The management of subscriptions and events is an important task in the content-based publish/subscribe system. A good management mechanism can not only produce lower matching costs to speed up the delivery of matched events to the interested subscribers but can also induce good load balancing for subscription storage. In this paper, we consider the construction of this kind of system over a peer-to-peer overlay network and propose two message-to-node mapping schemes for system management. We both analyze and simulate the performance of the proposed schemes. The simulation results show the superiority of our schemes over existing ones.

In this letter, a robust pilot-assisted synchronization scheme is proposed for estimation of residual frequency offset (RFO) in OFDM-based digital radio mondiale (DRM) system. The RFO estimator uses the gain reference pilots mainly reserved for the channel tracking in the DRM standard. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed RFO estimator, comparisons are made with the conventional RFO estimator using the frequency reference pilots in terms of mean square error (MSE) performance.

Facial skin detection is an important step in facial surgical planning like as many other applications. There are many problems in facial skin detection. One of them is that the image features can be severely corrupted due to illumination, noise, and occlusion, where, shadows can cause numerous strong edges. Hence, in this paper, we present an automatic Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for facial skin color segmentation that uses knowledge of chromatic space and varying illumination conditions to correct and segment frontal and lateral facial color images, simultaneously. The proposed EM algorithm leads to a method that allows for more robust and accurate segmentation of facial images. The initialization of the model parameters is very important in convergence of algorithm. For this purpose, we use a method for robust parameter estimation of Gaussian mixture components. Also, we use an additional class, which includes all pixels not modeled explicitly by Gaussian with small variance, by a uniform probability density, and amending the EM algorithm appropriately, in order to obtain significantly better results. Experimental results on facial color images show that accurate estimates of the Gaussian mixture parameters are computed. Also, other results on images presenting a wide range of variations in lighting conditions, demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed color skin segmentation algorithm compared to conventional EM algorithm.

Obtaining the best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) of noisy signals is a traditional but powerful approach to noise reduction. Explicitly computing the BLUE usually requires the prior knowledge of the noise covariance matrix and the subspace to which the true signal belongs. However, such prior knowledge is often unavailable in reality, which prevents us from applying the BLUE to real-world problems. To cope with this problem, we give a practical procedure for approximating the BLUE without such prior knowledge. Our additional assumption is that the true signal follows a non-Gaussian distribution while the noise is Gaussian.

This paper will propose a wolf attack probability (WAP) as a new measure for evaluating security of biometric authentication systems. The wolf attack is an attempt to impersonate a victim by feeding "wolves" into the system to be attacked. The "wolf" means an input value which can be falsely accepted as a match with multiple templates. WAP is defined as a maximum success probability of the wolf attack with one wolf sample. In this paper, we give a rigorous definition of the new security measure which gives strength estimation of an individual biometric authentication system against impersonation attacks. We show that if one reestimates using our WAP measure, a typical fingerprint algorithm turns out to be much weaker than theoretically estimated by Ratha et al. Moreover, we apply the wolf attack to a finger-vein-pattern based algorithm. Surprisingly, we show that there exists an extremely strong wolf which falsely matches all templates for any threshold value.

Effective classification and analysis of semantic contents are very important for the content-based indexing and retrieval of video database. Our research attempts to classify movie clips into three groups of commonly elicited emotions, namely excitement, joy and sadness, based on a set of abstract-level semantic features extracted from the film sequence. In particular, these features consist of six visual and audio measures grounded on the artistic film theories. A unique sieving-structured neural network is proposed to be the classifying model due to its robustness. The performance of the proposed model is tested with 101 movie clips excerpted from 24 award-winning and well-known Hollywood feature films. The experimental result of 97.8% correct classification rate, measured against the collected human-judges, indicates the great potential of using abstract-level semantic features as an engineered tool for the application of video-content retrieval/indexing.

We developed a content delivery system using a partially reconfigurable FPGA to securely distribute digital content on the Internet. With partial reconfigurability of a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA, the system provides an innovative single-chip solution for protecting digital content. In the system, a partial circuit must be downloaded from a server to the client terminal to play content. Content will be played only when the downloaded circuit is correctly combined (=interlocked) with the circuit built in the terminal. Since each circuit has a unique I/O configuration, the downloaded circuit interlocks with the corresponding built-in circuit designed for a particular terminal. Thus, the interface of the circuit itself provides a novel authentication mechanism. This paper describes the detailed architecture of the system and clarify the feasibility and effectiveness of the system. In addition, we discuss a fail-safe mechanism and future work necessary for the practical application of the system.

UHF radio frequency identification (RFID) has gathered significant interest in the field of long-distance automatic identification applications. Since UHF RFID shares the frequency band with other RFID and/or other wireless systems, it is important to determine how much interference can be applied without causing a significant degradation of anti-collision speed. In this paper, the permissible link quality for RFID anti-collision in a practical environment is discussed by considering an erroneous communication link, taking into account of bit encoding and the type of interference. We approach the quantification of permissible link quality experimentally along with protocol simulations and the mathematical analyses. An international standard protocol, employing frame slotted ALOHA, was used as the air protocol. For these investigations, the present authors developed a protocol simulator. The simulation results were compared with analytical values based on Poisson distribution. The investigation in the return (tag to reader) link, and the forward (reader to tag) link, were analyzed separately. As result of the protocol simulation, it is generally important to secure the Pulse Error Rate 10-4 or better in both return and forward links for the anti-collision of 64 or less tags. The quality of the return link may be relaxed when the application does not require fast anti-collision. The degradation of the forward link, on the other hand, may entail loss of important commands, resulting in extremely slow anti-collision. It is measured experimentally that the required link quality can be relaxed by up to 10 dB in the return links and by 5 dB in the forward link when the primary source of interference originates in the interfering readers.

A dispersion diagram is useful in interpreting the characteristics of a periodic structure. In particular, the fast-wave region, where the wave is radiating, and the slow-wave region, where the wave is guided, can be determined from the dispersion diagram. An electronically-controlled composite right/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) was previously proposed and utilized as a leaky-wave (LW) antenna operating in the fast-wave region. However, since a guided-wave application operates in the slow-wave region, it is meaningful to study slow-wave effects of the proposed TL. In this paper, the dispersion diagram is used to investigate the slow-wave factor (SWF), which is necessary to understand the fast/slow-wave operations. Furthermore, the frequency characteristics are measured to find the cut-off frequencies in the LH and RH regions. Based on experimental results, it is observed at a fixed frequency, 2.6-GHz, that the phase of a proposed 6-cell structure can be changed by up to 280 in the LH slow-wave region.

Today, users themselves are becoming subjects of content creation. The fact that blog, wiki, and UCC have become very popular shows that users want to participate to create and modify digital content. Users who participate in composing content also want to have their copyrights on their modification parts. Thus, a copyright protection system for the content which can be modified by multiple users is required. However, the conventional DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems like OMA DRM are not suitable for the modifiable content because they do not support the content created and modified by different users. Therefore in this paper, we propose a new copyright protection system which allows each modifier of the content created and modified by multiple users to have one's own copyright. We propose data formats and protocols, and analyze the proposed system in terms of the correctness and security. Performance evaluation in the view of response time shows that the proposed system is 2 to 18 times shorter than other comparative schemes.

An all CMOS variable gain amplifier (VGA) which features wide dB-linear gain range per stage (45 dB), low power consumption (1.32 mW), small chip size (0.13 mm2), and low supply voltage (1.2 V) is described. The dB-linear range is extended by reducing the supply voltage of the conventional V-to-I converter. The two-stage VGA implemented in 0.18 µm CMOS offers 90 dB of gain variation, 3 dB bandwidth of greater than 21 MHz, and max/min input IP3 and P1 dB, respectively, of -5/-42 and -12/-50 dBm.

This paper presents a new QoS model for end-to-end service provisioning in multi-hop wireless networks. In legacy IEEE 802.11e based multi-hop wireless networks, the fixed assignment of service classes according to flow's priority at every node causes priority inversion problem when performing end-to-end service differentiation. Thus, this paper proposes a new QoS provisioning model called Dynamic Hop Service Differentiation (DHSD) to alleviate the problem and support effective service differentiation between end-to-end nodes. Many previous works for QoS model through the 802.11e based service differentiation focus on packet scheduling on several service queues with different service rate and service priority. Our model, however, concentrates on a dynamic class selection scheme, called Per Hop Class Assignment (PHCA), in the node's MAC layer, which selects a proper service class for each packet, in accordance with queue states and service requirement, in every node along the end-to-end route of the packet. The proposed QoS solution is evaluated using the OPNET simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed model outperforms both best-effort and 802.11e based strict priority service models in mobile ad hoc environments.

Efforts have been devoted to maximizing memory array densities. However, as the devices are scaled down in dimension and getting closer to each other, electrical interference phenomena among devices become more prominent. Various features of 3-D memory devices are proposed for the enhancement of memory array density. In this study, we mention 3-D NAND flash memory device having pillar structure as the representative, and investigate the paired cell interference (PCI) which inevitably occurs in the read operation for 3-D memory devices in this feature. Furthermore, criteria for setting up the read operation bias schemes are also examined in existence with PCI.

Tag collision is a major problem in the field of multi-tag identification in RFID systems. To solve this problem, many RFID systems adopt their own collision arbitration algorithms based on framed-structure slotted Aloha (FSSA) due to the simplicity of implementation. The frame size, meaning the number of slots in a frame, is a very important factor to inventory tags' responses in the FSSA. How to assign the frame size is therefore crucial to the collision arbitration performance. Since the existing collision arbitration methods do not consider the slot times of each slot when assigning frame size, they may increase overall identification time. By involving the slot times, we improve the collision arbitration performance of the conventional methods. Simulation results show that collision arbitration based on the proposed method is superior to that based on the conventional methods, irrespective of the number of tags.

This study describes the dependence of the surface electric field to the junction depth of source/drain-extension, and the suppression of gate induced drain leakage (GIDL) in fully depleted shallow junction gate-overlapped source/drain-extension (SDE). The GIDL can be reduced by reducing shallow junction depth of drain-extension. Total space charges are a function of junction depth in fully depleted shallow junction drain-extension, and the surface potential is proportional to these charges. Because the GIDL is proportional to surface potential, GIDL is the function of junction depth in fully depleted shallow junction drain-extension. Therefore, the GIDL is suppressed in a fully depleted shallow junction drain-extension by reducing surface potential. Negative substrate bias and halo doping could suppress the GIDL, too. The GIDL characteristic under negative substrate bias is contrary to other GIDL models.

We present a method for the objective quality evaluation of noise-reduced speech in wideband speech communication services, which utilize speech with a wider bandwidth (e.g., 7 kHz) than the usual telephone bandwidth. Experiments indicate that the amount of residual noise and the distortion of speech and noise, which are quality factors, influence the perceived quality degradation of noise-reduced speech. From the results, we observe the principal relationships between these quality factors and perceived speech quality. On the basis of these relationships, we propose a method that quantifies each quality factor in noise-reduced speech by analyzing signals that can be measured and assesses the overall perceived quality of noise-reduced speech using values of these quality factors. To verify the validity of the method, we perform a subjective listening test and compare subjective quality of noise-reduced speech with its estimation. In the test, we use various types of background noise and noise-reduction algorithms. The verification results indicate that the correlation between subjective quality and its objective estimation is sufficiently high regardless of the type of background noise and noise-reduction algorithm.

Previously proposed batch signature schemes do not allow a signer to generate a signature immediately for sequentially asked signing queries. In this letter, we propose flexible batch signatures which do not need any waiting period and have very light computational overhead. Therefore our schemes are well suited for low power devices.

This paper presents an algorithm for the robust watermarking of 3D polygonal mesh models. The proposed algorithm embeds the watermark into a 2D image extracted from the 3D model, rather than directly embedding it into 3D geometry. The proposed embedding domain, i.e., the 2D image, is devised to be robust against the attacks like mesh simplification which severely modifies the vertices and connectivity while preserving the appearance of the model. The watermark-embedded model is obtained by using a simple vertex perturbation algorithm without iterative optimization. Two exemplary watermark applications using the proposed methods are also presented: one is to embed several bits into 3D models and the other is to detect only the existence of a watermark. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is robust against similarity transform, mesh simplification, additive Gaussian noise, quantization of vertex coordinates and mesh smoothing, and that its computational complexity is lower than that of the conventional methods.

Based on cyclic difference sets, sequences with two-valued autocorrelation can be constructed. Using these constructed sequences, two classes of binary constant weight codes are presented. Some codes proposed in this paper are proven to be optimal.

In air navigation, the rotation of aircraft results in the discontinuous tracking of GNSS signals. As the platform rotates, the GNSS signals are subject to blanking effects. To solve this problem, a ring-type antenna array is used to prevent signal discontinuity and a hypothesis-test based detection scheme is developed so that the correct antenna combination can be formed to provide uninterrupted reception of GNSS signals in the presence of blanking, noise, and interferences. A fixed threshold detection scheme is first developed by assuming that the statistics of the noise are known. It is shown that the scheme is capable of differentiating signal from noise at each antenna element. To account for the interference effect, a multiple hypothesis test scheme, together with an adaptive selection rule, is further developed. Through this detection and selection process, it is shown, through simulations, that the desired GNSS signals can be extracted and successfully tracked in the presence of blanking and co-channel interference.