We investigated the truncated convolutional code with the characteristics of a block code for block-based communication systems. Three truncation methods (direct truncation, tail-terminating, and tail-biting method) were introduced by other researchers. Each of the three methods has a weakness: the direct truncation method decreases the minimum distance, the tail-terminating method uses tail bits, and the tail-biting method can only be applied by using a complicated decoder. Although the tail-biting method gives a better BER performance than the other two methods, we cannot apply the tail-biting method in all situations. Occasionally, the tail-biting convolutional code does not exist. Wang et al. presented two necessary conditions for the existence of the tail-biting convolutional code of the rate-1/2 recursive systematic convolutional code. In this paper, we analyze the encoder of the convolutional code as a linear time invariant system, and present two theorems and six corollaries on the existence of the tail-biting convolutional code. These existence conditions are adaptable to all convolutional codes. In the communication system using the truncated convolutional code, these results are applicable to determining the truncation method.

Various niching methods have been developed to maintain the population diversity. The feature of these methods is to prevent the proliferation of similar individuals in the niche (subpopulation) based on the similarity measure. This paper demonstrates that they are effective to avoid premature convergence in a case where only one global optimum in multimodal functions is searched. The performance of major niching methods in such a case is investigated and compared by experiments using seven benchmark functions. The niching methods tested in this paper are deterministic crowding, probabilistic crowding, restricted tournament selection, clearing procedure and diversity-control-oriented genetic algorithm (DCGA). According to the experiment, each method shows a fairly good global-optimum-searching capability. However, no method can completely avoid premature convergence in all functions. In addition, no method shows a better searching capability than the other methods in all functions.

Fiber-optic access system integration is the key to providing various kinds of services to home users. The combination of ATM- and SCM-PON systems is essential to support a high-speed data service and analog/digital video distribution services. From this viewpoint, a frequency-division- multiplexing technique for digital baseband and subcarrier multiplexed signals is required to achieve system integration. However, system integration for these two access systems has not been fully investigated yet. The SCM-PON system, which uses a super wideband optical FM converter, will enable these two different kinds of access system (ATM and SCM) to be integrated. In this paper, we describe experimentally obtained results for frequency- division-multiplexed signals consisting of digital baseband and subcarrier- multiplexed signals. The experiments were carried out using a 622-Mb/s baseband signal and an FM-converted signal containing AM and 64QAM signals. The experimental results reveal that the inter-channel interference between the digital baseband and FM-converted signals restricts the number of subcarriers for AM and 64QAM. With an intermediate frequency of 3 GHz for the FM-converted signal, an FDM signal consisting of 622-Mb/s baseband, 30 carriers of 64QAM, and 11 carriers of AM was successfully transmitted.

This paper presents an active vision system for on-line traffic sign recognition. The system is composed of two cameras, one is equipped with a wide-angle lens and the other with a telephoto lens, and a PC with an image processing board. The system first detects candidates for traffic signs in the wide-angle image using color, intensity, and shape information. For each candidate, the telephoto-camera is directed to its predicted position to capture the candidate in a larger size in the image. The recognition algorithm is designed by intensively using built-in functions of an off-the-shelf image processing board to realize both easy implementation and fast recognition. The results of on-road experiments show the feasibility of the system.

The fields in the junctions between straight and curved rectangular waveguides are analyzed by using the method of separating variables. This method was succeeded because the authors developed the method of numerical calculation of the cylindrical functions of complex order. As a result, we numerically calculate the reflection and transmission coefficients in the junctions in various situations, and we compare these results with the results by the perturbation method and with the results by Jui-Pang et al.

We developed a new method to improve the efficiency of the PDP (plasma display panel) by the use of a novel protecting film or Gd doped MgO film. In the cells of the PDP, the VUV (vacuum ultraviolet ray) is generated by Xe discharge. The VUV is simply absorbed by the protecting film or MgO film. Therefore, normally the absorbed VUV doesn't contribute to the light conversion efficiency. However, the novel protecting film or MgO:Gd film radiates the ultraviolet ray of which 317 nm wavelength, by the irradiation of the shorter wavelength VUV, and it excites the blue phosphor. Consequently the efficiency of blue emission is improved.

The present study introduces the adaptive BPF to the BPSK coherent detection system and the characteristic of the resulting system is investigated.

The authors propose a novel 3-way power divider named a planar cross-junction, which is used as the center feed for single-layer slotted waveguide arrays. A feeding waveguide consisting of a cascade connection of these dividers is placed at the middle of radiating waveguide in a single layer. The length of radiating waveguides is halved; the long line effect in traveling wave operation is halved and bandwidth is widened. One divider as a unit is designed by Galerkin's method of moments to suppress the reflection and to control the amplitude and the phase of the divided power into two radiating waveguides on both sides of a feed one. Two types of the cross-junction with a different divided power ratio are designed and tested by experiments in 4 GHz band. The mutual coupling effects between two adjacent cross-junctions as cascaded in a feeding waveguide of the array are predicted to be small enough; units designed here are directly applicable for a multiple-way power divider.

Recently, Lin et al. addressed two weaknesses of a new strong-password authentication scheme, the SAS protocol, and then proposed an improved one called the OSPA (Optimal Strong-Password Authentication) protocol. However, we find that both the OSPA protocol and the SAS protocol are vulnerable to the stolen-verifier attack.

Recently, information display equipment such as a navigation system has often come to be installed in a vehicle, and a variety of useful information has been offered to the driver by voice and images while driving. The necessity of improving safety when the driver receives such information has come to be stressed. As one of the means of solving this problem, we can develop a system that presents the driving and road conditions information such as a lane changing car to the driver by using a warning sound. The purpose of our study is to clarify the effectiveness of an auditory display that uses spatial sounds on such a system. An experiment for measuring the driver's reaction time and eye movements to LED lighting during actual driving has been carried out to investigate whether the spatial sound can quicken the driver's operation and decrease human error. We evaluated the effectiveness by two measures, average reaction time and the number of largely delayed reactions. We considered that the average reaction time corresponds to the quickness of the driver's operation, and the number of largely delayed reactions corresponds to the probability of human error. As a result of the experiment, the use of directional sound clearly showed better performance than the use of monaural sound and no sound in the number of largely delayed reactions. Moreover, we analyzed the factors involved in delay of the reaction by the results of eye movement measurements. Consequently, it has been found that directional sound can decrease the number of the largely delayed reactions, which lead to an accident during actual driving.

This paper presents a method of extracting car license plates captured from the arbitrary directions by using symmetry features. The generalized symmetry transform (GST) produces continuous features of symmetry between two points by combining locality constraint and reflectional symmetry, but its time complexity of GST is increased by the second power of the radius of a searching window. To achieve considerable reduction of this time complexity, we propose a scan line based GST (SLGST) which calculates the symmetry between a pair of edge pixels along the scan lines. Instead of calculating the global symmetry of a license plate, we assign the symmetry contribution acquired from SLGST to the corner point estimated from two edge points and their gradient orientations. The right angle tuned SLGST (RATSLGST) is newly proposed to detect the right angle corners more effectively. Image normalization by image warping is adopted to make such segmentation of license plate and later identification much easier. We also adopt the verifier that evaluates a candidate license plate to enhance extraction rate. Our experiments show that the proposed method for extracting perspectively distorted license plates is fairly reliable.

The two-sample locally optimum rank detector test statistics for composite signals in additive, multiplicative, and signal-dependent noise are obtained in this letter. Compared with the structure of the one-sample locally optimum rank detector, that of the two-sample locally optimum rank detector is shown to be simpler, although it needs more computations. It is known that there is a trade-off of computational complexity and structural simplicity between the one- and two-sample detectors.

A virtual city, a virtual reality system to display an urban scene, is one of the most promising tools for ITS applications, including car navigation aids, shopping guides, and city planning, to name a few. This paper overviews our effort to create virtual cities through a sequence of images obtained with vision/range sensors. Our virtual city consists not of only stationary buildings but also of running and parked vehicles, which reflect the current activities in the real city. The first part of this paper describes how to construct still building images from a sequence of images. Here, we focus on methods employing an omni image camera that acquires images containing rays of 360 degrees viewing directions. The second part describes a system to display vehicle movement in the virtual city based on the image sequence given with a monitoring TV camera at an intersection. It also describes a preliminary step toward displaying illegal parked vehicles from information collected by a probe car.

Face detection from cluttered images is very challenging due to the wide variety of faces and the complexity of image backgrounds. In this paper, we propose a neural network based approach for locating frontal views of human faces in cluttered images. We use a radial basis function network (RBFN) for separation of face and non-face patterns, and the complexity of RBFN is reduced by principal component analysis (PCA). The influence of the number of hidden units and the configuration of basis functions on the detection performance was investigated. To further improve the performance, we integrate the distance from feature subspace into the RBFN. The proposed method has achieved high detection rate and low false positive rate on testing a large number of images.

This paper proposes a design method of 2-D variable IIR digital filters with high frequency tuning accuracy. In the proposed method, a parallel complex allpass structure is used as the prototype structure of the 2-D variable digital filters in order to obtain low sensitivity characteristic. Because the proposed 2-D variable digital filter is composed of first-order complex allpass sections connected in parallel, the proposed variable digital filter possesses several advantages such as low sensitivity characteristic in the passband, simple stability monitoring and high parallelism. In order to improve the frequency tuning accuracy of the proposed variable digital filter, each first-order complex allpass section is substituted by a new first-order complex allpass section with low sensitivity characteristic. Moreover, the coefficient sensitivity analysis of a 2-D parallel complex allpass structure is presented. Numerical examples show that the proposed 2-D variable IIR digital filter has high tuning accuracy under the finite coefficient wordlength.

This paper presents a method for disambiguating word senses in Korean-Japanese machine translation by using a language independent ontology. This ontology stores semantic constraints between concepts and other world knowledge, and enables a natural language processing system to resolve semantic ambiguities by making inferences with the concept network of the ontology. In order to acquire a language-independent and reasonably practical ontology in a limited time and with less manpower, we extend the existing Kadokawa thesaurus by inserting additional semantic relations into its hierarchy, which are classified as case relations and other semantic relations. The former can be obtained by converting valency information and case frames from previously-built electronic dictionaries used in machine translation. The latter can be acquired from concept co-occurrence information, which is extracted automatically from a corpus. In practical machine translation systems, our word sense disambiguation method achieved an improvement of average precision by 6.0% for Japanese analysis and by 9.2% for Korean analysis over the method without using an ontology.

This paper deals with a mathematical formulation of the scattering from a periodic surface with finite extent. In a previous paper the scattered wave was shown to be represented by an extended Floquet form by use of the periodic nature of the surface. This paper gives a new interpretation of the extended Floquet form, which is understood as a sum of diffraction beams with diffraction orders. Then, the power flow of each diffraction beam and the relative power of diffraction are introduced. Next, on the basis of a physical assumption such that the wave scattering takes place only from the corrugated part of the surface, the amplitude functions are represented by the sampling theorem with unknown sample sequence. From the Dirichlet boundary condition, an equation for the sample sequence is derived and solved numerically to calculate the scattering cross section and optical theorem. Discussions are given on a hypothesis such that the relative power of diffracted beam becomes almost independent of the width of surface corrugation.

This paper deals with formal verification of high-level designs, in particular, symbolic comparison of register-transfer-level descriptions and behavioral descriptions. We use state machines extended by quantifier-free first-order logic with equality, as models of those descriptions. We cannot adopt the classical notion of equivalence for state machines, because the signals in the corresponding outputs of such two descriptions do not change in the same way. This paper defines a new notion of consistency based on signal-transitions of the corresponding outputs, and proposes an algorithm for checking consistency of those descriptions, up to a limited number of steps from initial states. As an example of high-level designs, we take a simple hardware/software codesign. A C program for digital signal processing called PARCOR filter was compared with its corresponding design given as a register-transfer-level description, which is composed of a VLIW architecture and assembly code. Since this example terminates within approximately 4500 steps, symbolic exploration of a finite number of steps is sufficient to verify the descriptions. Our prototype verifier succeeded in the verification of this example in 31 minutes.

One of the reasons of slow convergence in Backpropagation learning is the diminishing value of the derivative of the commonly used activation functions as the nodes approach extreme values, namely, 0 or 1. In this letter, we propose arctangent activation function to accelerate learning speed. Simulation results indicate considerable improvement in convergence performance.

An n-detection testing for stuck-at faults can be used not only for delay fault testing but also for detection of unmodeled faults. We have developed a hybrid BIST circuit; that is, a method consisting of a shift register with partial rotation and a procedure that selects test vectors from ATPG ones. This testing method can perform at-speed testing with high stuck-at fault coverage. During the at-speed testing, a subset of the ATPG vectors is input by using a low-speed tester. Computer simulations on ISCAS'85, ISCAS'89, and ITC'99 circuits are conducted for n = 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, and 15. The simulation results show that the amount of test vectors can be reduced to ranging from 52.3% to 0.9% in comparison with that of the ATPG vectors. As a result, the proposed method can reduce the cost of at-speed testing.