In this paper, a single-channel adaptive noise canceller (SCANC) is proposed to enhance heart sounds during auscultation. Heart sounds provide important information about the condition of the heart, but other sounds interfere with heart sounds during auscultation. The adaptive noise canceller (ANC) is widely used to reduce noises from biomedical signals, but it is not suitable for enhancing auscultatory sounds acquired by a stethoscope. While the ANC needs two inputs, a stethoscope provides only one input. Other approaches, such as ECG gating and wavelet de-noising, are rather complex and difficult to implement as real-time systems. The proposed SCANC uses a single-channel input based on Heart Sound Inherency Indicator and reference generator. The architecture is simple, so it can be easily implemented in real-time systems. It was experimentally confirmed that the proposed SCANC is efficient for heart sound enhancement and is robust against the heart rate variations.

This letter presents a robust receiver using the generalized sidelobe canceller aided with the high-order derivative constraint technique for multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) uplink against carrier frequency offset (CFO). Numerical results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed receiver.

In this letter, we propose a Cooperation-aware topology control scheme with Opportunistic Interference Cancellation (COIC) to improve network capacity in wireless ad hoc networks by jointly considering both upper layer network capacity and physical layer cooperative communications with interference cancellation. We show that the benefits brought by cooperative communications are opportunistic and rely on network structures and channel conditions. Such opportunistic advantages have significant impacts on network capacity, and our proposed COIC can effectively capture these opportunities to substantially improve network capacity.

The authors have been investigating degradation process of Au plated slip ring and Ag-Pd-Cu brush system. In almost all cases the lifetime of the sliding system ends, when Au plating layer is worn out, the ring surface is oxidized to be black in color and contact resistance becomes very high. Further, the lifetime is very short without lubricant. So, the lubricant is very effective to make the lifetime longer. However, even with lubricant the lifetime is varied from about 1000 hours to almost 7000 hours in the past experiments. It is an important issue how the lubricant works on the lifetime of the system. In this paper the effect of lubricant on the degradation process of contact resistance is focused on. In the past tests the lubricant is supplied only once before the test. In this test the lubricant is regularly supplied almost every 900 operation hours. Consequently, the operation more than 8000 hours is realized, which is the longest among tests so far. In addition the contact voltage drop increase gradually until 2600 hours and after that it stays almost constant around 70 mV. According to the Element Analysis after the test the Ni base plating layer is totally exposed in many tracks. It means that the Au plating layer is gradually worn out probably at the stage of increasing voltage drop. In the previous tests the lifetime ended even when the Ni plating layer remained. So, the reason of long operation in this test is guessed to be that the lubricant not only decreases wear of ring and brush, but also suppresses oxidation of the Ni layer.

The time efficiency of aerial video stitching is still an open problem due to the huge amount of input frames, which usually results in prohibitive complexities in both image registration and blending. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework aiming to stitch aerial videos in real time. Reasonable distortions are allowed as a tradeoff for acceleration. Instead of searching for globally optimized solutions, we directly refine frame positions with sensor data to compensate for the accumulative error in alignment. A priority scan method is proposed to select pixels within overlapping area into the final panorama for blending, which avoids complicated operations like weighting or averaging on pixels. Experiments show that our method can generate satisfying results at very competitive speed.

This paper proposes a new first-scan method for two-scan labeling algorithms. In the first scan, our proposed method first scans every fourth image line, and processes the scan line and its two neighbor lines. Then, it processes the remaining lines from top to bottom one by one. Our method decreases the average number of times that must be checked to process a foreground pixel will; thus, the efficiency of labeling can be improved.

In this study, we show that the motion blur is caused by exposure time of video camera as well as the characteristics of LCD system. Also, we suggest that evaluation method of motion picture quality according to the frequency response of video camera and LCD systems of hold and scanning backlight type.

This paper proposes applying our inter-cell interference (ICI) cancellation method to fractional frequency reuse (FFR) and evaluates the resulting spectral efficiency improvement. With our ICI cancellation method based on base station cooperation, the control station generates ICI replica signals by simple linear processing. Moreover, FFR effectively utilizes frequency resources by both allowing users in the cell-center region to access all available sub-channels and increasing the transmission power to users in the cell-edge region. FFR provides the conditions under which the ICI cancellation method works effectively. Computer simulations show that the average spectral efficiency of the proposed method is comparable to that of cooperative MU-MIMO, which can completely remove ICI.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for presenting the local features of digital image using 1D Local Patterns by Multi-Scans (1DLPMS). We also consider the extentions and simplifications of the proposed approach into facial images analysis. The proposed approach consists of three steps. At the first step, the gray values of pixels in image are represented as a vector giving the local neighborhood intensity distrubutions of the pixels. Then, multi-scans are applied to capture different spatial information on the image with advantage of less computation than other traditional ways, such as Local Binary Patterns (LBP). The second step is encoding the local features based on different encoding rules using 1D local patterns. This transformation is expected to be less sensitive to illumination variations besides preserving the appearance of images embedded in the original gray scale. At the final step, Grouped 1D Local Patterns by Multi-Scans (G1DLPMS) is applied to make the proposed approach computationally simpler and easy to extend. Next, we further formulate boosted algorithm to extract the most discriminant local features. The evaluated results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the conventional approaches in terms of accuracy in applications of face recognition, gender estimation and facial expression.

In 3GPP (3-rd Generation Partnership Project) LTE (Long Term Evolution) system, the use of PRS (Positioning Reference Signal) for OTDOA (Observed Time Difference of Arrival) based positioning method has been agreed. However, PRSs can be overlapped at the receiver side in synchronous network because the frequency shift pattern of PRS is decided by cell ID (Identity). Moreover, in asynchronous network, the loss of orthogonality between received PRSs generates continuous interferences. Even though autonomous muting can be applied to solve the interference problems in synchronous and asynchronous networks, the muting scheme degrades the overall positioning efficiency and requires additional network complexity. Therefore, in this paper, we propose novel OTDOA based positioning methods at the receiver side to improve positioning efficiency: cancellation method of serving PRS for synchronous network, TDORS (Time Domain Orthogonal Reference Signal) generation and useful CIR (Channel Impulse Response) selection methods for asynchronous network. We verified that the proposed methods can achieve an accurate estimation and stable operation without PRS muting.

In this paper, we propose a power amplifier linearization technique combined with iterative noise cancelation. This method alleviates the effect of added noises which prevents the predistorter (PD) from estimating the exact characteristics of the power amplifier (PA). To iteratively cancel the noise added in the feedback signal, the output signal of the power amplifier without noise is reconstructed by applying the inverse characteristics of the PD to the predistorted signals. The noise can be revealed by subtracting the reconstructed signals from the feedback signals. Simulation results based on the mean-square error (MSE) and power spectral density (PSD) criteria are presented to evaluate PD performance. The results show that the iterative noise cancelation significantly enhances the MSE performance, which leads to an improvement of the out-of-band power suppression. The performance of the proposed technique is verified by computer simulation and hardware test results.

In this paper, we have reported the development of a snowblower support system which can safely navigate snowblowers, even during a whiteout, with the combination of a very accurate GPS system, so called RTK-GPS, and a unique and highly accurate map of roadsides and obstacles on roads. Particularly emphasized new techniques in this paper are ways to detect accurate geographical positions of roadsides and obstacles by utilizing and analyzing 3D laser scanned data, whose data has become available in recent days. The experiment has shown that the map created by the methods and RTK-GPS can sufficiently navigate snowblowers, whereby a secure and pleasant social environment can be archived in snow areas of Japan. In addition, proposed methods are expected to be useful for other systems such as a quick development of a highly accurate road map, a safely navigation of a wheeled chair, and so on.

As the fundamental component of dynamic spectrum access, implementing spectrum sensing is one of the most important goals in cognitive radio networks due to its key functions of protecting licensed primary users from harmful interference and identifying spectrum holes for the improvement of spectrum utilization. However, its performance is generally compromised by the interference from adjacent primary channels. To cope with such interference and improve detection performance, this paper proposes a non-coherent power decomposition-based energy detection method for cooperative spectrum sensing. Due to its use of power decomposition, interference cancellation can be applied in energy detection. The proposed power decomposition does not require any prior knowledge of the primary signals. The power detection with its interference cancellation can be implemented indirectly by solving a non-homogeneous linear equation set with a coefficient matrix that involves only the distances between primary transmitters and cognitive secondary users (SUs). The optimal number of SUs for sensing a single channel and the number of channels that can be sensed simultaneously are also derived. The simulation results show that the proposed method is able to cope with the expected interference variation and achieve higher probability of detection and lower probability of false alarm than the conventional method in both hard combining and soft combining scenarios.

This paper proposes an adaptive algorithm for adaptive arrays that minimizes the bit error rate (BER) of the array output signals in radio communication systems with the use of multilevel modulation signals. In particular, amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) is used as one type of multilevel modulations in this paper. Simultaneous non-linear equations that are satisfied by the optimum weight vector of the proposed algorithm are derived and used for theoretical analyze of the performance of the adaptive array based on the proposed algorithm. As a result of the theoretical analysis, it can be shown that the proposed adaptive array improves the carrier to interference ratio of the array output signal without taking advantage of the nulls. Furthermore, it is confirmed that the result of the theoretical analysis agrees with that of computer simulation. When the number of the received antenna is less than that of the received signals, the adaptive array based on the proposed algorithm is verified to achieve much better performance then that based on the least mean square (LMS) algorithm.

This paper presents a restoration method using several degraded observed images obtained through a technique known as microscanning. It is shown that microscanning provides sufficient spatial information for image restoration with minimal information about the original image and without knowing the interference function that causes degradation.

An inductorless low noise amplifier (LNA) with active balun for digital TV (DTV) applications is presented. The LNA exploits a noise cancellation technique which allows for simultaneous wide-band impedance matching and low noise design. The matching and amplifier stages in the LNA topology perform single-ended to differential signal conversion with balanced output. The second and third-order nonlinearity of the individual amplifiers as well as the distortion caused by the interaction between the stages are suppressed to achieve high IIP2 and IIP3. A method for intrinsic cancellation of the second-order interaction is employed to reduce the dependence of the IIP3 on the frequency spacing between the interfering signals in the two-tone test of DTV tuners. Fabricated in a 0.18 µm CMOS technology, the LNA core size is 0.21 mm2. Measurements show that the LNA IIP3 and IIP2 are +12 dBm and +21 dBm, respectively. The IIP3 variation is less than 5 dB in the 10 MHz to 200 MHz frequency spacing range. A voltage gain of 14.5 dB and a noise figure below 4 dB are achieved in a frequency range from 100 MHz to 1 GHz. The LNA consumes 11 mA from a 1.8 V supply voltage.

In multi-cell wireless systems with insufficient frequency reuse, the downlink transmission suffers from other cell interference (OCI). The cooperative transmission among multiple base stations is an effective way to mitigate OCI and increase the system sum rate. An adaptive scheme for serving one user in each cell was proposed in [1]. In this paper, we generalize the scheme in [1] by serving more than one user in each cell with adaptive OCI cancelation. Based on our derived statistics of a user for different transmission strategies, we propose a low complexity transmission scheme that achieves near-maximal ergodic sum rate. Through numerical examples, we show that the system sum rate can be improved by selecting the appropriate transmission strategy combination adaptively. As a result, our proposed system can explore spatial multiplexing gain without additional power and thus improves the system sum rate significantly.

In this paper, we propose an iterative minimum mean square error detection with interference cancellation (MMSED-IC) for frequency-domain filtered single carrier (SC)-frequency-division multiple-access (FDMA) uplink transmission. The use of a square-root Nyquist transmit filter reduces the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) while increases the frequency-diversity gain. However, if carrier-frequency separation among multiple-access users is kept the same as the one used for the case of roll-off factor α=0 (i.e., brick-wall filter), then the adjacent users' spectra will overlap and multi-user interference (MUI) occurs. The proposed MMSED-IC can sufficiently suppress the MUI from adjacent users while achieving the maximum frequency-diversity gain. We apply the proposed MMSED-IC to a packet access using filtered SC-FDMA, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) multiplexing, and hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ). It is shown by computer simulation that filtered SC-FDMA with α=1 can achieve higher throughput than orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA).

As an application of the direct sequence spread spectrum (SS) communication system, there is an M-ary bi-orthogonal SS communication system. In its system, several spreading sequences (bi-orthogonal sequences) are used in a code shift keying basis. Hence, design of the spreading code synchronization system has been an issue in the M-ary bi-orthogonal SS systems. In this paper, the authors focus on a code tracking system using a differential detector and a Delay Lock Loop (DLL). They investigate a tracking performance of their code tracking system by theoretical analysis. In addition, a multi-stage interference canceler is applied to the M-ary bi-orthogonal SS system. As the result, it is shown that the tracking performance of the theoretical analysis is almost the same as that of computer simulations in a multi-user environment. It is also shown that the multi-stage interference canceler is effective in improvement of the BER performance.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid test application in partial skewed-load (PSL) scan design. The PSL scan design in which some flip-flops (FFs) are controlled as skewed-load FFs and the others are controlled as broad-side FFs was proposed in [1]. We notice that the PSL scan design potentially has a capability of two test application modes: one is the broad-side test mode, and the other is the hybrid test mode which corresponds to the test application considered in [1]. According to this observation, we present a hybrid test application of the two test modes in the PSL scan design. In addition, we also address a way of skewed-load FF selection based on propagation dominance of FFs in order to take advantage of the hybrid test application. Experimental results for ITC'99 benchmark circuits show that the hybrid test application in the proposed PSL scan design can achieve higher fault coverage than the design based on the skewed-load FF selection [1] does.