A novel approach for the multiple-model multi-sensor Bernoulli filter (MM-MSBF) based on the theory of finite set statistics (FISST) is proposed for a single maneuvering target tracking in the presence of detection uncertainty and clutter. First, the FISST is used to derive the multi-sensor likelihood function of MSBF, and then combining the MSBF filter with the interacting multiple models (IMM) algorithm to track the maneuvering target. Moreover, the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method is used to implement the MM-MSBF algorithm. Eventually, the simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter.

The conventional non-negative matrix factorization (NMF)-based speech enhancement is accomplished by updating iteratively with the prior knowledge of the clean speech and noise spectra bases. With the probabilistic estimation of whether the speech is present or not in a certain frame, this letter proposes a speech enhancement algorithm incorporating the speech presence probability (SPP) obtained via noise estimation to the NMF process. To take advantage of both the NMF-based and statistical model-based approaches, the final enhanced speech is achieved by applying a statistical model-based filter to the output of the SPP weighted NMF. Objective evaluations using perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) on TIMIT with 20 noise types at various signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the conventional NMF and statistical model-based baselines.

Route guidance system is one of the essential components of a vehicle navigation system in ITS. In this paper, a centrally determined route guidance system is established to solve congestion problems. The Sarsa learning method is used to guide vehicles, and global and local parameter strategy is proposed to adjust the vehicle guidance by considering the whole traffic system and local traffic environment, respectively. The proposed method can save the average driving time and relieve traffic congestion. The evaluation was done using two cases on different road networks. The experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment (IQA) algorithm aims to automatically evaluate the distorted image quality with partial reference data. The goal of RR IQA metric is to achieve higher quality prediction accuracy using less reference information. In this paper, we introduce a new RR IQA metric by quantifying the difference of discrete cosine transform (DCT) entropy features between the reference and distorted images. Neurophysiological evidences indicate that the human visual system presents different sensitivities to different frequency bands. Moreover, distortions on different bands result in individual quality degradations. Therefore, we suggest to calculate the information degradation on each band separately for quality assessment. The information degradations are firstly measured by the entropy difference of reorganized DCT coefficients. Then, the entropy differences on all bands are pooled to obtain the quality score. Experimental results on LIVE, CSIQ, TID2008, Toyama and IVC databases show that the proposed method performs highly consistent with human perception with limited reference data (8 values).

In this paper, we propose a method for designing finite impulse response (FIR) filters with canonic signed digit (CSD) coefficients using particle swarm optimization (PSO). In such a design problem, a large number of local minimums appear in an evaluation function for the optimization. An updating procedure of PSO tends to stagnate around such local minimums and thus indicates a premature convergence property. Therefore, a new framework for avoiding such a situation is proposed, in which the evaluation function is modified around the stagnation point. Several design examples are shown to present the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In the routing design of interposer and etc., the combination of a pin pair to be connected by wire is often flexible, and the reductions of the total wire length and the length difference are pursued to keep the circuit performance. Even though the total wire length can be minimized by finding a minimum cost maximum flow in set pair routing problems, the length difference is often large, and the reduction of it is not easy. In this paper, an algorithm that reduces the length difference while keeping the total wire length small is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, an initial routing first obtained by a minimum cost maximum flow. Then it is modified to reduce the maximum length while keeping the minimum total wire length, and a connection of the minimum length is detoured to reduce the length difference. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is confirmed by experiments.

A conventional HMM-based speech synthesis system for Hanoi Vietnamese often suffers from hoarse quality due to incomplete F0 parameterization of glottalized tones. Since estimating F0 from glottalized waveform is rather problematic for usual F0 extractors, we propose a pitch marking algorithm where pitch marks are propagated from regular regions of a speech signal to glottalized ones, from which complete F0 contours for the glottalized tones are derived. The proposed F0 parameterization scheme was confirmed to significantly reduce the hoarseness whilst slightly improving the tone naturalness of synthetic speech by both objective and listening tests. The pitch marking algorithm works as a refinement step based on the results of an F0 extractor. Therefore, the proposed scheme can be combined with any F0 extractor.

Almost sure convergence coding theorems of one-shot and multi-shot Tunstall codes are proved for stationary memoryless sources. Coding theorem of one-shot Tunstall code is proved in the case that the leaf count of Tunstall tree increases. On the other hand, coding theorem is proved for multi-shot Tunstall code with increasing parsing count, under the assumption that the Tunstall tree grows as the parsing proceeds. In this result, it is clarified that the theorem for the one-shot Tunstall code is not a corollary of the theorem for the multi-shot Tunstall code. In the case of the multi-shot Tunstall code, it can be regarded that the coding theorem is proved for the sequential algorithm such that parsing and coding are processed repeatedly. Cartesian concatenation of trees and geometric mean of the leaf counts of trees are newly introduced, which play crucial roles in the analyses of multi-shot Tunstall code.

We consider the distributed source coding system of two correlated Gaussian Vector sources Yl=t(Yl1, Yl2),l=1,2 which are noisy observations of correlated Gaussian scalar source X0. We assume that for each (l,k)∈{1,2}, Ylk is an observation of the source X0, having the form Ylk=X0+Nlk, where Nlk is a Gaussian random variable independent of X0. We further assume that Nlk, (l,k)∈{1,2}2 are independent. In this system two correlated Gaussian observations are separately compressed by two encoders and sent to the information processing center. We study the remote source coding problem where the decoder at the center attempts to reconstruct the remote source X0. The determination problem of the rate distortion region for this communication system can be regarded as an extension of the Gaussian CEO problem to the case of vector observations. For each vector observation we can obtain an estimation on X0 from this observation. Those estimations are sufficient statistics on X0. Using those sufficient statistics, we determine the rate distortion region by showing that it coincides with the rate distortion region of the CEO problem where the scalar observations of X0 are equal to the estimations computed from the vector observations. We further extend the result to the case of L terminal and general vector observations.

To design high quality three-dimensional integrated circuits (3-D ICs), the effect of process and design parameters on delay must be adequately understood. This paper presents an electrical circuit model of an entire structure in through silicon via (TSV) based 3-D ICs with a new equation for on-chip interconnect capacitance and then proposes an effective model for evaluating signal propagation delay in vertically stacked chips. All electrical parameter values can be calculated by the closed-form equations without a field solver. The delay model is constructed with the first- or second-order function of each parameter to the delay obtained from a typical structure. The results obtained by on-chip interconnect capacitance equations and delay model are in excellent agreement with those by a field solver and circuit simulator, respectively. We also show that the model is very useful for evaluating effects of the process and design parameters on vertical signal propagation delay such as the sensitivity and variability analysis.

The challenges of providing a divide-and-conquer strategy for tackling large geospatial raster data input/output (I/O) are longstanding. Solutions need to change with advances in the technology and hardware. After analyzing the reason for the problems of traditional parallel raster I/O mode, a parallel I/O strategy using file view is proposed to solve these problems. Message Passing Interface I/O (MPI-IO) is used to implement this strategy. Experimental results show how a file view approach can be effectively married to General Parallel File System (GPFS). A suitable file view setting provides an efficient solution to parallel geospatial raster data I/O.

We conduct, in accordance with IEC 61000-4-2, an electrostatic discharge (ESD) test for a small size battery-operated control circuit board in a myoelectric artificial hand system to investigate the influence of the induced noises by indirect ESDs from an ESD generator to a horizontal coupling plane (HCP) and a vertical coupling plane (VCP). A photo-coupler is set between the small size control board and a motor control circuit to suppress noise in the pulse width modulation (PWM) signals. Two types of ESD noise are observed at the output pins of PWM signals. One type is the ESD noise itself (called Type A) and the other one is the ESD noise superimposed over the PWM pulses (Type B). No matter which polarity the charge voltages of the ESD generator have, both types can be observed and the Type A is dominant in the output pulses. Moreover, the ESD interference in the HCP case is found to be stronger than that in the VCP case usually. In the PWM signals observed at the photo-coupler output, on the other hand, Type A noises tend to increase for positive polarity and decrease for negative polarity, while Type B noises tend to increase at -8kV test level in the HCP case. These results suggest that the photo-coupler does not work well for ESD noise suppression. One of the reasons has been demonstrated to be due to the driving capability of the photo-coupler, and other one is due to the presence of a parasitic capacitance between the input and output of the photo-coupler. The parasitic capacitance can yield a capacitive coupling so that high-frequency ESD noises pass through the photo-coupler.

Postcopy live migration is a promising alternative of virtual machine (VM) migration, which transfers memory pages after switching the execution host of a VM. It allows a shorter and more deterministic migration time than precopy migration. There is, however, a possibility that postcopy migration would degrade VM performance just after switching the execution host. In this paper, we propose a performance improvement technique of postcopy migration, extending the para-virtualized page fault mechanism of a virtual machine monitor. When the guest operating system accesses a not-yet-transferred memory page, our proposed mechanism allows the guest kernel to defer the execution of the current process until the page data is transferred. In parallel with the page transfer, the guest kernel can yield VCPU to other active processes. We implemented the proposed technique in our postcopy migration mechanism for Qemu/KVM. Through experiments, we confirmed that our technique successfully alleviated performance degradation of postcopy migration for web server and database benchmarks.

We present a low-voltage digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO) with the third-order ΔΣ modulator utilized in the medical implant communication service (MICS) frequency band. An optimized DCO core operating in the subthreshold region is designed, based on the gm/ID methodology. Thermometer coder with the dynamic element matching and ΔΣ modulator are implemented for the frequency tuning. High frequency resolution is achieved by using the ΔΣ modulator. The ΔΣ-modulator-based LC-DCO implemented in a 130-nm CMOS technology has achieved the phase noise of -115.3 dBc/Hz at 200 kHz offset frequency with the tuning range of 382 MHz to 412 MHz for the MICS band. It consumes 700 µW from a 0.7-V supply voltage and has a high frequency resolution of 18 kHz.

To analyze the structure of a set of high-dimensional perfect sequences over a composition algebra over R, we developed the theory of Fourier transforms of the set of such sequences. We define the discrete cosine transform and the discrete sine transform, and we show that there exists a relationship between these transforms and a convolution of sequences. By applying this property to a set of perfect sequences, we obtain a parameterization theorem. Using this theorem, we show the equivalence between the left perfectness and right perfectness of sequences. For sequences of real numbers, we obtain the parameterization without restrictions on the parameters.

A wide-bandwidth fundamental mixer operating at a frequency above 110GHz for precise spectrum analysis was developed using the InP HEMT technology. A single-ended resistive mixer was adopted for the mixer circuit. An IF amplifier and LO buffer amplifier were also developed and integrated into the mixer chip. As for packaging into a metal block module, a flip-chip bonding technique was introduced. Compared to face-up mounting with wire connections, flip-chip bonding exhibited good frequency flatness in signal loss. The mixer module with a built-in IF amplifier achieved a conversion gain of 5dB at an RF frequency of 135GHz and a 3-dB bandwidth of 35GHz. The mixer module with an LO buffer amplifier operated well even at an LO power of -20dBm.

The researches on model-based testing mainly focus on the models with single component, such as FSM and EFSM. For the network protocols which have multiple components communicating with messages, CFSM is a widely accepted solution. But in some network protocols, parallel and data-shared components maybe exist in the same network entity. It is infeasible to precisely specify such protocol by existing models. In this paper we present a new model, Parallel Parameterized Extended Finite State Machine (PaP-EFSM). A protocol system can be modeled with a group of PaP-EFSMs. The PaP-EFSMs work in parallel and they can read external variables form each other. We present a 2-stage test generation approach for our new models. Firstly, we generate test sequences for internal variables of each machine. They may be non-executable due to external variables. Secondly, we process the external variables. We make the sequences for internal variables executable and generate more test sequences for external variables. For validation, we apply this method to the conformance testing of real-life protocols. The devices from different vendors are tested and implementation faults are exposed.

The amount of seasonings used during food preparation is quite important information for modern people to enable them to cook delicious dishes as well as to take care for their health. In this paper, we propose a near real-time automated system for measuring and recording the amount of seasonings used during food preparation. Our proposed system is equipped with two devices: electronic scales and a camera. Seasoning bottles are basically placed on the electronic scales in the proposed system, and the scales continually measure the total weight of the bottles placed on them. When a chef uses a certain seasoning, he/she first picks up the bottle containing it from the scales, then adds the seasoning to a dish, and then returns the bottle to the scales. In this process, the chef's picking and returning actions are monitored by the camera. The consumed amount of each seasoning is calculated as the difference in weight between before and after it is used. We evaluated the performance of the proposed system with experiments in 301 trials in actual food preparation performed by seven participants. The results revealed that our system successfully measured the consumption of seasonings in 60.1% of all the trials.

This paper addresses the problem of job scheduling in volunteer computing (VC) systems where each computation job is replicated and allocated to multiple participants (workers) to remove incorrect results by a voting mechanism. In the job scheduling of VC, the number of workers to complete a job is an important factor for the system performance; however, it cannot be fixed because some of the workers may secede in real VC. This is the problem that existing methods have not considered in the job scheduling. We propose a dynamic job scheduling method which considers the expected probability of completion (EPC) for each job based on the probability of worker's secession. The key idea of the proposed method is to allocate jobs so that EPC is always greater than a specified value (SPC). By setting SPC as a reasonable value, the proposed method enables to complete jobs without excess allocation, which leads to the higher performance of VC systems. We assume in this paper that worker's secession probability follows Weibull-distribution which is known to reflect more practical situation. We derive parameters for the distribution using actual trace data and compare the performance of the proposed and the previous method under the Weibull-distribution model, as well as the previous constant probability model. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method is up to 5 times higher than that of the existing method especially when the time for completing jobs is restricted, while keeping the error rate lower than a required value.

Intelligent information systems captivate people's attention. Examples of such systems include driving support vehicles capable of sensing driver state and communication robots capable of interacting with humans. Modeling how people search visual information is indispensable for designing these kinds of systems. In this paper, we focus on human visual attention, which is closely related to visual search behavior. We propose a computational model to estimate human visual attention while carrying out a visual target search task. Existing models estimate visual attention using the ratio between a representative value of visual feature of a target stimulus and that of distractors or background. The models, however, can not often achieve a better performance for difficult search tasks that require a sequentially spotlighting process. For such tasks, the linear separability effect of a visual feature distribution should be considered. Hence, we introduce this effect to spatially localized activation. Concretely, our top-down model estimates target-specific visual attention using Fisher's variance ratio between a visual feature distribution of a local region in the field of view and that of a target stimulus. We confirm the effectiveness of our computational model through a visual search experiment.