The conventional shape from focus (SFF) methods have inaccuracies because of piecewise constant approximation of the focused image surface (FIS). We propose a more accurate scheme for SFF based on representation of three-dimensional FIS in terms of neural network weights. The neural networks are trained to learn the shape of the FIS that maximizes the focus measure.

The relationship between the change in transistor operation regions and the fault behavior of a mixed-signal circuit having a bridging fault was investigated. We also discussed determination of transistors to be observed for estimating the fault behavior. These results will be useful for modeling faulty behaviors and analyzing and diagnosing faults in mixed-signal circuits.

A new manufacturing process for advanced Fiber Bragg Gratings which uses phase plates is described. Its high versatility allows to achieve many type of filters in optical fibers (phase-shifted, apodised, Fabry-Perot).

A low-cost technique using commercial UV grade silica fibers to construct microlens array that is suitable for mass-production of long-period gratings is reported. The growth rate of gratings fabricated using these arrays is much faster than the conventional amplitude masks. Our previous work had shown that this technique was 400% more efficient than the metal mask technique. Further improvement of this grating writing technique using plano-convex microlens array is reported in this paper. Under the same writing conditions, long-period gratings with absorption peaks of 1.5 dB and 17 dB were fabricated by using a microlens array and a plano-convex microlens array, respectively.

In this letter we propose a new Shape from Focus (SFF) method using piecewise curved search windows for accurate 3-D shape recovery. The new method uses piecewise curved windows to compute focus measure and to search for Focus Image Surface (FIS) in image space. The experimental result shows that our new method gives more accurate result than the previous SFF methods.

For measuring high frequency ultrasonic fields which are often spatially distributed and transient, an array probe with small element sensors is highly required. In this paper, we propose a fiber-optic micro-probe array which is based on wavelength-division-multiplexing technique. The element sensor consists of a micro optical cavity of 100 µm long made at the end of optical fiber. Optical path length of the cavity is changed by the applied acoustic field, and the modulation of output light intensity is monitored at another end of the fiber for the information of the acoustic field. Array of sensor elements and a light source as well as a photo detector are connected together by an optical star coupler. The Fabry-Perot resonance wavelength of each sensor element is designed different one another, and the outputs from the sensors are discriminated by sweeping the wavelength of light source with the use of a tunable semiconductor laser. In this paper, the performance of the micro-probe array is discussed experimentally.

A novel technique has been developed for in situ sensing of thin film growth. In this method, a fiber optic probe is placed at an appropriate position in a deposition chamber, and the thin film builds up on the end of the fiber. This film is either the same as on the wafer where deposition occurs, or it bears a fixed relationship to the film on the wafer. By an analysis of the intensity of the light reflected from the film and guided by the fiber, information on the film may be obtained. With interference causing maxima, minima and a point of inflection as the film grows, it is possible to obtain near real time information on the following quantities: the real and imaginary parts of the refractive index of the film, a Gaussian parameter characterizing surface roughness, and the film thickness itself. To demonstrate this technique, we have studied the deposition of silicon nitride films in a CVD reactor and how reactor temperature and reactant flow rates influence film growth. This technique may be applied to measure in situ reflectivity of multi layer films, so that reflectance as a function of temperature and time may be obtained. Because the measurement is simple and direct and the information is optical, we believe that this technique has the potential to supplant quartz oscillators in the measurement of thin film growth.

The vehicle routing and facility location fields are well-developed areas in management science and operations research application. There is an increasing recognition that effective decision-making in these fields requires the adoption of optimization software that can be embedded into a decision support system. In this paper, we describe the implementation details of our software components for solving the vehicle routing and facility location problems.

Metallic pair lines transmitting high-frequency information signals above several tens MHz are often used without being twisted, as flat floor cable installed in buildings, ribbon-type cables installed in computer equipment, and traces in printed circuit boards. However, the conversion characteristics of untwisted unbalanced metallic pair lines connecting unbalanced circuits have not been investigated over a wide range of frequencies in the MHz region. First, we developed a method to estimate effective power conversion factors using a cascade connection of F matrices, where the unbalance in impedance and admittance of each pair line is distributed uniformly along the line. As a result some useful information was obtained about the balance-unbalance conversion characteristics of the effective power which can be used to suppress EMI phenomena in wiring, especially over several decades of high frequencies. Next, we attempted to apply the conversion characteristics of untwisted unbalanced pair lines obtained at frequencies below several MHz to techniques for searching for the return circuits of conductors installed in buildings. It was clarified experimentaly that the depth of the equivalent ground plane can be estimated by comparing the measured conversion values of TV feeder lines installed at the place being tested with reference values measured in advance on a copper plate .

This paper describes the implementation of a Bragg grating-based strain-monitoring system on the Viaduc des Vaux bridge during its construction in 1997 and 1998. The bridge was constructed in a cantilevered, push/pull incremental launching method, and data obtained from two tests were shown to reveal interesting features of the box-girder strain response during the push and pull phases, particularly with regard to limit loads and local buckling. When appropriate, data were compared to data obtained from conventional resistive strain gages and from simple analytical models.

As a new idea for analyzing the wave scattering and diffraction from a finite periodic surface, this paper proposes the periodic Fourier transform. By the periodic Fourier transform, the scattered wave is transformed into a periodic function which is further expanded into Fourier series. In terms of the inverse transformation, the scattered wave is shown to have an extended Floquet form, which is a 'Fourier series' with 'Fourier coefficients' given by band-limited Fourier integrals of amplitude functions. In case of the TE plane wave incident, an integral equation for the amplitude functions is obtained from the the boundary condition on the finite periodic surface. When the surface corrugation is small, in amplitude, compared with the wavelength, the integral equation is approximately solved by iteration to obtain the scattering cross section. Several properties and examples of the periodic Fourier transform are summarized in Appendix.

Since river levee collapse causes great damage, it is socially very important to prevent such disasters by using a monitoring system which can detect changes in the state of a river levee. To investigate the possibility of detecting the collapse of a levee slope at an early stage, we performed an experiment in which we used artificial rainfall and penetration to collapse a full-scale levee model, and measured the change in the levee state using a detection system during collapse. The system consists of sensor plates, a distributed fiber optic strain sensor, and a personal computer. With this system, the stretching produced in the sensor plates by the force resulting from the movement of the soil on the levee slope face is detected as strain by a sensing optical fiber fixed to the plates. Since the distributed fiber optic strain sensor can measure strain continuously and for a long distance along a fiber, it is suitable for monitoring civil structures such as river levees. The experiment confirmed that a change in a levee can be clearly detected when the slope face collapse progresses near the place where the sensor plates are buried. The results suggest the feasibility of being able to foresee the collapse of a levee slope.

Distributed computation has attracted considerable attention and large-scale distributed systems have been designed and developed. A distributed system inherently has possibility of fault tolerance because of its redundancy. Thus, a great deal of investigation has been made to design fault-tolerant distributed algorithms. This paper introduces two promising paradigms, self-stabilization and wait-freedom, for designing fault-tolerant distributed algorithms and discusses some subjects important from the point of view of algorithm engineering.

This paper presents the bit-error rate (BER) performance of the RAKE receiver over a multipath Rayleigh fading channel. The closed-form BER in the downlink single-cell environment is obtained through the analysis of the imperfect channel estimation. We compute the BER as a function of energy-to-noise ratio per bit including the effect of multiple access interference and multipath interference, with channel and system parameters: number of diversity channels L = 1, 3, 6, 12; Doppler frequency shift with fD T = 0.008333, 0.0167, 0.025; residual carrier frequency offset Δ f = -600 600 Hz; averaging length of the channel estimator Np = 128-1536 chips. This analysis allows predicting the system's performance and helps to optimize the parameter setting for the channel estimation process. We show that even if the optimal system parameters are used, the BER performance results in a minimal 4dB degradation in comparison to the perfect channel estimation. Finally, the theoretical results are verified by using the Monte-Carlo computer simulations.

A novel polarimetric fiber optics current sensor configuration using an in-line 22.5 degree Faraday rotator is proposed on this paper. The introduction of the 22.5 degree Faraday rotator allows to obtain a sensor configuration that does not require adjustment on most optical elements, resulting in an accuracy immune to manufacturing issues. Two prototypes are presented in this paper that are designed to measure AC current, yielding in an excellent accuracy over more than 3 decades.

A novel optical technique for the measurement of temperature is proposed. This is accomplished by depositing alternating 1/4 wave layers of silicon nitride and silicon-rich silicon nitride at the end of an optical fiber. These layers of alternating refractive index form the equivalent of a Bragg grating of a high temperature material. When the fiber and the Bragg grating are heated, the Bragg stack expands, and there is a change in the reflective peak wavelength of this wave stack. Thus, the wavelength of peak reflectivity is a function of temperature. Currently, the 15 nm spectral width of the Bragg stacks is achieved in our laboratory, which is conveniently monitored with a CCD solid state spectrometer and the temperature sensor probes can be also multiplexed at separated specific reflection wavelength. In the experiment, the temperatures in excess of 1,100 centigrade have been measured with a resolution of less than 3 centigrade degree.

In this paper, design and experimental results are described about a newly developed highly flexible fiber Faraday effect current sensor using the flint glass fiber as the sensor element. In the new type, a mirror is coated at an end of the flint glass fiber, and light takes round trip transmission in it. By the round trip transmission, the effect of rotation of polarization plane due to the torsion of the fiber is automatically canceled. Because of the low photo-elastic constant of the flint glass fiber, and the automatic canceling of the rotation, the polarization state of light passed through the fiber is stable. Therefore, in the new reflection type, it is not necessary to support the flint glass fiber with a durable circular frame to maintain accuracy. And so, the sensor head is small, light, and can be easily installed to existing power apparatus by winding the flint glass fiber around the current conductor without pulling out or cutting it. Experiments were done to verify the stable characteristics using the developed sensor model. In the experiments, relation between the final output signal of the sensor and shape of the curve of the flint glass fiber were examined. From the experiments, it became clear that the final output is almost perfectly independent on shape of the curve of the fiber. It was also confirmed that accuracy of the sensor conform to the standard of conventional current transducers for protection of power systems in Japan.

An optical magnetic field measuring system using diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMS) probes is presented. The attractive features of DMS for building current/ magnetic field sensors are outlined. The system configuration includes a common-mode noise rejection scheme (CMR) to eliminate optic intensity noise induced in the fibre links by environmental vibrations. The CMR scheme relies on a pulse delay method based on the creation of two relatively delayed replicas of the photodetector output signal and their subsequent subtraction (division). Theoretical and experimental analyses of the system operation are developed and noise rejection methods using subtraction and division are presented and compared. Although CMR by division seems to be more appealing from the theoretical viewpoint (due to the rejection of intensity noise caused both by environmental vibrations and laser source output power fluctuations), in practical terms the subtraction is more reliable and easier to implement. The noise rejection figure measured experimentally is about 17 dBV for CMR both by subtraction and by division. A system calibration curve is presented. The minimum magnetic flux density detected with the system is 0.06 mT rms.

An optical fiber humidity sensor was fabricated forming a nanometer-scale Fabry-Perot interferometer by using the Ionic Self-Assembly Monolayer (ISAM) method. The materials used were Poly R-478 and poly(diallyldimethyl ammonium chloride). Taking advantage of the precision that the ISAM method can achieve in controlling the length of the nano cavity, the length was fit to obtain a maximum variation of 8.7 dB of reflected optical power between 11.3% and 85% RH. The sensor exhibited a fast response time and was able to monitor the human breathing.

The features of the method of moment (MoM) and the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method for numerical analysis of the electromagnetic scattering problem are presented. First, the integral equations for the conducting wire, conducting plane and the dielectric materials are described. Importance to ensure the condition of the continuity of the current of the scatterers is emphasized and numerical examples for a conducting structure involving a junction of wire segment and planar segment is presented. Finally, the advantages and the disadvantages of the FDTD method are discussed.