In robot vision system, enormously large computation power is required to perform three-dimensional (3-D) instrumentation and object recognition. However, many kinds of complex and irregular operations are required to make accurate 3-D instrumentation and object recognition in the conventional method for software implementation. In this paper, a VLSI-oriented Model-Based Robot Vision (MBRV) processor is proposed for high-speed and accurate 3-D instrumentation and object recognition. An input image is compared with two-dimensional (2-D) silhouette images which are generated from the 3-D object models by means of perspective projection. Because the MBRV algorithm always gives the candidates for the accurate 3-D instrumentation and object recognition result with simple and regular procedures, it is suitable for the implementation of the VLSI processor. Highly parallel architecture is employed in the VLSI processor to reduce the latency between the image acquisition and the output generation of the 3-D instrumentation and object recognition results. As a result, 3-D instrumentation and object recognition can be performed 10000 times faster than a 28.5 MIPS workstation.

We developed an automatic data processing algorithm for a ground-probing radar which is essential in analyzing a large amount of data by a non-expert. Its aim is to obtain an optimum result that the conventional technique can give, without the assistance of an experienced operator. The algorithm is general except that it postulates the existence of at least one isolated target in the radar image. The raw images of underground objects are compressed in the vertical and the horizontal directions by using a pulse-compression filter and the aperture synthesis technique, respectively. The test function needed to configure the compression filter is automatically selected from the given image. The sensitivity of the compression filter is adjusted to minimize the magnitude of spurious responses. The propagation velocity needed to perform the aperture synthesis is determined by fitting a hyperbola to the selected echo trace. We verified the algorithm by applying it to the data obtained at two test sites with different magnitude of clutter echoes.

This paper surveys the researches on biological and electeromagnetic environments in RF (radio frequency) and microwave regions in Japan. Publicized research reports on biological objectives, evaluation of exposure rate, electromagnetic environments and guideline for the protection from radio wave nuisances are briefly introduced. Some researches on the evaluation of the exposure rate caused by the near field effect of portable radio transceiver are reviewed. Radio frequency exposer protection guidelines in Japan are also described.

In this paper, we discuss an application of range Doppler imaging to measurement of reflected wave intensity from a moving object without using an anechoic chamber. The wave intensity reflected from a metal plate moving in the horizontal direction toward the antenna is typically 40-50 dB higher than that in the case without using the plate, and the estimated radar cross sections for a metal plate and sphere show good agreement with the theoretical value. The measurement of wave absorption by the present method suggests that frequency characteristics of the observed reflection loss are in close agreement with those of the calculated loss. These results show the reliability of the present experimental system and suggest that the method is applicable to wave reflection measurement not in an anechoic chamber but in an ordinary laboratory room.

Pitch frequency is a basic characteristic of human voice, and pitch extraction is one of the most important studies for speech recognition. This paper describes a simple but effective technique to obtain correct pitch frequency from candidates (pitch candidates) extracted by the short-range autocorrelation function. The correction is performed by a neural network in consideration of the time coutinuation that is realized by referring to pitch candidates at previous frames. Since the neural network is trained by the back-propagation algorithm with training data, it adapts to any speaker and obtains good correction without sensitive adjustment and tuning. The pitch extraction was performed for 3 male and 3 female announcers, and the proposed method improves the percentage of correct pitch from 58.65% to 89.19%.

A simple method for separating the dissipation factors associated with both conductor losses and dielectric losses of printed circuit boards in microwave frequencies is presented. This method utilizes the difference in dependence of two dissipation factors on the dimensions of bounded stripline resonators using a single printed circuit board specimen as a center strip conductor. In this method, the separation is made through a procedure involving the comparison of the measured values of the total dissipation factor with those numerically calculated for the resonators. A method, which is based on a TEM wave approximation and uses Green's function and a variational principle, is used for the numerical calculation. Both effective conductivity for three kinds of industrial copper conductor supported with a substrate of polymide film and dielectric loss tangent of the substrates are determined using this method from the values of the unloaded Q measured at the 10 GHz region. Radiation losses from the resonator affecting the accuracy of the separation are discussed, as well as the values of the effective conductivity of metals on the polyimide substrate which is calculated using the above method. The resulting values of the effective conductivity agree with those using the triplateline method within 10%.

Physical optics (PO) is an approximation method for high-frequency scattering and diffraction problems. But PO fields are inaccurate in the shadow region where the source is screened by the scatterer. It has been difficult to extract the mechanism of this error because PO includes numerical integration. In 2-D problems, PO fields are analytically and accurately expressed in terms of PO equivalent edge currents (PO-EECs) which represent the leading contributions of PO original integration. Comparison of PO in this form and geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD) which gives accurate fields in the shadow region, clarifies the cause of PO errors. For a scatterer with a corner, PO errors are mainly due to the rays emanating from the invisible edges. For a curved surface scatterer, the contributions penetrating the scatterer are small and main PO errors generally consist in PO-EECs itself.

The plane wave diffraction by a two-dimensional parallel-plate waveguide cavity with partial material loading is rigorously analyzed for both the E and the H polarization using the Wiener-Hopf technique. Introducing the Fourier transform for the scattered field and applying boundary conditions in the transform domain, the problem is formulated in terms of the simultaneous Wiener-Hopf equations satisfied by the unknown spectral functions. The Wiener-Hopf equations are solved exactly via the factorization and decomposition procedure leading to the formal solution, which involves branch-cut integrals with unknown integrands as well as infinite series with unknown coefficients. Applying rigorous asymptotics with the aid of the edge condition, the approximate solution to the Wiener-Hopf equations is derived in the form suitable for numerical computations. The scattered field inside and outside the cavity is evaluated by taking the inverse Fourier transform together with the use of the saddle point method. Numerical examples of the radar cross section are presented for various physical parameters, and the far field backscattering characteristics of the cavity are discussed in detail. Some comparisons with a high-frequency technique are also given to validate the present method.

In this paper, an ARMA order selection method is proposed with a fuzzy reasoning method. In order to identify the reference model with the ARMA model, we need to determine its ARMA order. A less or more ARMA order, other than a suitable order causes problems such as; lack of spectral information, increasing calculation cost, etc. Therefore, ARMA order selection is significant for a high accurate ARMA model identification. The proposed method attempts to select an ARMA order of a time-varying model with the following procedures: (1) Suppose the parameters of the reference model change slowly, by introducing recursive fuzzy reasoning method, the estimated order is selected. (2) By introducing a fuzzy c-mean clustering methed, the period of the time during which the reference model is changing is detected and the forgetting factor of the recursive fuzzy reasoning method is set. Further, membership functions used in our algorithm are original, which are realized by experiments. In this paper, experiments are documented in order to validate the performance of the proposed method.

Distributed algorithms that entail successive rounds of message exchange are called decentralized consensus protocols. Several consensus protocols use a finite projective plane as a communication structure and require 4nn messages in two rounds, where n is the number of nodes. This paper presents an efficient communication structure that uses a finite projective plane with a duality of indices. The communication structure requires 2nn messages in two rounds, and can therefore halve the number of messages. It is shown that a finite projective plane with a duality can be constructed from a difference set, and that the presented communication structure has two kinds of symmetry.

If one of the R, L, or C Parameter of an RLC parallel circuit is changed periodically, under certain conditions, an oscillation called Parametric oscillation occurs. If one of remaining circuit elements is made to change due to an external cause (e.g. an external electric or magnetic field), then the parametric oscillation will experience some modulation. This modulation process and the subsequent demodulation can be exploited to create several types of sensors. In this letter, we describe the features of a new parametric magnetic speed sensor and its application in Induction motor robust control.

This paper describes a novel technique to realize high performance digital sequential circuits by using Hopfield neural networks. For an example of applications of neural networks to digital circuits, a novel gate circuit, full adder circuit and latch circuit using neural networks, which have the global convergence property, are proposed. Here, global convergence means that the energy function is monotonically decreasing and each circulit always operates correctly independently of the initial values. Finally the several digital sequential circuits such as shift register and asynchronous binary counter are designed.

In this paper, the fundamental characteristics of tactile recognition by electrical stimulus in order to develop a vision substitution system were described. The electrical stimulus pulse or DC voltage was applied at a touch board, and a conducting band which was connected to the ground level was fastened around a root of finger. First of all, the resistance of finger by the DC voltage was measured and the equivalent circuit of a finger was estimated. It was found that the most of resistance of this mechanism was concentrated at the contact of tip of finger and its value reached to MΩ order. And this resistance widely varied by the contact condition. The resistance of finger itself was relatively low and the contact resistance of band connectoin was about 30 kΩ. Total stray capacitance was about 26-62 nF, which was calculated by our experiments. Secondly, the minimum recognition voltage to applied stimulus pulse was measured by changing frequency, duty-ratio and voltage of pulse. It was found that the most sensitive pulse was in situation of that the frequency range was within from 60 Hz to 300 Hz, the duty-ratio of 20%, and the minimum sensitive voltage was about 13V. Lastly, this electrical stimulus pulse was applied to the touch Braille board. A touch Braille board was controlled by a computer (PC8801). In this system, an input letter from keyboard is translated to Braille code data by a computer automatically, which express the letter by the 6 points for the brind. And a Braille data is output at a touch board. By touching on the contact point of the touch board, a person can recognize Braille points by electrical stimulus. It was found that the Braille recognition by electrical stimulus pulse was available as same as it could be done by raised points.

A kind of time domain reflectometry using deconvolution and envelope extraction process is presented for measuring microwave resonator characteristics, where data acquisition and data processing are performed entirely in the time domain. The proposed method may be used to characterize resonators which have Q values in the range between a few dozen and several hundred. The major drawback of the time domain measurement techniques is in general considered to be a low frequency resolution. In the proposed method, it is avoided skillfully.

The performance of parallel combinatory spread spectrum (PC/SS) communication systems in the frequency-nonselective, slowly Rayleigh fading channel is studied. Performance is evaluated by symbol error rate using numerical computation. To overcome the performance degradation caused by fading, we also studied the effects of selection diversity and Reed-Solomon coding applied to the PC/SS system. As a result, a remarkable improvement in error rate performance is achieved with Reed-Solomon coding and diversity technique. The coding rate for the maximum coding gain is almost a half of that in the additive white gaussian noise channel.

ADTs (Abstract Data Types) have been known as a promising feature for extending the database applications to CAD/CAM and other engineering areas. This extension has brought a new dimension to query optimization. Conventional query optimization methods, which considers only joins as the dominant cost factor, are based on the belief that the executions of selections and projections basically take no time. However, in databases that support ADTs, this may not be true since the execution of a selection involving ADT functions may be very time-cosuming. Thus selections with ADT functions should not be considered as inexpensive operations in queries, and the conventional optimization heuristics should be enhanced to correspond to the appearance of the queries of this kind. In this paper, we show the possibility that semijoins can be used as an effective means to reduce the number of evaluations of an ADT function and consequently optimize queries containing expensive ADT selections. We suggest the enhancement of an conventional optimization heuristics by adding a semijoins pre-stage which is an additional component corresponding to expensive ADT selections. By this way, the applicable range of the conventional heuristics are extended to hold the ability of handling queries with ADT functions. Several optimization algorithms are given and some simulation results show the effectiveness of our methods.

An Ordered Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) is a graph representation of a Boolean function. According to its good properties, BDD's are widely used in various applications. In this paper, we investigate the computational complexity of basic operations on BDD's. We consider two important operations: reduction of a BDD and binary Boolean operations based on BDD's. This paper shows that both the reduction of a BDD and the binary Boolean operations based on BDD's are NC1-reducible to REACHABILITY. That is, both of the problems belong to NC2. In order to extend the results to the BDD's with output inverters, we also considered the transformations between BDD's and BDD's with output inverters. We show that both of the transformations are also NC1-reducible to REACHBILITY.

There have been several interesting investigations on the space functions constructed by one-dimensional or two-dimensional Turing machines. On the other hand, as far as we know, there is no investigation about the space functions constructed by three-dimensional Turing machines. In this paper, we investigate about space constructibility by three-dimensional deterministic Turing machines with cubic inputs, and show that the functions log*n and log(k)n, k1, are fully space constructible by these machines.

We present outside-in conditional narrowing for orthogonal conditional term rewriting systems, and show the completeness of leftmost-outside-in conditional narrowing with respect to normalizable solutions. We consider orthogonal conditional term rewriting systems whose conditions consist of strict equality only. Completeness results are obtained for systems both with and without extra variables. The result bears practical significance since orthogonal conditional term rewriting systems can be viewed as a computation model for functional-logic programming languages and leftmost-outside-in conditional narrowing is the computing mechanism for the model.

It is an important problem whether or not we can reject the disturbances from distributed parameter circuit. In order to analyze this problem structurally, it is necessary to investigate the basic equation of distributed parameter circuit in the framework of state space. Since the basic equation has two parameters for time and space, the state value belongs to an infinite-dimensional space. In this paper, the disturbance-rejection problems with incomplete state feedback and/or incomplete state feedback and feedforward for infinite-dimensional systems are studied in the framework of geometric approach. And under certain assumptions, necessary and/or sufficient conditions for these problems to be solvable are proved.