Processes in image recognition include target detection and shape extraction. Active Net has been proposed as one of the methods for such processing. It treats the target detection in an image as an energy optimization problem. In this paper, a problem of the conventional Active Net is presented and the new Active Net is proposed. The new net is improved the ability for detecting a target. Finally, the validity of the proposed net is confirmed by experimental results.

A secret sharing scheme allows a secret to be shared among a set of participants, P, such that only authorized subsets of P can recover the secret, but any unauthorized subset can not recover the secret. It can be used to protect important secret data, such as cryptographic keys, from being lost or destroyed without accidental or malicious exposure. In this paper, we consider secret sharing schemes based on interpolating polynomials. We show that, by simply increasing the number of shares held by each participant, there is a multiple assignment scheme for any monotone access structure such that cheating can be detected with very high probability by any honest participant even the cheaters form a coalition in order to deceive him.

With the advancement of technologies in wireless communication and computer down-sizing, it becomes possible to access a global network using handy terminals which are equipped with wireless communication facilities. In such a mobile computing environment, data management is one of the primary objectives of effective computer uses. However, since conventional distributed data management technologies assume that servers and clients are fixed at certain locations in a network, they do not provide any tools to construct advanced applications which make full use of dynamically changing information in such an environment. In this paper, in order to incorporate data distributed over mobile computing environment, we propose a dynamic data integration mechanism called MobiView which is an enhanced view mechanism of a conventional database system. In MobiView, we introduce four methods for database indication without using conventional host name or its local name: host-specified, cell-specified, location-dependent, and MobiView-oriented, through which we discuss how to handle both mobile database servers and mobile database clients.

Recently, in the modem, the spread spectrum communication system and the software radio, Digital Signal Processor type Squaring Loop (DSP-squaring-loop) is employed in the demodulation of Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) signal. The DSP-squaring-loop extracts the carrier signal that is used for the coherent detection. However, in case the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is low, the DSP-Phase Locked Loop (DSP-PLL) can not pull in the frequency offset and the phase offset. In this paper, we propose a DSP-squaring-loop that is robust against noise and which uses the adaptive notch filter type frequency estimator and the adaptive Band Pass Filter (BPF). The proposed method can extract the carrier signal in the low SNR environment. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by the computer simulation results.

For evaluating the output response fluctuation of the actual environmental acoustic system excited by arbitrary random inputs, it is important to predict a whole probability distribution form closely connected with many noise evaluation indexes Lx, Leq and so on. In this paper, a new type evaluation method is proposed by introducing lower and higher order type functional models matched to the prediction of the response probability distribution form especially from a problem-oriented viewpoint. Because of the non-negative property of the sound intensity variable, the response probability density function can be reasonably expressed in advance theoretically by a statistical Laguerre expansion series form. The system characteristic between input and output can be described by the regression relationship between the distribution parameters (containing expansion coefficients of this expression) and the stochastic input. These regression functions can be expressed in terms of the orthogonal series expansion. Since, in the actual environment, the observed output is inevitably contaminated by the background noise, the above regression functions can not be directly employed as the models for the actual environment. Fortunately, the observed output can be given by the sum of the system output and the background noise on the basis of additivity of intensity quantity and the statistical moments of the background noise can be obtained in advance. So, the models relating the regression functions to the function of the observed output can be derived. Next, the parameters of the regression functions are determined based on the least-squares error criteria and the measure of statistical independency according to the level of non-Gaussian property of the function of the observed output. Thus, by using the regression functions obtained by the proposed identification method, the probability distribution of the output reducing the background noise can be predicted. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed experimentally too by applying it to an actual indoor-outdoor acoustic system.

This paper proposes a method of supporting behavioral decision-making with a rule-based system to be used for the design stage of service specifications or service scenarios based on a state transition model. We consider telecommunication services as service scenarios of state transitions. A state transition can be described as a transition rule that is represented as the notation of an IF-THEN rule : "if < condition > then < action >. " Thus, behaviors or service scenarios are assumed to be treated as a set of IF-THEN rules in this paper. In general, an "if < condition > then < action >" rule is called a production rule, and production rules are often used to represent knowledge in expert systems. Thus, rules treated in this paper are a kind of production rule. It is still difficult to decide if behaviors are concurrent, cooperative, or exclusive as a whole system when many service scenarios are combined, even if each rule is clearly described and easy to understand. When several service scenarios are combined, it is necessary for the sub-elements of each state transition to cooperate. The method proposed in this paper consists of the following techniques: (1) decompositions of a state transition to sub-elements, (2) rule descriptions for the decomposed sub-elements and the application of rules, (3) use of conflict and cooperation strategies, and (4) support for behavioral decision-making by showing recommendations for cooperative, exclusive, or concurrent behavior. We provide examples of telecommunication services to show the effectiveness of the proposed method in an easy-to-understand manner. We also show cooperative resolution in the interactions among several services.

This paper proposes a new adaptation-mode control (AMC) for a robust adaptive microphone array with an adaptive blocking matrix (RAMA-ABM). The proposed AMC is based on cross correlations of two microphone signals and uses a state machine for controlling the adaptation to avoid target-signal cancellation. Evaluation with sound data obtained in different acoustic environments demonstrates that the noise reduction by the proposed AMC is 3 dB better than that by the AMC based on the SNR estimate. Subjective listening tests show that the quality of the output signal by the proposed AMC is comparable to or even better than those by the conventional AMCs.

The application of an active noise control system in a finite-length duct is studied. Previously proposed single-input-single-output systems are inappropriate in this case, because reflection at the terminals degrades the performance, and/or infinite-impulse-response filters are required for perfect noise cancellation. In this paper, we propose a single-input-single-output system applicable to finite-length ducts, which theoretically achieves perfect noise cancellation while using finite-impulse-response filters only. The tap lengths of the filters are as short as the delays between the reference sensor and the secondary source. A useful implementation of the proposed system is also discussed.

This paper proposes a new hybrid active noise control (ANC) system without the estimation of the secondary path filter in advance. The algorithm of the feedforward part of the proposed method is based on the simultaneous equations method and the feedback part employs the filtered-X LMS algorithm. The estimation of the secondary path filter is obtained in the operation of the feedforward part and it is used in the feedback part. When the secondary path changes in the operation of the system, the proposed system can follow to this change. In the simulation example which treats the colored measurement noise, the fine noise reduction performance is obtained.

This paper describes 1.0 V operation power performance of a double doped AlGaAs/InGaAs/AlGaAs heterojunction FET for personal digital cellular phones. The developed FET with a multilayer cap consisting of a highly Si-doped GaAs, an undoped GaAs and a highly Si-doped AlGaAs exhibited an on-resistance of 1.3 Ωmm and a maximum drain current of 620 mA/mm. A 28 mm gate-width device, operating with a drain bias voltage of 1.0 V, demonstrated an output power of 1.0 W, a power-added efficiency of 59% and an associated gain of 13.7 dB at an adjacent channel leakage power at 50 kHz off-center frequency of -48 dBc with a 950 MHz π/4-shifted quadrature phase shift keying signal.

This paper presents a new implementation of fuzzy filters for edge-preserving smoothing of an image corrupted by impulsive and white Gaussian noise. This filter structure is expressed as an adaptive weighted mean filter that uses fuzzy control. The parameters of this filter can be adjusted by learning. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

We have discussed a ray tracing method to estimate the scattering characteristics from random rough surface. It has been shown from the traced rays that the diffracted rays dominate over the reflected rays. For the field evaluation, we have used the Fresnel function for the diffracted coefficient and the Fresnel's reflection coefficients. Numerical examples have been carried out for the scattering characteristics of an ocean wave-like rough surface and the delay spared characteristics of a building-like surface. In the present work we have demonstrated that the ray tracing method is effective to numerical analysis of a rough surface scattering.

In this paper, a new expression is derived for the bit error rate (BER) performance of Gray-encoded MDPSK for M=2 and 4 in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems over time-variant and frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. We assume that the guard time is sufficiently larger than the delay spread to solve the intersymbol interference (ISI) problem on the demodulated OFDM signal. In this case, the performance depends on the Doppler spread of fading channel. The closed form expression for the bit error probability of MDPSK/OFDM extended from the result in [5] shows that the BER performance of MDPSK is determined by (N + NG ) fD Ts where N is the number of subchannels, NG the length of the guard interval, fD the maximum Doppler frequency, and Ts the sampling period. The theoretical analysis results are confirmed by computer simulations for DPSK and QDPSK signals.

In this paper, we propose a realtime concatenation technique between basic skeletal motions obtained by the motion capture technique and etc. to generate a lifelike behavior for a humanoid character (avatar). We execute several experiments to show the advantage and the property of our technique and also report the results. Finally, we describe our applied system called WonderSpace which leads participants to the exciting and attractive virtual worlds with humanoid characters in cyberspace. Our concatenation technique has the following features: (1) based on a blending method between a preceding motion and a succeeding motion by a transition function, (2) realizing "smooth transition," "monotone transition," and "equivalent transition" by the transition function called paste function, (3) generating a connecting interval by making the backward and forward predictions for the preceding and succeeding motions, (4) executing the prediction under the hypothesis of "the smooth stopping state" or "the state of connecting motion", (5) controlling the prediction intervals by the parameter indicating the importance of the motion, and (6) realizing realtime calculation.

The need for electronic sealed-bid auction services with quantitative competition is increasing. This paper proposes a new method that combines one-way functions and a bit commitment technique for quantitative competitive sealed-bid auctions. Since each modular exponentiation is replaced with a one-way function, the proposed method's computational time is one forty thousandth that of the former methods and the proposed method suits mass bidder systems.

This paper presents a new data hiding scheme under fractal image generation via Fourier filtering method for Computer Graphics (CG) applications. The data hiding operations are achieved in the frequency domain and a method similar to QAM used in digital communication is introduced for efficient embedding in order to explore both phase and amplitude components simultaneously. Consequently, this scheme enables us not only to generate a natural terrain surface without loss of fractalness analogous to the conventional scheme, but also to embed larger amounts of data into an image depending on the fractal dimension. This scheme ensures the correct decoding of the embedded data under lossy data compression such as JPEG by controlling the quantization exponent used in the embedding process.

A new approach for bandwidth allocation of heterogeneous regulated traffics is proposed for cases of lossless multiplexing and statistical multiplexing under the constraint of maximum delay. Minimum bandwidth required for lossless multiplexing can be expressed as 1-dimensional unconstrained-optimization problem. The corresponding optimality condition gives an optimal bandwidth and buffer requirements. This optimality condition is extended to the case of statistical multiplexing. In case of statistical multiplexing with independent, periodic on-off fluid sources, two random variables representing stochastic worst cases for the amount of traffics generated in an arbitrary time interval are introduced and these are combined optimally. This combined model guarantees the worst case bound for the regulated traffics. Using the proposed approach, bandwidth and buffer requirements of each virtual circuit are obtained simultaneously. As these values are sensitive to multiplexing environments, an effective bandwidth considering trade-off between bandwidth and buffer requirements is introduced. The proposed effective bandwidth can be matched directly with the boundary of the acceptance region, which is less sensitive to mutiplexing environments.

A trapdoor one-way function is an extended version of a zero-way permutation. A zero-way permutation was first introduced by Niemi-Renvall in Asiacrypt'94. In this paper we define the class of functions called no-way functions. This is an extended version of a zero-way permutation. Intuitively, a function f is no-way if, without trapdoor, both computing f and computing f-1 are hard. Li-Chida-Shizuya defined the notion of a no-way function, which is a provable-security version of a zero-way permutation. They also gave an example of a no-way function such that computing f and f-1 is proven to be as hard as breaking the Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme. We redefine the notion of a trapdoor no-way function more preciously, classify no-way functions by the property of the trapdoor: common, separated and semi-separated trapdoor no-way, give a method for constructing trapdoor no-way functions from trapdoor one-way functions, and also give an example of trapdoor no-way functions.

Semistructured data has no a-priori schema information, which causes some problems such as inefficient storage and query execution. To cope with such problems, extracting schema information from semistructured data has been an important issue. However, in most cases optimal schema information cannot be extracted efficiently, and few efficient approximation algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we consider an approximation algorithm for extracting "typical" classes from semistructured data. Intuitively, a class C is said to be typical if the structure of C is "similar" to those of "many" objects. We present the following results. First, we prove that the problem of deciding if a typical class can be extracted from given semistructured data is NP-complete. Second, we present an approximation algorithm for extracting typical classes from given semistructured data, and show a sufficient condition for the approximation algorithm to run in polynomial time. Finally, by using extracted classes obtained by the approximation algorithm, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm for constructing a set R of classes such that R covers all the objects to form a database schema.

Can we find in polynomial time an elliptic curve of a given order over a finite field? This paper is concerned with this question which is open since 1986. Consider the partial multivalued function that outputs such an elliptic curve. We characterize the difficulty of computing this function, and show that the polynomial time hierarchy collapses if sat reduces to this function with respect to the polynomial time Turing reducibility, where sat is the partial multivalued function that on input a Boolean formula, outputs a satisfying assignment. We also give a problem that is equivalent to the open question under the Extended Riemann Hypothesis.