This paper proposes a robust method for detecting step and ramp edges. In this method, an edge is defined not as a point where there is a large change in intensity, but as a region boundary based on the separability of image features which can be calculated by linear discriminant analysis. Based on this definition of an edge, its intensity can be obtained from the separability, which depends only on the shape of an edge. This characteristic enables easy selection of the optimum threshold value for the extraction of an edge, and this method can be applied to color and texture edge extraction. Experimental results have demonstrated that this proposed method is robust to noise and dulled edges, and, in addition, allows easy selection of the optimum threshold value.

The Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) is an intrinsic measurement of directional properties of the earth's surface. However, the estimation of the BRDF requires many remote sensing measurements of a given surface target from different viewing angles. In addition, a good atmospheric correction scheme is a prerequisite for such an attempt. The airborne POLDER sensor measures successively reflected radiation by terrestrial surfaces in a framed image form at different viewing angles during a single airplane pass, like taking snap-shot pictures. A specially improved atmospheric correction algorithm which is applicable to a framed image data by POLDER sensor is presented. The observed reflectance images taken successively by the airborne POLDER at slightly different viewing angles are converted to a series of surface albedo images by applying our atmospheric correction algorithm. Then, the BRDFs for three surface covers, namely, "River Water," "Forest," and "Rice Field," are estimated by using successive albedo images. It is found that the BRDF for "River Water" follows Lambert law at both 550nm and 850nm. It is also found that the BRDFs for "Forest" and "Rice Field" follow Lambert's law at 550nm, but they follow an anisotropic reflection law at 850nm and fitting parameters for their BRDFs are presented.

A new approach is presented for recovering the 3-D shape from shading image. Photometric Stereo Method (PSM) is generally based on the direct illumination. PSM in this paper is modified with the indirect diffuse illumination method (IDIM), and then applied to hybrid reflectance model which consists of two components; the Lambertian reflectance and the specular reflectance. Under the hybrid reflectance model and the indirect diffuse illumination circumstances, the 3-D shape of objects can be recovered from the surface normal vector extracted from the surface roughness, the surface reflectance ratio, and the intensity value of a pixel. This method is rapid because of using the reference table, simplifies the restriction condition about the reflectance function in prior studies without any loss in performance, and can be applied to various types of surfaces by defining general reflectance function.

The relative intensity noise (RIN) spectra of DC driven 1.3 µm distributed feedback laser diodes under the influence of external reflections are measured for various currents and reflection lengths. The effective power reflectivities are 310-4-310-3. The enhanced noise is observed when the relaxation oscillation frequency coincides with the external cavity frequency. It is also observed that the RIN spectra with the near end reflections differ from those with the far end reflections. The degradation of the RIN spectra is analyzed with the rate equations numerically. A new reflection noise model, which includes the carrier density change induced by the reflections, is introduced. The near and far end reflections are characterized well by this model. Furthermore, it is found that the reflection induced noise effect can be described well by the far end reflection noise model even when the reflection length is as short as 1 m.

This paper presents Ternary Decision Diagrams which represent sets of products. This paper also presents manipulating methods for sum-of-products forms and ringsum-of-products forms using Ternary Decision Diagrams, and gives comparison results between Ternary Decision Diagrams and Binary Decision Diagrams.

The magnetic properties and the structure of electroless-deposited NiFeB films were investigated in comparison with those of electrodeposited NiFe films. The electroless-deposited NiFeB film with 27at% Fe content had the lowest coercivity, H, as low as 0.5 Oe with a saturation magnetic flux density, Bs, of 1.0 T. The saturation magnetostriction, λ, and the uniaxial magnetic anisotropy, Hk, were 5.010-6 and 10 Oe, respectively, which were larger than those of the conventional, electrodeposited permalloy film. The permeability of as-deposited Ni70Fe27B3 film was 1000 at 1 MHz. In order to improve the permeability, the film was heated at 200 in a magnetic field applied in the hard-axis direction to decrease the Hk value, and the permeability became 2000 at 1 MHz. The crystal structure and grain size of NiFeB and NiFe films were investigated by XRD, THEED and TEM. Both films with low Hc had an fcc structure; the grain size of the NiFeB film was smaller than 10 nm, while that of the NiFe film was larger, approximately 20 nm. The results suggested that the electroless-deposited NiFeB film had a larger magnetic anisotropy than the electrodeposited NiFe film. Moreover, the films with Hc less than 10 Oe ded not show clear difference between their TEM bright images and THEED patterns.

The MUSIC algorithm has proven to be an effective means of estimating parameters of multiple incoherent signals. Furthermore, the forward-backward (FB) spatial smoothing technique has been considered the best preprocessing method to decorrelate coherent signals. In this paper, we propose a novel preprocessing technique based upon ideas associated with the FB and adaptive spatial smoothing techniques and report on its superiority in numerical simulations.

A fast pitch search algorithm using the skipping technique is proposed to reduce the computation time in CELP vocoder. Based on the characteristics of the correlation function of speech signal, the proposed algorithm skips over certain ranges in the full pitch search range in a simple way. Though the search range is reduced, high speech quality can be maintained since those lags having high correlation values are not skipped over and are used for search by closed-loop analysis. To improve the efficiency of the proposed method, we develop three variants of the skipping technique. The experimental results show that the proposed and the modified algorithm can reduce the computation time in the pitch search considerably, over 60% reduction compared with the traditional full search method.

Two method to predict targets which a user is about to point with a mouse on the basis of the trajectory of the mouse cursor were proposed. The effects of the interval between targets, the position of targets, the sampling interval and the number of sampling on the pointing time and the prediction accuracy were investigated. In both methods, the distance between targets had little effects on the pointing time. The prediction accuracy was found to be affected by the position of targets. In both prediction methods, the angle between the cursor movement vector and the vector which connects the current cursor position and the center of each target is calculated every st. As for Prediction Method1 that regards the target which correspond to the minimum angle continuously 5 times as the candidate target, the optimal condition of the sampling interval was found to be 0.06 sec or 0.08 sec. Concerning Prediction Method2 that calculates the angle n times and determines the minimum cumulative value as the candidate, the optimal condition of the number of sampling was 8.

In this paper, we discuss an abstraction method for Petri nets based on an equivalence of firing sequences of a specified subnet or a specified subset of transitions. Specifically, a method is presented to generate an equivalent net which preserves firing sequences of a specified subnet or a specified subset of transitions. The abstraction can be applied to an efficient behavioral analysis of concurrent systems constructed by composition of modules such as communication networks and Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS).

Simplification of the Viterbi algorithm and the error rate performance are presented for a partial response maximum-likelihood (PRML) system employing the PR(1, 1) system as a PR system for (1, 7) run-length limited (RLL) code. The minimum run-length of 1's or O's in the output sequence of the precoder for (1, 7) RLL code is limited to 2. Two kinds of simplified Viterbi algorithms using this run-length constraint are proposed. One algorithm requires the path memory length of only two in the Viterbi detector. The Viterbi detector based on the other algorithm is equivalent to the simple PR(1, 1) system followed by a threshold detector. The bit-error rates of PRML systems with Viterbi detectors based on these algorithms are obtained by computer simulation and their performance is compared with that of conventional PRML systems for (1, 7) RLL code. It is shown that the proposed PRML system exhibits better performance than conventional PRML systems at high recording density.

A typed, object-oriented database technology, equipped with appropriate declarative, temporal logic based executable constraints, is presented. The underlying object-oriented database type system is based on advanced features such as subtype, parametric and F-bounded polymorphism. A particularly distinctive feature of the type system is its associated type-safe reflection technology, which provides the flexibility required by database operators without sacrificing type safety. Strongly, and even statically typed, executable class specifications of a variety of standard database abstractions, both application-oriented and system-oriented, are presented in the paper, in order to demonstrate strate the applicability of the paradigm. The temporal logic basis of the constraint language has an execution model, as well as the minimal model semantics, and it allows complex, temporal behavioral patterns to be expressed. It is based on three tomporal operators: always, next time and some time, and rules that determine how these operators may be applied in temporal Horn clauses. Because of the object-oriented nature of the paradigm, the logic basis is also equipped with the equality predicate The proposed technology is intended to provide major advantages not only in managing appropriately complex application environments with temporal constraints, but also in providing more efficient (because of static type checking) and reliable database management systems. It offers the advantages of non-procedural data languages and the richness of a temporal object-oriented paradigm. It also leads to a powerful prototyping tool for structural and behavioral testing of complex, strongly typed object-oriented systems, prior to major procedural implementation efforts.

This paper proposes and investigates a tap selectable Viterbi equalizer for mobile radio communications. When the multipath channel is modeled by a tapped delay line only, the taps which may seriously affect the data sequence estimation are selected and used to calculate the trellis metric in the Viterbi algorithm. The proposed equalization algorithm can reduce the number of path metric calculations and the number of path selections in the Viterbi algorithm. Moreover, we propose an extended equalizer which has antenna diversity. This equalizer calculates the path metric using the antenna outputs and results of channel estimators. Computer simulation is used to evaluate the BER performance of the proposed equalizer in a multipath radio channel.

An automatic transistor-level performance fault tracing method is proposed which is applicable to the case where only CAD layout data is available in the CAD-linked electron beam test system. The technique uses an integrated algorithm that combines a previously proposed transistor-level fault tracing algorithm and a successive circuit extraction from CAD layout data. An expansion of the algorithm to the fault tracing in a combined focused ion beam and electron beam test system which enables us to measure signals on the interconnections in the lower layers is also described. An application of the technique to a CMOS model layout with about 100 transistors shows its validity.

A new method is developed to generate fuzzy rules from numerical data. This method consists of two algorithms: Algorithm 1 is used to identify structures of the given data set, that is, the optimal number of rules of system; Algorithm 2 is used to identify parameter of the used model. The former is belonged to unsupervised learning, and the latter is belonged to supervised learning. To identify parameters of fuzzy model, we developed a neural network which is referred to as Unsymmetrical Gaussian Function Network (UGFN). Unlike traditional fuzzy modelling methods, in the present method, a) the optimal number of rules (clusters) is determinde by input-output data pairs rather than by only output data as in sugeno's method, b) parameter identification of ghe present model is based on a like-RBF network rather than backpropagation algorithm. Our method is simple and effective because it integrates fuzzy logic with neural networks from basic network principles to neural architecture, thereby establishing an unifying framework for different fuzzy modelling methods such as one with cluster analysis or neural networks and so on.

For a complex object model, a form of range restriction, called specialization constraint (SC), has been studied. On the other hand, very few models have been proposed that support selective inheritance. In this paper, the following consideration is taken into SCs for a complex object medel suppoorting selective inheritance. A polynomial-time algorithm is given for deciding if a given database schema is well-formed. A sound and complete axiomatization for SCs is presented. A polynomial-time algorithm is given that decides if an SC is a logical consequence of a set of SCs. Finally, another polynomial-time algorithm is given, which decides if there exists a database that contains a given path from a given class.

Scientific database systems for the analysis of genes and proteins are becoming very important these days. We have developed a deductive database system PACADE for analyzing the three dimensional and secondary structures of proteins. In this paper, we describe the statistical data classification component of PACADE. We implemented the component for cluster analysis and discrimination analysis. In addition, we enhanced the aggregation function in order to calculate the characteristic values which are useful for data classification. By using the cluster analysis function, the proteins are thereby classified into different types of structural characteristics. The results of these structural analysis experiments are also described in this paper.

A particulate recording medium with an ultrathin magnetic layer is presented in this paper. This medium consists of a magnetic layer and a nonmagnetic underlayer composed of very fine titanium dioxide powder. When metal powder was employed, we observed the anticipated advantages of decreasing the thickness of the magnetic layer in tapes and diskettes. By reducing the layer thickness to below 0.3 µm we were able to increase the reproduced output at short wavelengths, and improve both the overwrite erasability and the D50. There was also a decrease in the half peak width of an isolated pulse and a peak shift. Tribological advantages were also observed with this medium. When barium ferrite was employed as the magnetic powder, we observed that the modulation noise of thin-layer barium ferrite medium was less than that of a thinlayer MP medium while it generated an output as high as that of the MP medium. The advantages of the barium ferrite medium lie in its two-layer construction. Particulate media will continue to develop as magnetic powder is improved mainly in terms of its size, saturation magnetization, and coercivity.

In this paper, a pushdown automaton, with an infinite set of states as a partially ordered set (poset), is formulated, and its control problem of whether a given configuration can be transferred to another is discussed. For the controllability to be decidable, we take a condition the poset satisfies, that is, a condition that there are only finite number of states under the partial ordering between two given states. The control problem is decidable in polynomial time on condition the length of each pushed stack string is bounded by a constant in a given pushdown automaton. The motivation of considering the control problem comes up from the stack structure in implementing the SLD resolution deductions, in which the leftmost atom in each goal is selected and unified with some procedure name (that is, some head) of a definite clause, with the effect of the procedure name being replaced by the procedure bodies and unifications. Thus, the control problem is applied to describe the SLD resolution deductions of finite steps, by constructing a pushdown automaton model for a set of definite clauses, in which leftmost selection of atom in each goal forms a stack structure and substitutions affecting goals are interpreted as states. When constructing a pushdown automaton model for an SLD resolution deduction, algebraic properties of the idempotent substitution set, which are used in unifications, are examined and utilized. The quotient set of the idempotent substitution set per renamings is adopted to present the automaton model.

In this paper, electromagnetic scattering by infinite double two-dimensional periodic array of resistive upper and lower elements is considered. The electric field equations are solved by using the moment method in the spectral domain. Some numerical results are shown and frequency selective properties are discussed.