We consider the edge-linking approach for accurate locating of moving object boundaries in video segmentation. We review the existing methods and propose a scheme designed for efficiency and better accuracy. The scheme first obtains a very rough outline of an object by a suitable means, e.g., change detection. It then forms a relatively compact image region that properly contains the object, through a procedure termed "mask sketch." Finally, the outermost edges in the region are found and linked via a shortest-path algorithm. Experiments show that the scheme yields good performance.

2 GHz band electrically tunable superconducting microstrip line band-pass filter was developed. The tunable filter used a thin interdigital electrode. The dielectric distribution of SrTiO3 substrate included a calculated nonlinear effect of the electrode and ferroelectric material. As a result, the tunable microstrip line filter design with interdigital electrode enabled calculation by the finite element method and the moment method. The tunable filter with a measured unloaded Q factor of 9700 and a frequency shift of 1.25 MHz was obtained.

This paper introduces the water ring scan method especially designed for the scalable video coding schemes such as fine granularity scalabilities (FGS) on the basis of MPEG-4 part-2 and the H.264. The proposed scanning method can improve the subjective quality of the decoded video by most-preferentially encoding, transmitting and decoding the image information of the region of interest. From the various simulation results of FGS coding schemes with MPEG-4 part 2 and H.264, the proposed scanning method can improve the subjective picture quality about 0.5 dB 3.5 dB better than the widely used raster scan order, especially on the region of interest, without significant loss of the quality in the left-over region.

This paper proposes a new method of example-based query generation for spontaneous speech. Along with modeling the information flows of human dialogues, the authors have designed a system that allows users to retrieve information while driving a car. The system refers to the dialogue corpus to find an example that is similar to input speech, and it generates a query from the example. The experimental results for the prototype system show that 1) for transcribed text input, it provides the correct query in about 64% of cases and the partially collect query in about 88% 2) it has the ability to create correct queries for the utterances not including keywords, compared with the conventional keyword extraction method.

This paper presents a new fast and robust circle extraction method that is capable of extracting circles from images with complicated backgrounds. It is not based on the Hough transform (HT) that requires a time-consuming voting process. The proposed method uses a least-squares circle fitting algorithm for extracting circles. The arcs are fitted by extended digital lines that are extracted by a fast line extraction method. The proposed method calculates accurate circle parameters using the fitted arcs instead of evidence histograms in the parameter space. Tests performed on various real-world images show that the proposed method quickly and accurately extracts circles from complicated and heavily corrupted images.

A combining method for receiver diversity, followed by a Bayesian decision feedback equalizer, is proposed. This eigenvector based combining maximizes the desired part energy of combined channel, on which the equalizer performance mainly depends. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulations.

The paper first researches the properties of neural networks in the framework of the dual linear programming theory, then discusses the variation range of a Hessian matrix associated to dual linear programming problems. By means of eigenvalues method, a Lipschitz constant based formula for determining the algorithm step-size is presented. Two examples are given to show that the proposed formula is efficacious.

An improved method for extracting translation equivalents from bilingual comparable corpora according to contextual similarity was developed. This method has two main features. First, a seed bilingual lexicon--which is used to bridge contexts in different languages--is adapted to the corpora from which translation equivalents are to be extracted. Second, the contextual similarity is evaluated by using a combination of similarity measures defined in opposite directions. An experiment using Wall Street Journal and Nihon Keizai Shimbun corpora, together with the EDR bilingual dictionary, demonstrated the effectiveness of the method; it produced lists of candidate translation equivalents with an accuracy of around 30% for frequently occurring unknown words. The method thus proved to be useful for improving the coverage of a bilingual lexicon.

The Generalized Max-Min Fairness policy (GMM) allocates in a fair way the available bandwidth among elastic calls by taking into account their minimum and maximum rate requirements. The GMM has been described in a five-step procedure, which has the advantage of an easy presentation, but does not come into details, as far as its computer implementation is concerned, and fails to describe the policy in a clear mathematical way. We propose a new algorithm for the GMM policy, in a clear mathematical way, based on Linear Programming (LP). The new algorithm is directly convertible into software. Numerical examples clarify our algorithm.

The uplink synchronous transmission scheme was proposed to improve the uplink performance of DS-CDMA systems. However, previous performance analyses have assumed perfect uplink synchronization among main paths, which is impractical due to timing misalignment. Accordingly, this Letter evaluates the impact of imperfect synchronization on the performance of an uplink synchronized DS-CDMA system by deriving an orthogonality factor as a measure of the imperfection in synchronization.

Recursive programs are often easier to read and write than iterative ones, but their execution frequently requires large numbers of procedure calls and stack operations. This causes problems in program optimization related to inline coding and the locality of data references. In addition to these problems, defining programs recursively sometimes leads to repetitive execution of similar computations, causing programs to have exponential time complexity. As a result, recursion removal methods, which transform a given recursive program to an iterative one without using the stack and increasing the amount of computation time, have been studied since the 1970s. In 1998, our group proposed a recursion removal method for a linear recursive program. In this paper, we extend the method to deal with non-linear recursive programs with one descent function (RPODs), which are programs of the form f(x) = if p(x) then b(x) else a(c(x),f(d(x)),f(d2(x)),...,f(dn(x))). First, we define the cumulative function for an RPOD. Next, based on the new cumulative function, several transformation techniques for RPODs are shown. These include a unified method of deriving logarithmic-order iterative programs or loop-free programs. Finally, the relationships between our method and various tupling strategies are discussed.

This paper describes a new probabilistic sentence reduction method using maximum entropy model. In contrast to previous methods, the proposed method has the ability to produce multiple best results for a given sentence, which is useful in text summarization applications. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves on earlier methods in both accuracy and computation time.

In this letter, we provide a solution to the stabilization problem of a class of Lipschitz nonlinear systems by output feedback. Via the newly proposed nonlinearity characterization function (NCF) concept, we propose an effective method in designing an output feedback controller. Under the suggested sufficient condition which is derived by using the NCF, the proposed control scheme achieves the global exponential stabilization.

Projection-based model reductions become a necessity for efficient interconnect modeling and simulations. In order to choose the order of the reduced system that can really reflect the essential dynamics of the original interconnect, the residual error of the transfer function can be considered as a stopping criteria to terminate the Arnoldi iteration process. Analytical expressions of this residual error are derived in detail. Furthermore, it can be found that the approximate transfer function can also be expressed as the original interconnect model with some additive perturbations. The perturbation matrix only involves resultant vectors at the previous step of the Arnoldi algorithm. These error information will provide a guideline for the order selection scheme used in the Krylov subspace model-order algorithm.

Inoue et al. introduced an automaton on a two-dimensional tape, which decides acceptance or rejection of an input tape by scanning the tape from various sides by various automata which move one way, and investigated the accepting power of such an automaton. This paper continues the investigation of this type of automata, especially, -type automata (obtained by combining four three-way two-dimensional deterministic finite automata (tr2-dfa's) in "or" fashion) and -type automata (obtained by combining four tr2-dfa's in "and" fashion). We first investigate a relationship between the accepting powers of -type automata and -type automata, and show that they are incomparable. Then, we investigate a hierarchy of the accepting powers based on the number of tr2-dfa's combined. Finally, we briefly describe a relationship between the accepting powers of automata obtained by combining three-way two-dimensional deterministic and nondeterministic finite automata.

This paper presents a computer-aided design procedure of simulated annealing algorithm to optimize dual-wideband microstrip line filters with symmetrical at least 500 MHz bandwidths respectively. This method demonstrates the superiority of designing microstrip line dual-band filters. The value of characteristic impedances and electrical lengths of transmission lines synthesizing 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz dualband filters with a single input and a single output are adjusted to the annealing process by the optimization algorithm. The fabricated dual-wideband spectral transmittance and reflectance curves of these filters applying this method all effectively achieved desired high performances and resulted in a lower cost dual-band filters and open the way to commercial mass production. The method is applicable not only in 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz, but can be applied to any other multi-frequency bands.

This paper presents an efficient scaling-simulation algorithm that simulates operations of the reconfigurable mesh (RM) of size n n using the mesh with multiple partitioned buses (MMPB) of size m m (m < n). The RM and the MMPB are the two-dimensional mesh-connected computers equipped with broadcasting buses. The broadcasting buses of the RM can be used to dynamically obtain various interconnection patterns among the processors during the execution of programs, while those of the MMPB are placed only to every row and column and are statically partitioned in advance by a fixed length. We show that the RM of size n n can be simulated in steps by the MMPB of size m m (m < n), where L is the number of broadcasting buses in each row/column of the simulating MMPB. Although the time-complexity of our algorithm is less efficient than that of the fastest RM scaling-simulation algorithm, the simulating model of our algorithm is the MMPB model where the bus-reconfiguration is not allowed.

We propose efficient secret sharing schemes realizing general access structures. Our proposed schemes are perfect secret sharing schemes and include Shamir's (k, n)-threshold schemes as a special case. Furthermore, we show that a verifiable secret sharing scheme for general access structures is realized by one of the proposed schemes.

The traffic congestion problem in urban areas is worsening since traditional traffic signal control systems cannot provide] efficient traffic regulation. Therefore, dynamic traffic signal control in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) recently has received increasing attention. This study devised a multi-agent architecture, the Adaptive and Cooperative Traffic light Agent Model (ACTAM), for a decentralized traffic signal control system. The proposed architecture comprises a data storage and communication layer, a traffic regulation factor processing layer, and a decision-making layer. This study focused on utilizing the cooperation of multi-agents and the prediction mechanism of our architecture, the Forecast Module, to forecast future traffic volume in each individual intersection. The Forecast Module is designed to forecast traffic volume in an intersection via multi-agent cooperation by exchanging traffic volume information for adjacent intersections, since vehicles passing through nearby intersections were believed to significantly influence the traffic volume of specific intersections. The proposed architecture can achieve dynamic traffic signal control. Thus, total delay time of the traffic network under ACTAM can be reduced by 37% compared to the conventional fixed sequence traffic signal control strategy. Consequently, traffic congestion in urban areas can be alleviated by adopting ACTAM.

A low-loss serial power combiner using suspended stripline is described. It consists of novel broadside-coupled directional couplers which have shunt capacitances at the edges of the coupled sections. These additional shunt capacitances compensate for poor directivities of the couplers because of inhomogeneous dielectric in suspended stripline structure. The fabricated three-way power combiner has achieved good performance with insertion loss less than 0.23 dB over a bandwidth of 10% in 2 GHz band.