A crossing charge recycle refresh(CCRR) scheme and a serial charge recycle refresh(SCRR) scheme are proposed for the large capacity DRAMs with hierarchical bit-line architecture to reduce main bit-line charging current. A separated driver sense-amplifier(SDSA) circuit is essential to realize this scheme because it features 11 times shorter charge transfer period than that of conventional sense-amplifiers. These circuits are applied to an experimental 1-Gb DRAM, which achieves reduction of main bit-line charging current to 37.5%.

Special memory and embedded memories used in a newly designed MPEG2 decorder LSI are described. Orthogonal memory, which has a functionality of parallel-to-serial transposition, is employed in a IDCT(Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) block for small area and low-power. The orthogonal memory realizes the special pupose with 50% of the area and the power compared with using flip-flop array. FIFO's and other dual-port memories are designed by using a single-port RAM operated twice in one clock cycle to reduce cost. Flip-Flop cell is one of the important memory elements in the MPEG environment, and is also improved for the low-cost optimizing functionality for video processing. The area and power of the fabricated MPEG2 decoder chip are reduced by 20% using these techniques. As for testability, direct test mode is implemented for small area. An instruction RAM is placed outside the pad area in parallel to a normal instruction ROM and activated by Al-masterslice for extensive debugging and an early sampling. Other memory related techniques and the key features of the decoder LSI are also described.

We have investigated the gain and noise figure characteristics of a Nd-doped silica single-mode fiber amplifier (NDFA) at 1.06 µm which is applicable to various systems using a Nd: YAG laser light source at 1.06 µm, such as free-space laser communications, a fiber sensing system, and a lidar system. A fluorescence spectrum observation of the Nd-doped fibers with various co-dopants shows that the Nd-A1 co-doped fiber is suitable for realizing a high-gain amplifier for the 1.06-µm wavelength region. The pump wavelength tolerance at around 0.81 µm , the gain bandwidth and the sufficient value of the Nd concentration and length product for achieving maximum small signal gain are clarified. A noise figure of almost 3 dB and small signal gain of more than 30 dB are attained by 50-mW pump power. The unique four-level system characteristics, even in low pumppower conditions, provide low noise amplification in the NDFA. These gain and noise characteristics are well described by a simple theoretical model. We also demonstrated high-power operation of the NDFA with four pump LD modules adoptinga polarization-multiplexing technique. More than 100-mW signal output power is available for 1-mW signal input power at 200mW launched pump power. These features of the NDFA as a compact, polarization-independent, spatial-beam -distortion-free amplifier, will allow it to replace the solid sate laser in various applications using a Nd: YAG laser light source at 1.06µm.

In this paper we propose a new medical image processing system called Virtualized Endoscope System (VES)", which can examine the inside of a virtualized human body. The virtualized human body is a 3-D digital image which is taken by such as X-ray CT scanner or MRI scanner. VES consists of three modules; (1) imaging, (2) segmentation and reconstruction and (3) interactive operation. The interactive operation module has following thee major functions; (a) display of, (b) measurement from, and (c) manipulation to the virtualized human body. The user of the system can observe freely both the inside and the outside of a target organ from any point and any direction freely, and can perform necessary measurement interactively concerning angle and length at any time during observation. VES enables to observe repeatedly an area where the real endoscope can not enter without pain from any direction which the real endoscope can not. We applied this system to real 3-D X-ray CT images and obtained good result.

In this paper, we show that the conventional BCH codes can be better than the AG codes when the number of check symbols is relatively small. More precisely, we consider an AG code on Cab whose number of check symbols is less than min {g+a, n-g}, where n and g denote the code length and the genus of the curve, respectively. It is shown that there always exists an extended BCH code, (i) which has the same designed distance as the Feng-Rao designed distance of the AG code and the code length and the rate greater than those of the AG code, or (ii) which has the same number of check symbols as that of the AG code, the designed distance not less than that of the AG code and the code length longer than that of the AG code.

We propose a speech recognition method using fusion of auditory and visual information for accurate speech recognition. Since we use both auditory information and visual information, we can perform speech recognition more accurately in comparison with the case of either auditory information or visual information. After processing each information by HMM, they are fused by linear combination with weight coefficient. We performed experiments and confirmed the validity of the proposed method.

One of the important properties of multihop network is the mean internodal distance to evaluate the transmission delay, and the connective semi-random network achieves smaller mean internodal distance than other networks. However, the results are shown only by computer simulation and no theoretical analysis is investigated. Moreover, the network connective probability of the connective semi-random network is relatively small. In this paper, we propose the restricted connective semi-random network whose network connective probability is larger than that of the conventional connective semi-random network. And we theoretically analyze the mean internodal distance and the network connective probability of these two networks. It is shown that if the restriction is loose, the mean internodal distance of our model is almost the same as that of the conventional model, whereas the network connective probability of our model is larger than that of the conventional model. Moreover, the theoretical analyzed results of the mean internodal distance agree well with the simulated results in the conventional model and our model with small restriction.

This paper is concerned with bandwidth reservation for circuit groups which handle calls requesting asymmetric forward and backward multi-connections. A model of circuit group with sub-group configuration is treated, and two types of the bandwidth reservation schemes for the model are studied in this paper. One is a global scheme with monitoring the whole circuit group, and the other is a local scheme with monitoring each sub-group independently. The problems of optimizing the reservation parameters are formulated, and optimization methods for the problems are proposed. Numerical example are presented, and effectiveness of the reservation schemes with using the optimized parameters is numerically examined.

Several major aircraft accidents have been attributed to low-altitude wind shears, which are normally caused by microbursts or gust fronts. Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) systems are being installed near major airports for the detection of low-altitude wind shears. In order to develop a TDWR system further, low-altitude wind shears were numerically simulated in this study. The basic equations, which contain prognostic equations for air velocity, pressure, temperature, water vapor, and rainwater, were solved using a finite difference scheme. A terrain-following coordinate transformation was employed to simulate terrain effects. The simulation results are presented in this paper.

A maximum diameter (Dmax) of raindrop should be assumed when rainfall rate (R) is estimates from the differential reflectivity (ZDR) and the horizontal reflectivity (ZH) measured with dual-polarization radar. If the assumed Dmax is different from actual Dmax, the estimated R contains errors. Using distrometer data, it was found that ZDR correlates with Dmax, and it was verified that when Dmax is adaptively determined by an empirical relationship between ZDR and Dmax, errors in estimated R can be reduced.

A verification is made on the accuracy of Radar-AMeDAS precipitation, which represents hourly precipitation over the Japanese Islands and the surrounding sea area with a spatial resolution of 5km using data from 5cm conventional radars, 10cm Fujisan Radar, and Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System (AMeDAS) raingauge network. By comparing with data from a very dense raingauge network of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, it is found that 1) Radar-AMeDAS precipitation shows good agreement if a positioning error of one pixel of 5km square is allowed 2) Radar-AMeDAS precipitation represents almost the average of raingauge measurements in the 5km square for most of the precipitation caused by a large scale disturbance, and 3) Radar-AMeDAS precipitation is close to the maximum raingauge measurement in the pixel when precipitation is extremely localized such as thunderstorms or showers. Radar-AMeDAS precipitations are compared also with AMeDAS measurements statistically with respect to the appearance rates, that is (total number of pixels where specific intensity is observed) / (total number of all pixels), for different precipitation intensities. The rate of Radar- AMeDAS precipitation shows excellent agreement with that of AMeDAS if radar echoes are observed at the altitude lower than 2km. Since Radar- AMeDAS precipitation on land sometimes represents the maximum of precipitation in a pixel for the purpose of unfailingly detecting extremely localized severe precipitation, it shows a high appearance rate at high precipitation intensity than AMeDAS, which is considered to represent statistically the average of a pixel. As a result, in estimating areal rainfall amounts, Radar- AMeDAS precipitation overestimates AMeDAS measurement by 8% at 5mm/h and by 12% at 40mm/h. Radar- AMeDAS precipitation over the sea, with no local calibration by AMeDAS and with little influence of orography, is 2% weaker in intensity than AMeDAS at 10mm/h, and 12% at 40mm/h.

This paper describes the results obtained of a prototype system, VeriProc/1, based on an algorithm we first presented in [13] which can prove the correctness of pipelined processors automatically without pipeline invariant, human interaction, or additional information. No timing relations such as an abstract function or β-relation is required. The only information required is to specify the location of the selectors in the design. The performance is independent of not only data width but also memory size. Detailed analysis of CPU time is presented. Further, don't-care forcing using additional data easily prepared by the user can improve performance.

In order to produce high quality multimedia contents efficiently, DTPP -desktop program production system- has been proposed. The DTPP is capable of supporting all the necessary procedures of program production, from planning to broadcasting, by molding each process into the desktop environment of program producers. The DTPP system consists of multimedia terminals, a media server, a computing server, and network system. In the DTPP, new technological concepts such as cooperative program production, indexing and utilization of attribute information of images, and video components and spatio-temporal editing will be installed.

In this paper, the real-time scheduling mechanism which could support multimedia retrieval services more efficiently is investigated. In order to support multimedia service, the MEDF (modified earliest deadline first) algorithm that takes advantage of the priority queue and the virtual deadline mechanism is proposed. Additionally, its performance is analyzed and compared with conventional RR (round robin), FCFS (first come first serve), SS (sporadic server), MRF (minimum remained-time first), and EDF (earliest deadline first) algorithms. According to the simulation results, the proposed MEDF algorithm shows better performance than other scheduling algorithms in the multimedia environments.

Time-critical-communication, which should guarantee a time limit of a communication service is getting important in multimedia and factory automation fields. This paper proposes an IP-based protocol, Network Protocol with Performance (NPP) to provide the advanced best-effort service which takes a time constraint into account for real-time applications on the Internet. NPP uses the packet-scheduling function to make an effort to guarantee time constraints. Packet-scheduling algorithm chooses a packet in a NPP queue by a precedent level and a time constraint of each packet. We also discuss an application of NPP to multimedia communication system, and investigate performance of NPP by simulation.

Neural network hardware using time-shared bus and integer representation architecture has already been fabricated and reported from the design viewpoint. However, nothing related to performance evaluation of hardware has yet been presented. Computation-speed, scalability and learning accuracy of hardware are evaluated theoretically and experimentally using a Back Propagation (BP) algorithm. In addition, a mirror-weight assignment technique is proposed for high-speed computation in the BP. NETTalk, an English-pronunciation-reasoning task, has been chosen as the target application for the BP. In the experiment, recently-developed neuro-hardware based on the above architecture and its parallel programming language are used. An outline of the language is described along with BP programming. Mirror-weight assignment allows maximum speed at 55.0 MCUPS (Million Connections Updated Per Second) using 256 neurons in the hidden-layer (numbers of neurons in input-and output-layers are fixed at 203 and 26 respectively in NETTalk). In addition, if scalability is defined as a function of the number of neurons in the hidden-layer, the machine retains high scalability at 0.5 if such a maximum speed needs to be used. No degradation in learning accuracy occurs when experimental results computed using the neuro-hardware are compared with those obtained by floating-point representation architecture (workstation). The experiment indicates that the present integer representational design of the neuro-hardware is sufficient for NETTalk. Performance has been evaluated theoretically. For evaluation purposes, it is assumed that most of the total execution-time is taken up by bus cycles. On the basis of this assumption, an analytical model of computation-speed and scalability is proposed. Analytical predictions agreed well with experimental results.

A practical structural representation of a segmented image is presented. The practicalness is defined according to whether or not the representation can be directly generated from its corresponding segmented image. Two structural representations have been proposed in the literature. They are hierarchical structure and relational graph. Because they are defined totally on the basis of human perception, neither of the representations can be directly generated from the corresponding segmented image. The structural representation described in this paper, however, is based on the relations among pattern primitives and generated by applying some human-oriented constraints.

To develop human interface for virtual environment, we have constructed a tensed strings based interface device called SPIDAR, which allow us to manipulate virtual object directly just like in real space. SPIDAR can both measure the movement of user's finger tip and offer force display. Since proper force feedback comes out of the proper position measurement, in this paper, we will analyze the possible reasons that may cause position measurement error, and propose an algorithm which can revise the error and improve position measurement precision.

Here we investigate the unique advantages of our proposed Virtual Space Teleconferencing System (VST) in the area of multimedia teleconferencing, with emphasis to facial emotion transmission and recognition. Specially, we show that this concept can be used in a unique way of communication in which the emotions of the local participant are transmitted to the remote party with higher recognition rate by enhancing the emotions using some intelligence processing in between the local and the remote participants. In other words, we can show that this kind of emotion enhanced teleconferencing systems can supersede face to face meetings, by effectively alleviating the barriers in recognizing emotions between different nations. Also in this paper we show that it is better alternative to the blurred or mosaiced facial images that one can find in some television interviews with people who are not willing to be exposed in public.

In order to display complicated virtual spaces in real time, such as spaces consisting of a dynamic natural scenery, we earlier proposed a method for simplifying the shape data of 3-D trees whereby the amount of shape data is efficiently reduced. The method generates tree shapes based on a fractal model according to the required level of details (LOD). By using a texture-mapping technique, we experimentally showed that our method can display 3-D tree images with allowable image quality in real time. However, methods for controlling the LOD of 3-D tree shapes in virtual spaces have yet to be discussed. In this paper, quantitative evaluations were made on the effect of a data simplification method employing such visual properties as resolution difference between the central vision and peripheral vision. Results showed that it is possible to display a complicated scene containing many trees in real time by controlling the LOD of tree shapes in the virtual space considering such visual properties. Furthermore, so that reality can be added to the virtual space, we consider that it is important to display the natural sways of wind-blown trees and plants in real time. Therefore, we propose a method for generating sway data for simplified tree shape data based on a simple physical model, in which each branch is connected to several other branches by springs, and also a new texture-mapping technique for rendering simplified tree shapes, making it appear as if the shapes have a high LOD. Finally, we show some examples of images of trees generated in real time by using our method, in which many trees exist and sway due to wind.