In this letter, we propose (1) a new sub-optimum minimum distance search (sub-MDS), whose search complexity is reduced considerably compared with optimum MDSs and (2) a termination criterion, called near optimality condition, to reduce the average number of decoding iterations with little degradation of error performance for the proposed decoding using sub-MDS iteratively. Consequently, the decoding algorithm can be applied to longer codes with feasible complexity. Simulation results for several Reed-Muller (RM) codes of lengths 256 and 512 are given.

In this paper, the time-frequency separation algorithm (TFS) proposed by Belouchrani and Amin is applied to ground penetrating radar (GPR) data to reduce ground clutter, that hides reflected waves from a near-surface planar interface. We formulated the problem with several assumptions so that narrow band signals, whose center frequency and baseband signal depend on propagation paths, are received at the receiver, when a wideband signal is radiated from a transmitter. These phenomena can be clearly seen in time-frequency distribution (TFD) of the received signal. In this paper, we adopted the TFS utilizing the TFD signature as a blind separation technique to separate the ground clutter from the target signals. We show numerical and experimental results in order to verify the validity of the problem formulation and the TFS. We carried out GPR measurements to measure permafrost in Yakutsk, Russia. We found the difference in TFD signatures between the ground clutter and the target signal in the experimental data. We could detect the upper boundary of the permafrost with the TFS in spite of the unstable ground clutter.

For the mass production of GaN-based electronic devices, growth of AlGaN/GaN heterostructures on substrates larger than 100 mm in diameter is indispensable. In this study, we demonstrate the growth of 100-mm-diameter Al0.26Ga0.74N/GaN heterostructures on sapphire substrates by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE). The obtained films have specular surfaces, good crystal quality and good uniformity of alloy composition across the entire 100-mm-diameter epitaxial wafer. The bowing value of the 100-mm-diameter epitaxial wafer on c-face sapphire substrates is about 40 µm. This bowing value seems to be preferable for electronic device fabrication processes. These epitaxial wafers show good electrical properties.

Software and its systems are more complicated than a decade ago, and the systems are used for mission critical business, flight control and so on which often require high assurance systems. In this circumstance, we often use black-box testing. The question now arises that black-box testing does not generate numerical value of testing result but empirical. Thus, in this research, we develop and enhance FSM (Finite State Machine) testing method which can produce code coverage rate as numerical value. Our developed FSM testing by code coverage focuses on not only software system behavior but also data. We found higher code coverage rate, which indicates quality of system, by this method than existing black box testing method.

The center problem of a graph is motivated by a number of facility location problems. In this paper, we propose parallel algorithms for finding the center of interval graphs and circular-arc graphs. Our algorithms run in O(log n) time algorithm using O(n/log n) processors while the intervals and arcs are given in sorted order. Our algorithms are on the EREW PRAM model.

We consider a soft-decision iterative bounded distance decoding algorithm for binary linear block codes. In the decoding algorithm, bounded distance decodings are carried out with respect to successive input words, called the search centers. A search center is the sum of the hard-decision sequence of a received sequence and a sequence in a set of test patterns which are generated beforehand. This set of test patterns has influence on the error performance of the decoding algorithms as simulation results show. In this paper, we propose a construction method of a set of candidate test patterns and a selection method of test patterns based on an introduced measure of effectiveness of test patterns. For several BCH codes of lengths 127, 255 and 511, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method by simulation.

When the Alamouti code is applied (as a space-time block code) to an OFDM system with transmit diversity, the simple Alamouti decoding requires that each subchannel is flat-fading and constant over two symbol periods (Alamouti codeword period). The second requirement makes the Alamouti decoding scheme not suitable for time varying channels. In this Letter, we propose a new decision directed receiver to better accommodate time varying channels.

The virtual memory functions in real-time operating systems have been used in embedded systems. Recent RISC processors provide virtual memory supports through software-managed Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) in software. In real-time aspects of the embedded systems, managing TLB entries is the most important because overhead at TLB miss time gives a great effect to overall performance of the system. In this paper, we propose several TLB management algorithms in MIPS processors. In the algorithms, a replaced TLB entry is randomly chosen or managed. We analyze the algorithms by comparing overheads at task switching times and TLB miss times.

In an optical time domain reflectometer type strain measurement system, we theoretically derive the shape of the Brillouin gain spectrum produced in an optical fiber under a parabolic strain distribution which is formed in a uniformly loaded beam. Based on the derived result, we investigate the effects of the parabolic strain distribution parameters and the measurement conditions such as the launched pulse width and the measurement position on the beam on the deformation of the Brillouin backscattered-light power spectrum shape. In addition, we investigate the strain measurement error resulting from the deformation of the power spectrum shape by analyzing the peak-power frequency at which the power spectrum is maximized.

In this paper, we propose the soft boundary concept achieved by dynamic tilted antenna to solve the issue of traffic congestion occurred in cellular wireless systems. The tilted antenna array can provide the merit of traffic balance and also achieve the optimization of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) at receivers by automatically tilting the antenna and implementing the soft boundary among cells, corresponding to the variation of traffic. According to our results, it is shown that power ratio control do not necessarily improved system performance when there is a large variation in traffic because it only control power levels. Also the properly chosen angle of tilt antenna can relieve the traffic congestion and perform the system performance optimization.

In this paper, a preprocessing approach to improving the quality of the music on a mobile phone using Enhanced variable rate codec (EVRC) is presented. Our approach works well on music signals considerably reducing the number of time-clipped frames.

In this paper we present an unsupervised color image segmentation algorithm based on statistical models. We have adopted the Gaussian mixture model to represent the distribution of color feature vectors. A novel deterministic annealing EM and mean field theory from statistical mechanics are used to compute the posterior probability distribution of each pixel and estimate the parameters of the Gaussian Mixture Model. We describe the noncontexture segmentation algorithm that uses a deterministic annealing approach and the contexture segmentation algorithm that uses the mean field theory. The experimental results show that the deterministic annealing EM and mean field theory provide a global optimal solution for the maximum likelihood estimators and that these algorithms can efficiently segment the real image.

We propose multibits/sequence-period optical code division multiple access (MS-OCDMA) systems with double optical hardlimiters (DHL) in the presence of APD noise, thermal noise, and channel interference. We apply Reed-Solomon (RS) codes to MS-OCDMA to further improve the error rate performance. We show that the MS-OCDMA receiver with DHL improves the bit error probability of MS-OCDMA systems when the received laser power is large. We also show that the performance of RS coded MS-OCDMA system is better than that of on-off keying OCDMA (OOK-OCDMA) system at the same bit rate and at the same chip rate, respectively.

In this paper, we propose an on-line writer recognition method for Thai numeral. A handwriting process is characterized by a change of numeral's shape, which is represented by two features, a displacement of pen-point position and an area of triangle determined from the two adjacent points of pen-point position and the origin. First, the above two features are expanded into Fourier series. Secondly, in order to describe feature of handwriting, FIR (Finite impulse response) system having the above Fourier coefficients as input and output of the system is introduced. The impulse response of the FIR system is used as the feature of handwriting. Furthermore, K-L expansion of the obtained impulse response is used to recognize writer. Writer recognition experiments are performed by using 3,770 data collected by 54 Thai writers for one year. The average of Type I (false rejection) error rate and Type II (false acceptance) error rate were 2.16% and 1.12%, respectively.

Self-organizing map is a widely used tool in high-dimensional data visualization. However, despite its benefits of plotting very high-dimensional data on a low-dimensional grid, browsing and understanding the meaning of a trained map turn to be a difficult task -- specially when number of nodes or the size of data increases. Though there are some well-known techniques to visualize SOMs, they mainly deals with cluster boundaries and they fail to consider raw information available in original data in browsing SOMs. In this paper, we propose our Factor controlled Hierarchical SOM that enables us select number of data to train and label a particular map based on a pre-defined factor and provides consistent hierarchical SOM browsing.

This paper proposes the evaluation methods for measuring retrieval effectiveness of Web search engine systems, attempting to make them suitable for real Web environment. With this objective, we constructed 100-gigabyte and 10-gigabyte document sets that were mainly gathered from the '.jp' domain, and conducted an evaluation workshop at the third NTCIR Workshop from 2001 to 2002, where we assessed the retrieval effectiveness of a certain number of Web search engine systems using the common data set. Conventional evaluation workshops assessed the relevance of the retrieved documents, which were submitted by the workshop participants, by considering the contents of individual pages. On the other hand, we assessed the relevance of the retrieved pages by considering the relationship between the pages referenced by hyperlinks.

We consider the problem of constructing nonlinear dynamical systems that realize an arbitrary prescribed tree sources. We give a construction of dynamical systems by using piecewise-linear maps. Furthermore, we examine the obtained dynamical system to show that the structure of the memory of tree sources is characterized with some geometrical property of the constructed dynamical systems. Using a similar method, we also construct a dynamical system generating an arbitrary prescribed reverse tree source and show that the obtained dynamical system has some interesting geometrical property explicitly reflecting the tree structure of the memory of the reverse tree source.

In this paper our recently introduced method called output distributional influence function (ODIF) is used for the evaluation of the robustness properties of the nonlinear filter class of morphological filters. Several examples of the ODIFs for the dilation, closing and clos-opening are given and explained carefully. For each of these morphological filters the effect of filter length is examined by using the ODIFs for the expectation and variance. The robustness properties of the filters are also compared to each other and the effect of the distribution of the contamination is investigated for the closing as an example of realistic filtering conditions.

Due to the explosive growth of the network technologies, 3D models and animations have led to a great interest in various media. Especially 3D mesh models (3D meshes), which approximate surfaces by polygonal meshes are widely used to model 3D objects. In 1D and 2D signals such as speech, audio, images, video, etc., the signal values are located on "grids", for example the signals of images are defined on pixels. Thus, the errors of such signals can be explicitly defined by differences of the values on the "grids". However since in the 3D meshes, vertices are located on arbitrary positions in a 3D space and are triangulated in arbitrary ways, the grids cannot be defined. This makes it difficult to measure error on the 3D meshes. In this paper, we propose a new numerical method to measure the errors between two different 3D meshes.

A nonlinear circuit described by the forced Duffing's equation is known to display a rich variety of dynamical behavior. Coupling two Duffing's circuits by a linear resistor, we conclude that combinatorial resonances occur on weak coupling condition. In a coupled system, although symmetrical properties are usually observed, breaking of symmetry can lead to much more complex nonlinear resonant phenomena. In this paper, we discuss asymmetry in four cases of perturbation on parameters. Many bifurcation diagrams are presented. Comparing with symmetrical cases, we analyze the combinatorial resonances in coupled Duffing's circuit completely.