We report on the enhancement of system detection efficiency in a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) by applying the optical cavity structure. The nanowire was made using 4-nm-thick NbN thin films and covered with an SiO cavity and Au mirror designed for 1300-1600 nm wavelengths. The device is mounted into fiber-coupled packages, and installed in a practical multichannel system based on GM cryocoolers. System detection efficiency depends on the absorptance of cavity structure, and reached 28% and 40% at 1550 nm and 1310 nm wavelengths, respectively. These values were considerably higher than an SNSPD without optical cavity.

A critical problem with wireless LAN-based positioning systems is the degradation in position estimation accuracy due to complex variation in the strength of the received signal, which originates in the nature of the underlying wireless channel. Handling such variation effectively is essential for the creation of practical wireless LAN-based positioning systems. In this paper, we propose a collaborative mechanism for correcting position estimation errors. The main objective is to assist users in correcting estimation errors manually by providing access to a shared body of accumulated information on corrections made by many other users. In particular, the mechanism is designed to enable any group of users to collaboratively build upon this body of information. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism through experiments. The results confirm that the proposed mechanism can provide effective estimation error correction in a realistic environment.

This study shows a fast simulation method for turbo codes over an additive white class A noise (AWAN) channel. The reduction of the estimation time is achieved by applying importance sampling (IS) which is one of the variance reduction simulation methods. In order to adapt the AWAN channel, we propose a design method of a simulation probability density function (PDF) utilized in IS. The proposed simulation PDF is related to the Bhattacharyya bound to evaluate wider area of the signal space than the conventional method. Since the mean translation method, which is a conventional design method of the simulation PDF used in IS, is optimized for an additive white Gaussian noise channel, the evaluation time of the error performance of turbo codes over the AWAN channel can not be reduced. To evaluate BER of 10-8, the simulation time of the proposed method can be reduced to 1/104 under the condition of the same accuracy of the traditional Monte Carlo simulation method.

This paper presents a robust framework of human-computer interaction from the hand gesture vision in the presence of realistic and challenging scenarios. To this end, several novel components are proposed. A hybrid approach is first proposed to automatically infer the beginning position of hand gestures of interest via jointly optimizing the regions given by an offline skin model trained from Gaussian mixture models and a specific hand gesture classifier trained from the Adaboost technique. To consistently track the hand in the context of using kernel based tracking, a semi-supervised feature selection strategy is further presented to choose the feature subspaces which appropriately represent the properties of offline hand skin cues and online foreground-background-classification cues. Taking the histogram of oriented gradients as the descriptor to represent hand gestures, a soft-decision approach is finally proposed for recognizing static hand gestures at the locations where severe ambiguity occurs and hidden Markov model based dynamic gestures are employed for interaction. Experiments on various real video sequences show the superior performance of the proposed components. In addition, the whole framework is applicable to real-time applications on general computing platforms.

This paper presents a syntax-based framework for gap resolution in analytic languages. CCG, reputable for dealing with deletion under coordination, is extended with a memory mechanism similar to the slot-and-filler mechanism, resulting in a wider coverage of syntactic gaps patterns. Though our grammar formalism is more expressive than the canonical CCG, its generative power is bounded by Partially Linear Indexed Grammar. Despite the spurious ambiguity originated from the memory mechanism, we also show that its probabilistic parsing is feasible by using the dual decomposition algorithm.

The letter deals with direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation under nonuniform white noise and moderately small signal-to-noise ratios. The proposed approach first uses signal subspace projection for received data vectors, which form an efficient iterative quadratic maximum-likelihood (IQML) approach to achieve fast convergence and high resolution capabilities. In conjunction with a signal subspace selection technique, a more exact signal subspace can be obtained for reducing the nonuniform noise effect. The performance improvement achieved by applying the proposal to the classic IQML method is confirmed by computer simulations.

We have designed and implemented a 4-bit Carry Look-ahead Adder (CLA) and 4-bit parallel multipliers to be used for the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) system with the estimated clock frequency of 20 GHz. Through some high frequency functional tests, we have confirmed that the operation of the CLA has been successful. Through some low speed tests, we have also confirmed that the operation of multiplication has been successful. In addition, we have designed a 4-bit multiplier with a Booth encoder and with a 2-point-4-bit butterfly circuit.

Flash SSDs are being incorporated in many enterprise storage platforms recently and expected to play a notable role for IO-intensive applications. However, the IO characteristics of flash SSDs are very different from those of hard disks. Since existent storage subsystems are designed on the basis of characteristics of hard disks, the IO performance of flash SSDs may not be obtained as expected. This paper provides an evaluation of flash SSDs in transaction processing systems with TPC-C benchmark. We present performance results with various configurations and describe our observations of the IO behaviors at different levels along the IO path, which helps to understand the performance of flash-based transaction processing systems and provides certain references to build flash-based systems for IO-intensive applications.

In this paper, accuracy or error in permeability measurement using a combined microstrip line-coaxial conductor method was investigated. The measurement circuit used in this study is composed of a microstrip line (MSL) circuit and a grounded metal pipe with a center conductor passing through it coaxially. A sample is placed between the metal pipe and the center conductor. We evaluated the measurement accuracy for this measurement arrangement with electromagnetic simulation for the case where there are gaps between the sample and the holder. As a result, it has been shown that the normalized errors for this method have similar gap size dependence to the conventional coaxial method, but are about 10 to 20 percent greater than the coaxial method. With a view to improving the measurement accuracy, a correction method for the error is also discussed.

Due to the limitations of language-processing tools for the Thai language, pattern-based information extraction from Thai documents requires supplementary techniques. Based on sliding-window rule application and extraction filtering, we present a framework for extracting semantic information from medical-symptom phrases with unknown boundaries in Thai unstructured-text information entries. A supervised rule learning algorithm is employed for automatic construction of information extraction rules from hand-tagged training symptom phrases. Two filtering components are introduced: one uses a classification model to predict rule application across a symptom-phrase boundary based on instantiation features of rule internal wildcards, the other uses weighted classification confidence to resolve conflicts arising from overlapping extractions. In our experimental study, we focus our attention on two basic types of symptom phrasal descriptions: one is concerned with abnormal characteristics of some observable entities and the other with human-body locations at which primitive symptoms appear. The experimental results show that the filtering components improve precision while preserving recall satisfactorily.

The extended binary phase shift keying (EBPSK) transmission system with ultra narrow bandwidth has excellent BER performance, which raises many doubts with the researchers. Therefore, on the premise of the existence of a special filter that can transform the modulated phase information into amplitude information, the theoretical BER formula of EBPSK system in Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel has been deduced. This paper gives the theoretical values of the parameters in the above BER formula and discusses the effects of parameters on BER firstly. Then the paper shows that the special impacting filter satisfies the above assumption, therefore, in the frame of binary detection theory, the excellent performance of high-efficiency EBPSK system can be explained and the correction of the theoretical BER formula can be validated.

Effect of an addition of a cooled step-up transformer to a flux locked loop (FLL) circuit was studied to reduce indirect rf interference to HTS-dc-SQUID. First, we demonstrated that a noise level of an HTS-dc-SQUID system using the FLL circuit with single room-temperature transformer could be easily degraded by radiation of rf electromagnetic wave to cables in the FLL circuit. It is thought that the rf radiation induced rf current in the circuit, and was transmitted to the SQUID to modulate the bias current, resulting in the increase of the noise level. To avoid the degradation due to such indirect rf interference, the cooled set-up transformer was added to the FLL circuit since it was expected that the additional transformer would work as a "step-down" transformer against the induced rf current. It was shown that the noise level of a HTS-SQUID system (SQUITEM system) operated in an electromagnetically unshielded environment could be improved to the same level as that measured in a magnetically shielded room by the additional cooled transformer and appropriate impedance matching.

Bandwidth is an extremely valuable and scarce resource in multimedia networks. Therefore, efficient bandwidth management is necessary in order to provide high Quality of Service (QoS) to users. In this paper, a new QoS-aware bandwidth allocation algorithm is proposed for the efficient use of available bandwidth. By using the multi-objective optimization technique and Talmud allocation rule, the bandwidth is adaptively controlled to maximize network efficiency while ensuring QoS provisioning. In addition, we adopt the online feedback strategy to dynamically respond to current network conditions. With a simulation study, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can adaptively approximate an optimized solution under widely diverse traffic load intensities.

Background subtraction is widely used in detecting moving objects; however, changing illumination conditions, color similarity, and real-time performance remain important problems. In this paper, we introduce a sequential method for adaptively estimating background components using Kalman filters, and a novel method for detecting objects using margined sign correlation (MSC). By applying MSC to our adaptive background model, the proposed system can perform object detection robustly and accurately. The proposed method is suitable for implementation on a graphics processing unit (GPU) and as such, the system realizes real-time performance efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed system.

This letter proposes a simple k-hop flooding scheme for the temporarily lost child node of a multicast tree in a mobile ad hoc network where a group of nodes move together within a bound. Through simulation, we show that our scheme improves the packet delivery ratio of MAODV to be comparable to the epidemic routing with only small additional duplicate packets.

Sequences with good correlation properties are of substantial interest in many applications. By interleaving a perfect array with shift sequences, a new method of constructing binary array set with zero correlation zone (ZCZ) is presented. The interleaving operation can be performed not only row-by-row but also column-by-column on the perfect array. The resultant ZCZ binary array set is optimal or almost optimal with respect to the theoretical bound. The new method provides a flexible choice for the rectangular ZCZ and the set size.

Semiconducting polymers, poly(1,4-phenylene) (PPP) and poly(4-diphenylaminostyrene) (PDAS), which are soluble to organic solvents, were synthesized and were deposited by means of electrospray deposition (ESD). The ESD generated spherical shells of diameters ranging from a few to several tens of microns. The shells consisted of coagulation of nanometric particles of the semiconducting polymers. Formation of the shells was largely influenced by the concentration of spray solution. It was also found that the formation of shells can be achieved with various types of soluble polymers.

In this article, a simple structure of the Wilkinson power divider which can suppress the nth harmonics of the Wilkinson power divider is proposed. By replacing the quarter wavelength transmission lines of the conventional Wilkinson power divider with the equivalent P-type transmission lines, a compact power divider which can suppress the nth harmonic is achieved. Design equations of proposed P-type line are achieved by ABCD matrices. To verify the design approach, the proposed power divider is designed, simulated (by ADS, CST Studio, and Sonnet simulators), and fabricated at 1 GHz to suppress the fifth harmonic. The proposed structure is 46% of the conventional Wilkinson power divider, while maintaining the characteristics of the conventional Wilkinson power divider at the fundamental frequency. The insertion losses at the fifth harmonic are larger than 35 dB. Furthermore, the second to seventh harmonic are suppressed by least 10 dB. Here is an excellent agreement between simulated results and measured results.

Our research is focused on examining the Image Quality Assessment Model based on the MPEG-7 descriptor and the No Reference model. The model retrieves a reference image using image search and evaluate its subject score as a pseudo Reduced Reference model. The MPEG-7 descriptor was originally used for content retrieval, but we discovered that the MPEG-7 descriptor can also be used for image quality assessment. We examined the performance of the proposed model and the results revealed that this method has a higher performance rating than the SSIM.

It is theoretically impossible to restore the original fingerprint image from a sequence of line images captured by a line sensor. However, in this paper we propose a unique fingerprint-image-generation algorithm, which derives fingerprint images from sequences of line images captured at different swipe speeds by the line sensor. A continuous image representation, called trajectory, is used in modeling distortion of raw fingerprint images. Sequences of line images captured from the same finger are considered as sequences of points, which are sampled on the same trajectory in N-dimensional vector space. The key point here is not to reconstruct the original image, but to generate identical images from the trajectory, which are independent of the swipe speed of the finger. The method for applying the algorithm in a practical application is also presented. Experimental results on a raw fingerprint image database from a line sensor show that the generated fingerprint images are independent of swipe speed, and can achieve remarkable matching performance with a conventional minutiae matcher.