlations are related to an inherent weakness of shuffle-exchange-type PRGA. In this paper, we investigate the correlations between S and S' with some differences in the initial round. We show that correlations between S and S' remain before "i" is in the position where the nonzero-bit difference exists in the initial round, and that the correlations remain with non negligible probability even after "i" passed by the position. This means that the same correlations between S and S' will be observed after the 255-th round. This reveals an inherent weakness of shuffle-exchange-type PRGA.

LCD Automatic Vision Inspection (AVI) systems automatically detect defect features and measure their sizes via camera vision. AVI systems usually report different measurements on the same defect with some variations on position or rotation mainly because we get different images. This is caused by possible variations in the image acquisition process including optical factors, non-uniform illumination, random noise, and so on. For this reason, conventional area based defect measuring method has some problems in terms of robustness and consistency. In this paper, we propose a new defect size measuring method to overcome these problems. We utilize volume information which is completely ignored in the area based conventional defect measuring method. We choose a bell shape as a defect model for experiment. The results show that our proposed method dramatically improves robustness of defect size measurement. Given proper modeling, the proposed volume based measuring method can be applied to various types of defect for better robustness and consistency.

In this Letter, the problem of estimating the time-difference-of-arrival between signals received at two spatially separated sensors is addressed. By taking discrete Fourier transform of the sensor outputs, time delay estimation corresponds to finding the frequency of a noisy sinusoid with time-varying amplitude. The generalized weighted linear predictor is utilized to estimate the time delay and it is shown that its estimation accuracy attains Cramér-Rao lower bound.

This paper presents a new approach to precompute points [3]P, [5]P,..., [2k-1]P, for some k ≥ 2 on an elliptic curve over Fp. Those points are required for the efficient evaluation of a scalar multiplication, the most important operation in elliptic curve cryptography. The proposed method precomputes the points in affine coordinates and needs only one single field inversion for the computation. The new method is superior to all known methods that also use one field inversion, if the required memory is taken into consideration. Compared to methods that require several field inversions for the precomputation, the proposed method is faster for a broad range of ratios of field inversions and field multiplications. The proposed method benefits especially from ratios as they occur on smart cards.

Provider authentication is necessary in bidirectional broadcasting services, and a digital signature scheme is often used to prevent an adversary from attempting impersonation. The cost of secure signing key management is extremely high. In addition, the key has to be updated very often, since it is frequently used. The result is that the verification key also has to be updated very often, and its redistribution cost is huge. These costs are real and substantive problems, especially when the number of users is large. In this paper, we propose a system that dramatically reduces these costs. In the system, the signing key is updated, but the corresponding verification key does not have to be updated. This means that the signing key can be updated without any cost for redistributing the verification key and that the system is secure against the threat of signing key leakage, since the key can be frequently updated. Moreover, we propose a new key management method that divides a conventional key management server's role into two. The use of a key-insulated signature (KIS) scheme enables low-cost and more secure key management with two servers. Finally, to make a bidirectional broadcasting service more secure even if the signing key is leaked, we developed a new strong KIS scheme. We performed an experiment that assessed the cost of our strong KIS scheme and found that it is sufficiently low. Accordingly, a provider authentication system employing this scheme would be more efficient and would have lower key redistribution and network costs in comparison with conventional authentication systems.

This paper investigates the closure properties of 1-inkdot nondeterministic Turing machines and 1-inkdot alternating Turing machines with only universal states which have sublogarithmic space. We show for example that the classes of sets accepted by these Turing machines are not closed under length-preserving homomorphism, concatenation with regular set, Kleene closure, and complementation.

Previously, we have proposed an access point (AP) allocation algorithm in indoor environments for the Wireless Internet-access Mesh NETwork (WIMNET) using one gateway (GW) to the Internet. WIMNET consists of multiple APs that are connected wirelessly mainly by the Wireless Distribution System (WDS), to expand the coverage area inexpensively and flexibly. In this paper, we present two extensions of this algorithm to enhance the applicability to the large-scale WIMNET. One is the multiple GW extension of the algorithm to increase the communication bandwidth with multiple GWs, where all the rooms in the network field are first partitioned into a set of disjoint GW clusters and then, our previous allocation algorithm is applied to each GW cluster sequentially. The APs in a GW cluster share the same GW. The other is the dependability extension to assure the network function by maintaining the connectivity and the host coverage, even if one link/AP fault occurs, where redundant APs are added to the AP allocation by our previous algorithm. The effectiveness of our proposal in terms of the number of APs and the throughput is verified through simulations using the WIMNET simulator.

Bag-of-Visual-Words representation has recently become popular for scene classification. However, learning the visual words in an unsupervised manner suffers from the problem when faced these patches with similar appearances corresponding to distinct semantic concepts. This paper proposes a novel supervised learning framework, which aims at taking full advantage of label information to address the problem. Specifically, the Gaussian Mixture Modeling (GMM) is firstly applied to obtain "semantic interpretation" of patches using scene labels. Each scene induces a probability density on the low-level visual features space, and patches are represented as vectors of posterior scene semantic concepts probabilities. And then the Information Bottleneck (IB) algorithm is introduce to cluster the patches into "visual words" via a supervised manner, from the perspective of semantic interpretations. Such operation can maximize the semantic information of the visual words. Once obtained the visual words, the appearing frequency of the corresponding visual words in a given image forms a histogram, which can be subsequently used in the scene categorization task via the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Experiments on a challenging dataset show that the proposed visual words better perform scene classification task than most existing methods.

The bit-error-rate (BER) performance predicted by the semi-analytical evolution technique proposed by Li Ping et al. becomes inaccurate for parallel concatenated coded interleave-division multiple-access (PCC-IDMA) systems. To solve this problem, we develop a novel evolution technique of such systems. Numerical results show that the predicted performance agrees well with the simulation results, and that this technique is useful for system optimization.