In this paper, we describe an accelerative current-programming method for active matrix OLED (AM-OLED) display. This new method uses common source configuration, "Acceleration Control" line and some mechanisms to prevent the programming current from flowing through OLED device. It would solve the basic problem of the current-programming pixel circuit: a long programming period, especially at the dark gray-level. The proposed method accelerates the current programming process at any gray levels, and it would be the solution for the problem.

Existence of a surface wave along the boundary between the semi-infinite materials, one of which is a free-space and the other is a material with either negative permeability or negative permittivity, is theoretically investigated. Surface waves exist in only limited combination of negative and positive signs of the material parameters. In addition, by analyzing the surface wave in a finite-thickness slab with negative permeability, its mode profile has been obtained for two different types of symmetry. From these results, the present paper predicts the possibility of a surface wave directional coupler based on a single slab transmission along its top and bottom surfaces.

In this letter, parallel interference cancellation (PIC) in code division multiple access (CDMA) was performed with two different structures by using a neural network (NN). In the first structure (receiver-1) the NN was used as a front-end stage of a one stage PIC circuit. In the second structure (receiver-2), the NN was used instead of the one stage PIC circuit and it was trained as a multiple access interference (MAI) detector to perform the PIC process by subtracting the MAI from the outputs of the matched filter. The PIC is a classical technique in multi user detection process and its bit error rate (BER) performance is not good in one stage for most of the applications. For improving its BER performance, generally a multi stage PIC which has the high computational complexity is used. In this study, we have gotten a better BER performance than a three stages PIC receiver with both proposed receivers that have the lower computational complexity.

There is a possibility that individuals ingest contaminants that have been accidentally mixed with food because processed foods have become very common. Therefore a detection method of small contaminants in food and pharmaceuticals is required. High-Tc SQUID detection systems for metallic contaminants in foods and drugs have been developed for safety purposes. We developed two systems; one large system is for meat blocks and the other small system is for powdered drugs or packaged foods. Both systems consist of SQUID magnetometers, a permanent magnet for magnetization and a belt conveyor. All samples were magnetized before measurements and detected by high Tc SQUIDs. As a result, we successfully detected small syringe needles with a length of 2 mm in a meat block and a stainless steel ball as small as 0.3 mm in diameter.

Two methods using comparable corpora to select translation equivalents appropriate to a domain were devised and evaluated. The first method ranks translation equivalents of a target word according to similarity of their contexts to that of the target word. The second method ranks translation equivalents according to the ratio of associated words that suggest them. An experiment using the EDR bilingual dictionary together with Wall Street Journal and Nihon Keizai Shimbun corpora showed that the method using the ratio of associated words outperforms the method based on contextual similarity. Namely, in a quantitative evaluation using pseudo words, the maximum F-measure of the former method was 86%, while that of the latter method was 82%. The key feature of the method using the ratio of associated words is that it outputs selected translation equivalents together with representative associated words, enabling the translation equivalents to be validated.

This paper presents a new fast and robust circle extraction method that is capable of extracting circles from images with complicated backgrounds. It is not based on the Hough transform (HT) that requires a time-consuming voting process. The proposed method uses a least-squares circle fitting algorithm for extracting circles. The arcs are fitted by extended digital lines that are extracted by a fast line extraction method. The proposed method calculates accurate circle parameters using the fitted arcs instead of evidence histograms in the parameter space. Tests performed on various real-world images show that the proposed method quickly and accurately extracts circles from complicated and heavily corrupted images.

We consider the edge-linking approach for accurate locating of moving object boundaries in video segmentation. We review the existing methods and propose a scheme designed for efficiency and better accuracy. The scheme first obtains a very rough outline of an object by a suitable means, e.g., change detection. It then forms a relatively compact image region that properly contains the object, through a procedure termed "mask sketch." Finally, the outermost edges in the region are found and linked via a shortest-path algorithm. Experiments show that the scheme yields good performance.

This letter presents a speech watermarking scheme that is combined with CELP (Code Excited Linear Prediction) speech coding for speech authentication. The excitation codebook of CELP is partitioned into three parts and labeled '0', '1' and 'any' according to the private key. Watermark embedding process chooses the codebook whose label is the same as the watermark bit and combines it with the codebook labeled 'any' for CELP coding. A statistical method is employed to detect the watermark, and the watermark length for authentication and detection threshold are determined by false alarm probability and missed detection probability. The new codebook partition technique produces less distortion, and the statistical detection method guarantees that the error probability can be controlled under prescribed level.

Non-equal length, three section coupled transmission line couplers are proposed. The proposed structure offers increased design flexibility and the compact circuit design capability over the conventional quarterwave coupled lines. The detailed analysis results and design method are presented along with the numerical and the experimental verification.

Multi-carrier code division multiplexing (MC-CDM) is one of promising multiplexing techniques for fourth-generation mobile downlink communications systems, where high data rate services should be provided even for high speed-cruising mobiles. For MC-CDM-based packet communication, a frequency scheduling method, which adaptively assigns different sub-carriers to different users, is proposed. This paper proposes a frequency scheduling method, which utilizes pre-assignmented subcarriers in the frequency domain for the MC-CDM scheme. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed system in frequency selective fading channels is compared with that of a no-scheduled MC-CDM scheme by computer simulation in both single- and multi-cell environments. From the results, it is found that the proposed system achieves better bit error rate performance than the no-scheduled MC-CDM scheme and can control quality of service (QoS) for active users.

The electric currents on the upper, lower and side surfaces of the patch conductor in a circular microstrip antenna are calculated by using the integral equation method and the characteristic between the electric currents on the upper and lower surfaces is compared. The integral equation is derived from the boundary condition that the tangential component of the total electric field due to the electric currents on the upper, lower and side surfaces of the patch conductor vanishes on the upper, lower and side surfaces of the patch conductor. The electric fields are derived by using Green's functions in a layered medium due to a horizontal and a vertical electric dipole on those surfaces. The result of numerical calculation shows that the electric current on the lower surface is much bigger than that on the upper surface and the input impedance of microstrip antenna depends on the electric current on the lower surface.

This paper proposes a distributed adaptive routing algorithm that may be applied to inter-domain calls passing over any type of network topology, traffic management and switching techniques on the path, while carrying bidirectional traffic with multiple QoS requirements. The path is searched within a contour area restricted by the number of hops between source and destination while the end-to-end admission of calls is controlled at source node and each hop's admission at each node, reflecting the latest resources availability and network conditions for the given QoS requirements. Performance analysis in various conditions shows good applicability in real networks.

In the Multi Carrier (MC)-CDMA system, the frequency diversity gain is obtained by its being spread in the frequency domain. The frequency interleaving technique can improve the frequency diversity gain. In this paper, the bit error rate (BER) performance in the MC-CDMA system which adopts the frequency interleaving scheme in the frequency selective fading channel is evaluated by computer simulation. In this simulation, orthogonal restoration combining (ORC) and minimum mean square error combining (MMSEC) are considered as frequency equalization combining techniques. This paper shows that BER performance with the frequency interleaver is better than without it in various environments.

Recently, multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) has been attracting much attention for the broadband wireless access in the next generation mobile communications systems. In the case of uplink transmissions, the orthogonality among users' signals is lost since each user's signal goes through different fading channel and hence, multi-access interference (MAI) is produced, thereby significantly degrading the transmission performance compared to the downlink case. The use of frequency-domain equalization at the receiver cannot sufficiently suppress the MAI. In this paper, we propose frequency-domain pre-equalization transmit diversity (FPTD), which employs pre-equalization using multiple transmit antennas with transmit power constraint, in order to transform a frequency-selective channel seen at a receiver close to the frequency-nonselective channel. We theoretically analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance achievable with the proposed FPTD and the analysis is confirmed by computer simulation.

In this paper, we propose an adaptive multistage fuzzy-based partial parallel interference cancellation (FB-PPIC) multiuser detector for multi-carrier direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) communication systems over frequency selective fading channels. The partial cancellation tries to reduce the cancellation error in parallel interference cancellation (PIC) schemes due to the wrong interference estimations in the early stages and thus outperforms the conventional PIC (CPIC) under the heavy load for MC-CDMA systems. Therefore, in this paper, the adaptive cancellation weights are inferred from a proposed multistage fuzzy inference system (FIS) to perform effective PPIC multiuser detection under time-varying frequency selective fading channels in MC-CDMA systems. Simulation results show that the proposed adaptive four-stage FB-PPIC scheme outperforms both CPIC and constant weight PPIC (CW-PPIC) schemes, especially in near-far environments.

This paper proposes likelihood function generation of complexity-reduced Maximum Likelihood Detection with QR Decomposition and M-algorithm (QRM-MLD) suitable for soft-decision Turbo decoding and investigates the throughput performance using QRM-MLD with the proposed likelihood function in multipath Rayleigh fading channels for Orthogonal Frequency and Code Division Multiplexing (OFCDM) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiplexing. Simulation results show that by using the proposed likelihood function generation scheme for soft-decision Turbo decoding following QRM-MLD in 4-by-4 MIMO multiplexing, the required average received signal energy per bit-to-noise power spectrum density ratio (Eb/N0) at the average block error rate (BLER) of 10-2 at a 1-Gbps data rate is significantly reduced compared to that using hard-decision decoding in OFCDM access with 16 QAM modulation, the coding rate of 8/9, and 8-code multiplexing with a spreading factor of 8 assuming a 100-MHz bandwidth. Furthermore, we show that by employing QRM-MLD associated with soft-decision Turbo decoding for 4-by-4 MIMO multiplexing, the throughput values of 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps are achieved at the average received Eb/N0 of approximately 4.5 and 9.3 dB by QPSK with the coding rate of R = 8/9 and 16QAM with R = 8/9, respectively, for OFCDM access assuming a 100-MHz bandwidth in a twelve-path Rayleigh fading channel.

Given a graph G, we give a fast algorithm for approximating the vertex connectivity κ of G. Our algorithm delivers a minimum vertex cut of G if κ δ/2, and returns a message "κ > δ/2" otherwise, where δ denotes the minimum degree of G. The algorithm runs in O(n2(1 + min {κ2, κ/δ)) time and O(n + m) space, where n and m denote the numbers of vertices and edges in G, respectively.

We present two new parallel algorithms for extending the domain of a UOWHF. The first algorithm is complete binary tree based construction and has less key length expansion than Sarkar's construction which is the previously best known complete binary tree based construction. But only disadvantage is that here we need more key length expansion than that of Shoup's sequential algorithm. But it is not too large as in all practical situations we need just two more masks than Shoup's. Our second algorithm is based on non-complete l-ary tree and has the same optimal key length expansion as Shoup's which has the most efficient key length expansion known so far. Using the recent result, we can also prove that the key length expansion of this algorithm and Shoup's sequential algorithm are the minimum possible for any algorithms in a large class of "natural" domain extending algorithms. But its parallelizability performance is less efficient than complete tree based constructions. However if l is getting larger, then the parallelizability of the construction is also getting near to that of complete tree based constructions. We also give a sufficient condition for valid domain extension in sequential domain extension.

Two-dimensional phase unwrapping (PU) process usually causes a noise-induced distortion in the geographical information of a wrapped phase image obtained by, for example, interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). This paper presents a novel method to reduce the phase-unwrapping distortion by being based on two-dimensional fractional Brownian motion (fBm) theory. The method incorporates fractal geometry estimation with conventional global-transform PU. For the spatial-frequency spectrum of an observed phase image, we estimate the fractal dimension by assuming an almost constant dimension over the image. Then, according to the estimation, we compensate the distorted spectrum of the tentatively computed global PU result. We obtain a better topographical map as the inverse Fourier transform of the compensated spectrum. It is demonstrated that the proposed method increases the signal-to-noise ratio of PU results for simulated data with various noise levels. Evaluations on an actual InSAR phase image also show that the method significantly improves the quality of the conventional global-transform PU result, in particular in its fine structure.

In this paper, we propose a transformation function for a user's raw iris data, an "iris code" in iris scanning verification on the server, since the iris code requires to be hidden from even a server administrator. We then show that the user can be properly authenticated on the server, even though the iris code is transformed by the proposed function. The reason is that the function has a characteristic, "The (normalized) Hamming distances between the enrolled iris codes and the verified iris codes are conserved before and after the computation of the function," that is, the normalized Hamming distance in this scheme is equal to that in the existing scheme. We also show that the transformed iris code is sufficiently secure to hide the original iris code, even if a stronger attack model is supposed than the previously described model. That can be explained from the following two reasons. One reason is that nonlinear function, which consists of the three-dimensional rotation about the x-axis and the y-axis with the iris code lengthened bit by bit, and the cyclic shift, does not enable an attacker to conjecture the iris code. The other reason is that the success probabilities for the exhaustive search attack concerning the iris code in the supposed attack models are lower than those of the previously proposed methods and are negligible.