Disturbance attenuation for a class of time-delay systems is performed by a combined simple adaptive control (SAC) with a new configuration of disturbance observer (DOB). The nominal system results from the Pade approximation, which is in the form of a non-minimum phase LTI system. For the implementation of SAC and DOB, two parallel feedforward compensators (PFC) are designed with the inverses of PD- and PID-controller, respectively. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller to compensate the disturbance response and uncertain delay time.

Visual adaptation is a universal phenomenon associated with human visual system. This adaptation affects not only the perception of low-level visual systems processing color, motion, and orientation, but also the perception of high-level visual systems processing complex visual patterns, such as facial identity and expression. Although it remains unclear for the mutual interaction mechanism between systems at different levels, this issue is the key to understand the hierarchical neural coding and computation mechanism. Thus, we examined whether the low-level adaptation influences on the high-level aftereffect by means of cross-level adaptation paradigm (i.e. color, figure adaptation versus facial identity adaptation). We measured the identity aftereffects within the real face test images on real face, color chip and figure adapting conditions. The cross-level mutual influence was evaluated by the aftereffect size among different adapting conditions. The results suggest that the adaptation to color and figure contributes to the high-level facial identity aftereffect. Besides, the real face adaptation obtained the significantly stronger aftereffect than the color chip or the figure adaptation. Our results reveal the possibility of cross-level adaptation propagation and implicitly indicate a high-level holistic facial neural representation. Based on these results, we discussed the theoretical implication of cross-level adaptation propagation for understanding the hierarchical sensory neural systems.

Cooperative communication provides a new way of introducing spatial diversity to wireless systems. In order to increase the spectral efficiency of coded cooperative relaying system, the adaptive modulation technique is presented under Rayleigh fading channel in this paper. The source and relay adapt their modulation schemes based on the channel condition of all three links, i.e. source to relay, source to destination and relay to destination. Furthermore, since the available channel knowledge of the source to relay link is usually non-ideal at the destination in practice, a simplified estimation of this link quality is also given. Simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed technique in improving the data throughput.

A method for reducing ground clutter contribution from ground penetrating radar (GPR) data is proposed for discrimination of landmines located in shallow depth. The algorithm of this method is based on the Matching Pursuit (MP) that is a technique for non-orthogonal signal decomposition using dictionary of functions. As the dictionary of function, a wave-based dictionary constructed by taking account of scattering mechanisms of electromagnetic (EM) wave by rough surfaces is employed. Through numerical simulations, performance of ground clutter reduction is evaluated. The results show that the proposed method has good performance and is effective for GPR data preprocessing for discrimination of shallowly buried landmines.

This paper proposes a low complexity noise suppressor with hybrid filterbanks and adaptive time-frequency tiling. An analysis hybrid filterbank provides efficient transformation by further decomposing low-frequency bins after a coarse transformation with a short frame size. A synthesis hybrid filterbank also reduces computational complexity in a similar fashion to the analysis hybrid filterbank. Adaptive time-frequency tiling reduces the number of spectral gain calculations. It adaptively generates tiling information in the time-frequency plane based on the signal characteristics. The average number of instructions on a typical DSP chip has been reduced by 30% to 7.5 MIPS in case of mono signals sampled at 44.1 kHz. A Subjective test result shows that the sound quality of the proposed method is comparable to that of the conventional one.

Femto cell systems have been the one of the key technologies for ubiquitous networks, and some of them are already serviced by manufacturers. Femto base stations are deployed randomly and without pre-planning, so the femto system has a wider variation in topology than cellular networks. Therefore, a specialized resource assignment algorithm is essential for efficient performance of the femto cell. In this paper, we propose a realtime channel assignment algorithm for adapting to the varying environments, including new cell deployment or power switch off. Our algorithm is a form of a sequential graph coloring problem which outperforms other fixed allocation algorithms. Simulation results show realtime assignment has better performance than the fixed allocation when the wireless environment changes faster than the tracking operation time.

Recently, proportionate adaptive algorithms have been proposed to speed up convergence in the identification of sparse impulse response. Although they can improve convergence for sparse impulse responses, the steady-state misalignment is limited by the constant step-size parameter. In this article, based on the principle of least perturbation, we first present a derivation of normalized version of proportionate algorithms. Then by taking the disturbance signal into account, we propose a variable step-size proportionate NLMS algorithm to combine the benefits of both variable step-size algorithms and proportionate algorithms. The proposed approach can achieve fast convergence with a large step size when the identification error is large, and then considerably decrease the steady-state misalignment with a small step size after the adaptive filter reaches a certain degree of convergence. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In this paper, we propose a rapid model adaptation technique for emotional speech recognition which enables us to extract paralinguistic information as well as linguistic information contained in speech signals. This technique is based on style estimation and style adaptation using a multiple-regression HMM (MRHMM). In the MRHMM, the mean parameters of the output probability density function are controlled by a low-dimensional parameter vector, called a style vector, which corresponds to a set of the explanatory variables of the multiple regression. The recognition process consists of two stages. In the first stage, the style vector that represents the emotional expression category and the intensity of its expressiveness for the input speech is estimated on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Next, the acoustic models are adapted using the estimated style vector, and then standard HMM-based speech recognition is performed in the second stage. We assess the performance of the proposed technique in the recognition of simulated emotional speech uttered by both professional narrators and non-professional speakers.

Ultrasonic imaging is useful in seabed or lakebed observations. We can roughly estimate the sea depth by hearing the echo generated by the boundary of water and rocks or sand. However, the estimation quality is usually not sufficient to draw seabed landscape since the echo signal includes serious distortion caused by autointerference. This paper proposes a novel method to visualize the shape of distant boundaries, such as the seawater-rock/sand boundary, based on the complex-valued Markov random field (CMRF) model. Our method realizes adaptive compensation of distortion without changing the global features in the measurement data, and obtains higher-quality landscape with less computational cost than conventional methods.

The final goal of the present project is to develop a ship detection and identification system by integrating spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR), ground-based maritime radar and automatic identification system (AIS); and this article presents the results of the first phase experiments and current status toward achieving this goal. The data acquired by the Phased Array L-band SAR (PALSAR) on board of the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) were used as SAR data, and X-band maritime radar including AIS were used as a ground-based system. The work is divided into two experimental phases. The first phase is to examine the ability of PALSAR to detect ships whose sizes are comparable with the SAR resolution cells, and the second is to incorporate the PALSAR data with those acquired by the ground-based radar with AIS. For the experiments in the first phase, we deployed three small fishing boats whose lengths ranged from approximately 8 m to 15 m in the Tosa Bay in Kochi, Japan in 2006. The experiments were carried out for four observation PALSAR modes: FBS (Fine Beam Single) 34.3, FBS 21.5, FBD (Fine Beam Double) 41.5, and PLR (PoLaRimetric) 20.5, where the numbers in each modes represent the off-nadir angles. For extracting the boats from the PALSAR images, five algorithms were considered, including amplitude-based, CFAR (Constant False Alarm Rate), MLCC (Multi-Look Cross-Correlation), CCF (Cross-Correlation Function) of HH- and HV-polarization amplitudes, and polarimetric analyses. This paper summarizes the results of the first phase experiments; the summary of the integrated system in the second phase will be reported in the near future.

In the present paper, the performance of cooperative relaying networks with adaptive relaying scheme selection is analyzed. Cooperative relaying is a new technique to achieve spatial diversity gain by using neighboring stations. However, when multiple stations transmit simultaneously, the number of interference signals increases. Therefore, the introduction of cooperative relaying in radio communication systems does not always increase the network capacity due to the co-channel interference. Therefore, in order to achieve high spectral efficiency, it is necessary to select cooperative relaying or non-cooperative relaying adaptively. Assuming both centralized and decentralized adaptive controls, the spectrum efficiency is evaluated. The performance under decentralized control is evaluated using a game-theoretic approach. Simulation results show that the introduction of cooperative relaying with centralized control always increases the spectral efficiency. On the other hand, Simulation results also show that, when each source selects a relaying scheme independently and selfishly to maximize its own spectral efficiency, the introduction of the cooperative relaying may reduce the spectral efficiency due to the increase in the number of interference signals.

Timing margin of a chip varies chip by chip due to manufacturing variability, and depends on operating environment and aging. Adaptive speed control with timing error prediction is promising to mitigate the timing margin variation, whereas it inherently has a critical risk of timing error occurrence when a circuit is slowed down. This paper presents how to evaluate the relation between timing error rate and power dissipation in self-adaptive circuits with timing error prediction. The discussion is experimentally validated using adders in subthreshold operation in a 90 nm CMOS process. We show a trade-off between timing error rate and power dissipation, and reveal the dependency of the trade-off on design parameters.

This paper addresses problems appearing in restoration algorithms based on utilizing both Tikhonov and bilateral total variation (BTV) regularization. The former regularization assumes that prior information has Gaussian distribution which indeed fails at edges, while the later regularization highly depends on the selected bilateral filter's parameters. To overcome these problems, we propose a locally adaptive regularization. In the proposed algorithm, we use general directional regularization functions with adaptive weights. The adaptive weights are estimated from local patches based on the property of the partially restored image. Unlike Tikhonov regularization, it can avoid smoothness across edges by using adaptive weights. In addition, unlike BTV regularization, the proposed regularization function doesn't depend on parameters' selection. The convexity conditions as well as the convergence conditions are derived for the proposed algorithm.

The optimization of polarimetric contrast enhancement (OPCE) is a widely used method for maximizing the received power ratio of a desired target versus an undesired target (clutter). In this letter, a new model of the OPCE is proposed based on the Fisher criterion. By introducing the well known two-class problem of linear discriminant analysis (LDA), the proposed model is to enlarge the normalized distance of mean value between the target and the clutter. In addition, a cross-iterative numerical method is proposed for solving the optimization with a quadratic constraint. Experimental results with the polarimetric SAR (POLSAR) data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Previous researches on ad-hoc networks did not consider the dynamic rate adaptation for wireless multicast. Instead, they statically use the lowest data rate for multicast transmission. The MAC protocol proposed in this paper utilizes the OFDMA mechanism, so that all members can report their rate preference at one time. As a result, the best rate for each member is dynamically selected.

In recent years, there have been many studies on integrating a number of heterogeneous wireless networks into one network by establishing standards like IEEE 802.16. For this purpose, the base station (BS) should allocate the appropriate bandwidth to each connection with a network scheduler. In wireless networks, the signal to noise ratio (SNR) changes with time due to many factors such as fading. Hence, we estimate the SNR based on the error rate reflecting wireless network condition. Using the estimated SNR, we propose a new time slot allocation algorithm so that the proposed algorithm guarantees the delay requirement and full link utilization.

The hidden terminal problem leads to frequent collisions and decreases the throughput of ad hoc networks dramatically. Low network spatial reuse also results in fewer parallel transmissions, which further leads to reduced network throughput. Eliminating the hidden terminals and improving the spatial reuse are two important approaches to improving network throughput. In this paper, spatial distribution of the hidden terminals is analyzed in consideration of accumulated interference and environmental noise. As the distribution of hidden terminals is affected by many factors such as transmitter-receiver distance, SINR requirement and nodes density, it is inefficient to use fixed busy tone transmission power. To eliminate the hidden terminals and improve network spatial reuse, an enhancement to DBTMA named EDBTMA is proposed. This is achieved by using an adaptive busy tone power control scheme. Receivers adjust the transmission power of busy tone according to received signal power and accumulated interference adaptively so that all hidden terminals (and only hidden terminals) are covered by the busy tone. Simulation results show that EDBTMA protocol can solve the hidden terminal problem and improve network spatial reuse better than DBTMA and achieves 65% additional network throughput compared to DBTMA.

An inversion method of bridge height over water by polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is developed. A geometric ray description to illustrate scattering mechanism of a bridge over water surface is identified by polarimetric image analysis. Using the mapping and projecting algorithm, a polarimetric SAR image of a bridge model is first simulated and shows that scattering from a bridge over water can be identified by three strip lines corresponding to single-, double-, and triple-order scattering, respectively. A set of polarimetric parameters based on the de-orientation theory is applied to analysis of three types scattering, and the thinning-clustering algorithm and Hough transform are then employed to locate the image positions of these strip lines. These lines are used to invert the bridge height. Fully polarimetric image data of airborne Pi-SAR at X-band are applied to inversion of the height and width of the Naruto Bridge in Japan. Based on the same principle, this approach is also applicable to spaceborne ALOSPALSAR single-polarization data of the Eastern Ocean Bridge in China. The results show good feasibility to realize the bridge height inversion.

Factorization of Hadamard matrices can provide fast algorithm and facilitate efficient hardware realization. In this letter, constructions of factorizable multilevel Hadamard matrices, which can be considered as special case of unitary matrices, are inverstigated. In particular, a class of ternary Hadamard matrices, together with its application, is presented.

In this letter, we propose a simple adaptive switching scheme to enhance the performance of space-time/frequency block coded OFDM systems (STBC/SFBC-OFDM). Since STBC-OFDM and SFBC-OFDM undergo severe performance degradation in time- and frequency-selective fading channels, respectively, performance enhancement can be achieved by switching between STBC-OFDM and SFBC-OFDM over a continuously varying channel environments. Thus, a new switching scheme based on the characteristics of the actual channel is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by computer simulations.