Clothoid or cornu spiral segments were used as transition spirals forming C-and S-shaped curves between circles as well as straight lines in various situations of highway road design. These transitions are the center lines of rail, highway road design. The above C and S-shaped form curves consist one or more transition segments. We study the possibility of using the single transition spirals in the situations that use many transition spirals to form smooth transition spline between circles as well as straight lines. We also compute the bounds for the scaling of such single spirals using the practical equation. This paper is aimed to give a method avoiding non-linear equations by finding range for the scaling factor of the clothoids which can take initially an appropriate closer value from this range.

The approach presented in this paper was intended for extending conventional Markov random field (MRF) models to a more practical problem: the unsupervised and adaptive segmentation of gray-level images. The "unsupervised" segmentation means that all the model parameters, including the number of image classes, are unknown and have to be estimated from the observed image. In addition, the "adaptive" segmentation means that both the region distribution and the image feature within a region are all location-dependent and their corresponding parameters must be estimated from location to location. We estimated local parameters independently from multiple small windows under the assumption that an observed image consists of objects with smooth surfaces, no texture. Due to this assumption, the intensity of each region is a slowly varying function plus noise, and the conventional homogeneous hidden MRF (HMRF) models are appropriate for these windows. In each window, we employed the EM algorithm for maximum-likelihood (ML) parameter estimation, and then, the estimated parameters were used for "maximizer of the posterior marginals" (MPM) segmentation. To keep continuous segments between windows, a scheme for combining window fragments was proposed. The scheme comprises two parts: the programming of windows and the Bayesian merging of window fragments. Finally, a remerging procedure is used as post processing to remove the over-segmented small regions that possibly exist after the Bayesian merging. Since the final segments are obtained from merging, the number of image classes is automatically determined. The use of multiple parallel windows makes our algorithm to be suitable for parallel implementation. The experimental results of real-world images showed that the surfaces (objects) consistent with our reasonable model assumptions were all correctly segmented as connected regions.

To reduce the memory access latency on sharedmemory multiprocessors, several prefetching schemes have been proposed. The sequential prefetching scheme is a simple hardware-controlled scheme, which exploits the sequentiality of memory accesses to predict which blocks will be read in the near future. Aggressive sequential prefetching prefetches many blocks on each miss to reduce the miss rates and results in good performance for application programs with high sequentiality. However, conservative sequential prefetching prefetches a few blocks on each miss to avoid prefetching of useless blocks, which shows better performance than aggressive sequential prefetching for application programs with low sequentiality. We analyze the relationship between the sequentiality of application programs and the effectiveness of sequential prefetching on various memory and network latency and propose a new adaptive sequential prefetching scheme. Simply adding a small table to the sequential prefetching scheme, the proposed scheme prefetches a large number of blocks for application programs with high sequentiality and reduces the miss rates significantly, and prefetches a small number of blocks for application programs with low sequentiality and avoids loading useless blocks.

A novel neural network architecture for image texture classification is introduced. The proposed model (Kernel Modifying Neural Network: KM Net) which incorporates the convolution filter kernel and the classifier in one, enables an automated texture feature extraction in multichannel texture classification through the modification of the kernel and the connection weights by the backpropagation-based training rule. The first layer units working as the convolution kernels are constrained to be an array of Gabor filters, which achieves a most efficient texture feature localization. The following layers work as a classifier of the extracted texture feature vectors. The capability of the KM Net and its training rule is verified using a basic problem on a synthetic texture image. In addition, the possibilities of applying the KM Net to natural texture classification and biological tissue classification using an ultrasonic echo image have been tried.

Fractals provide a good description of natural scenes and objects based on their statistically self-similar property. They are also used to discriminate natural or man-made objects because natural objects have a better fitting to the fractional Brownian motion (fBm) model than artificial objects. Sea clutter as natural phenomena well fit to the fBm to induce little error. On the other hand, targets as man-made objects induce much more error because they frequently deviate from the fBm model. Therefore, the fractal error has a good characteristic to detect targets buried in clutter. We modified the fractal error defined by Cooper to be suitable for radar image processing. For the X-band radar image, the performance of our proposed method is comparable to that of the Cooper's method. For the millimeter wave (MMW) radar images, our method is better than the Cooper's one.

In this paper a new class of single error-correcting fixed block-length (d, k) codes has been proposed. The correctable error types are peak-shift error, insertion or deletion error, symmetric error, etc. The basic technique to construct codes is a systematic construction algorithm of multilevel sequences with a constant Lee weight (TALG algorithm). The coding rate and efficiency are considerably good, and hence the proposed new codes will be very useful for improving the reliability of high density magnetic recording.

In this paper, a quite general systematic procedure is presented for defining incremental field contributions, that may provide effective tools for describing a wide class of scattering and diffraction phenomena at any aspect, whthin a unitary, self-consistent framework. This is based on a generalization of the localization process for cylindrical canonical problems with elementary source illumination and arbitrary observation aspects. In particular, it is shown that the spectral integral formulation of the exact solution may also be represented as a spatial integral convolution along the axis of the cylinder. Its integrand is then directly used to define the relevant incremental field contribution. This procedure, that will be referred to as a ITD (Incremental Theory of Diffraction) Fourier transform convolution localization process, is explicitly applied to both wedge and circular cylinder canonical configurations, to define incremental diffiraction and scattering contributions, respectively. These formulations are asymptotically approximated to find closed form high-frequency expression for the incremental field contributions. This generalization of the ITD lacalization process may provide a quite general, systematic procedure to find incremental field contributions that explicitly satisfy reciprocity and naturally lead to the UTD ray field representation, when it is applicable.

The H-polarized diffraction by a wedge consisting of perfect conductor and lossless dielectric is investigated by employing the dual integral equations. Its physical optics diffraction coefficients are expressed in a finite series of cotangent functions weighted by the Fresnel reflection coefficients. A correction rule is extracted from the difference between the diffraction coefficients of the physical optics field and those of the exact solution to a perfectly conducting wedge. The angular period of the cotangent functions is changed to satisfy the edge condition at the tip of the wedge, and the poles of the cotangent functions are relocated to cancel out the incident field in the artificially complementary region. Numerical results assure that the presented correction is highly effective for reducing the error posed in the physical optics solution.

Polarization transformation characteristics of a statified slab consisting of uniaxial chiral layers are investigated. It is assumed that a plane electromagnetic wave with arbitrary polarization is normally incident from free space on the stratified slab, which is located on a dielectric substrate. Note that the electric field inside a uniaxial chiral layer is expressed as a sum of four plane waves with different wavenumbers. The wavenumbers are found by seeking non-trivial solutions of the constitutive relations with Maxwell's equations. The electric field components of the transmitted and reflected waves can be obtained from a chainmatrix formalism. The powers and the Stokes parameters of the two waves are represented in terms of their electric field components. As is well known, the Stokes parameters uniquely describe every possible state of polarization of a plane wave. Numerical results are presented for two types of uniaxial chiral structure. The cross- and co-polarized powers and the Stokes parameters of the transmitted and reflected waves are computed for the incident plane wave of linear polarization. The results demonstrate a significant polarization transformation of the transmitted wave. Then it is shown that the stratified slab can be used as efficient polarization-transformation transmission filters active at some frequency band.

In this paper, we illustrate the analysis of microstrip structures with a large number of unknowns using the sparse-matrix/canonical grid method. This fast Fourier thansform (FFT) based iterative method reduces both CPU time and computer storage memory requirements. We employ the Mixed-Potential Integral Equation (MPIE) formulation in conjunction with the RWG triangular discretization. The required spatial-domain Green's functions are obtained efficiently and accurately using the Complex Image Method (CIM). The impedance matrix is decomposed into a sparse matrix which corresponds to near interactions and its complementary matrix which corresponds to far interactions among the subsectional current elements on the microstrip structures. During the iterative process, the near-interaction portion of the matrix -vector multiplication is computed directly as the conventional MPIE formulation. The far-interaction portion of the matrix-vector multiplication is computed indirectly using fast Fourier transforms (FFTs). This is achieved by a Taylor series expansion of the Green's function about the grid points of a uniformly-spaced canonical grid overlaying the triangular discretization.

Electromagnetic field diffracted by conducting circular disk and circular hole in the conducting plate is formulated by the method of Kobayashi potential. The field is expressed by linear combination of functions which satisfy the required boundary conditions except on the disk or hole. Thus the functions may be regarded as eigen functions of the configuration. By imposing the remaining boundary conditions, we can derive the matrix equations for the expansion coefficients. It may be verified readily that each eigen function satisfies edge conditions for induced current on the disk and for aperture field distribution on the hole. It may also be verified that the solutions for the disk and the hole satisfy Babinet's principle. Matrix elements of the equations for the expansion coefficients are given by two kinds of infinite integrals and the series solutions for these integrals are derived. The validity of these expressions are verified numerically by comparing with the results obtained from direct numerical integrations.

The integral kernel expansion method is applied to an analysis of scattering of magnetostatic forward volume waves (MSFVWs) by an array with any number of metal strips. In this method, first the integral kernel of the Fourier integral is expanded in terms of orthogonal polynomials to obtain moment equations. Then a system of algebraic equations is derived by applying the Galerkin's method. In the process, interaction between strips is naturally taken into account and real current distributions on the strips are determined such that boundary conditions are satisfied. Calculus confirmation through the energy conservation principle shows that numerical results are quite satisfactory. A comparison shows that theoretical results are in good agreement with experimental ones except the vicinity of lower and upper limits of the MSFVW band. It is shown that an infinite number of propagation modes is excited even if a wave of single mode is incident. Dependence of the scattering on dimension of arrays and on frequency and mode of an incident wave is obtained.

This paper presents a new generation method of the periodic orthogonal numerical sequences with small maximum amplitude. In the generation method, complex exponential sequences are used as the generating sequences and such periodic orthogonal numerical sequences are constructed from the discrete Fourier transform of the generating sequences. Until now, there has not been found a generation algorithm to derive such sequences with any period. It is shown that the proposed generation method can derive periodic orthogonal real sequences with the maximum amplitude less than 1.5 for the period 1N200 and periodic orthogonal coplex sequences with all the sbsolute amplitude value of 1 for any period.

In this paper, we will show some significant results of the routability analysis of bit-serial pipeline datapath designs based on Rent's rule and Donath's observation. Our results show that all of the tested bit-serial benchmarks have Rent exponent of below 0.4, indicating that the average wiring length of the circuit is expected to be independent of the circuit size. This study provides some important implications on the silicon utilization and time-area efficiency of bit-serial pipeline circuits on FPGAs and ASICs.

Service interaction resolution is an important study subject to realize a network supporting various advanced communication services. This paper proposes service interaction resolution by service node connected with the communication network via the user-network interface. By executing various advanced services on the service node, service interactions can be efficiently resolved without adding new functions to the existing network. In other words, the service node enables a unified execution control of all the services including those for the originating side and those for the terminating side. This prevents the signalling system and the signalling procedure from being expanded to resolve service interactions. Moreover, the interactions between the services initiated at the conversation active state can be resolved by the service node equipped with function of receiving plural types of in-band signals. This avoids functional expansion of the switching systems in the network. In this paper, feasibility of the proposed resolution scheme is proved by showing a structure of the service node and a detailed procedure to resolve interactions on that service node. In the proposed service node, the application part is divided into basic call processing part and service processing part, and the basic call processing part is represented by three kinds of basic call processing state models. The proposed method for resolving service interactions can control services execution with high flexibility by using feature interaction table.

Minato has proposed canonical representation for polynomial functions using zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams (ZBDDs). In this paper, we extend binary moment diagrams (BMDs) proposed by Bryant and Chen to handle variables with degrees higher than l. The experimental results show that this approach is much more efficient than the previous ZBDDs' approach. The proposed approach is expected to be useful for various problems, in particular, for computer algebra.

For the completely polarized wave case, this paper presents the explicit formulae of the characteristic polarization states in the co-polarized radar channel, from which one can obtain the CO-POL Max, the CO-POL Saddle and the CO-POL Nulls in the Stokes vector form. Then the problem on the polarimetric contrast optimization is discussed, and the explicit formula of the optimal polarization state for contrast enhancement is presented in the Stokes vector form for the first time. To verify these formulae, we give some numerical examples. The results are completely identical with other authors', which shows the validity of the presented method.

In this paper we propose a comprehensive approach to physical design based on the constraint paradigm. Bounds on the most critical circuit parasitics are automatically generated to help designers and/or physical design tools meet a set of high-level specifications. The constraint generation engine is based on constrained optimization, where various parasitic effects on interconnect and devices are accounted for and dealt with in different manners according to their statistical behavior and their effect on performance.

This paper presents an exact minimization algorithm for AND-OR-EXOR three-level networks, where a single two-input exclusive-OR (EXOR) gate is used. The network realizes an EXOR of two sum-of-products expressions (EX-SOP), where the two sum-of-products expressions (SOP) can share products. The objective is to minimize the total number of different products in the two SOPs. An algorithm for the exact minimization of EX-SOPs with up to five variables are shown. Up to five variables, EX-SOPs for all the representative functions of NP-equivalence classes were minimized. For five-variable functions, we confirmed that minimum EX-SOPs require up to 9 products. For n-variable functions, minimum EX-SOPs require at most 92n-5 (n6) products.

In computer hardware there is a constant evolution towards smaller transistor sizes. At the same time, more and more transistors are placed on one chip. Both trends make the pin limitation problem worse. Scaling down chip sizes adds to the shortage of available pins while increasing the number of transistors per chip imposes a higher need for chip terminals. The use of three-dimensional systems would alleviate this pin limitation problem. In order to decide whether the benefits of such systems balance the higher processing costs, one must be able to characterize these benefits accurately. This can be done by estimating important layout properties of electronic designs, such as space requirements and interconnection length values. For a two-dimensional placement, Donath found an upper bound for the average interconnection length that follows the trends of experimentally obtained average lengths. Yet, this upper bound deviates from the experimentally obtained value by a factor of approximately 2 which is not sufficiently accurate for some applications. In this paper, we first extend Donath's technique to a three-dimensional placement. We then compute a significantly more accurate estimate by taking into account the inherent features of the optimal placement process.