In a DC 50 V/5 A circuit, the relationship between the number of breaking arcs and the spatial distribution of the spectral intensity of breaking arcs of long duration near the cathode in palladium contact were examined through substitution of the contact surfaces of three different shapes: flat and spherical (1 mm radius and 2 mm radius). Findings show the distribution of spectral intensity in Pd arcs to be influenced remarkably by the shape of contact surface and the number of breaking arcs. However, the temperature of Pd arcs was affected neither by the shape of contact surface nor by the number of breaking arcs. The metal-vapor quantity present differed for flat and spherical surface contacts; however, it was not affected by the radius of the curved contact surfaces or by the number of breaking arcs. Additionally, the longer the duration of the breaking arc, the more metal-vapor was presented in the beginning of the arc. Furthermore, arc tracks on contact surfaces were observed with microscopes, clarifying that the relationship between the area of the clouded white metal on the cathode and the shape of contact surface is the same as the relationship between the existent area of measured spectra and the shape of the contact surface.

It is shown from the Hilberts theory that if the real function Π(θ) has no zeros over the interval [0, 2π], it can be factorized into a product of the factor π+(θ) and its complex conjugate π-(θ)(=). This factorization is tested to decompose a real far-zone field pattern having zeros. To this end, the factorized factors are described in terms of bicomplex mathematics. In our bicomplex mathematics, the temporal imaginary unit "j" is newly defined to distinguish from the spatial imaginary unit i, both of which satisfy i2=-1 and j2=-1.

Multicasting is an important feature for any switching network being intended to support broadband integrated services digital networks (B-ISDN). This paper proposes an improved multicast packet switch based on Lee's nonblocking copy network. The improved design retains the desirable features of Lee's network including its nonblocking property while adopting techniques to overcome the various limitations mentioned in various literature. The proposed network architecture utilizes d-dilated banyan networks to increase the amount of cells that can be replicated within the copy network. Cell splitting is used to optimize the utilization of the network's available bandwidth. Furthermore, the proposed architecture allows for the modular expansion in capacity to accomodate changing traffic patterns. The modular design of the proposed switch likewise offers easy handling and replacement of faulty modules.

The development of a far-infrared imaging system based on ultrafast THz time-domain spectroscopy has opened a new field of applications of femtosecond technology. We describe the principle of this new imaging technique and report recent progress to augment the possibilities of "T-ray" imaging. These include sub-wavelength-resolution near-field imaging and three-dimensional tomographic reconstruction of a samples refractive index profile.

Recent advances in solid-state laser technology and ultrafast optics led to the generation of optical pulses as short as 5 femtoseconds with peak powers up to the subterawatt level from a compact kHz-repetition-rate all-solid-state laser. This source significantly pushes the frontiers of nonlinear optics. Exciting new possibilities include the investigation and exploitation of reversible nonlinear optical processes in solids at unprecedented intensity levels, the development of a compact laser-driven coherent soft-X ray source at photon energies near 1 keV, and the generation of attosecond xuv pulses. First, a brief review of recent milestones in the evolution of ultrafast laser technology is given, followed by a description of the high-power 5-fs source. The rest of the paper is devoted to applications in previously inaccessible regimes of nonlinear optics. We demonstrate that wide-gap dielectrics resist intensities in excess of 1014 W/cm2 in the sub-10 fs regime and the extension of high-harmonic generation in helium to wavelengths shorter than 2. 4 nm (Eph > 0. 5 keV).

We implement a graphical interface that automatically transforms a figure input by a mouse into a regular figure which the system infers is the closest to the input. The difficulty lies in the fact that the classes into which the input is to be classified have inclusion relations, which prohibit us from using a simple distance criterion. In this letter, we show that this problem can be resolved by introducing the geometric AIC.

The Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and the switches and other network elements based on this principle have matured significantly over the past few years. Extensive field trials have been successfully performed all over the world and an increasing number of operators is starting to offer regular services based on ATM infrastructures. The general trend towards deregulation and liberalization resulting in an increasing competition among network providers world wide creates a strong push towards flexible, high-performance, cost effective infrastructures for data, voice, video and multimedia communication. ATM has the potential to provide the universal platform for this future B-ISDN because it combines the features of classical telecommunication networks with features required to cope with the increasing demand for computer based communication. Therefore, ATM allows a consolidation of all existing, dedicated networks for the various services onto a common network platform and at the same time provides a solid and future proof basis for new services and applications. To make this ATM-based multiservice platform a favorable option for large wide area networks, the reliability known from the classical voice networks has to be provided in addition to a virtually unlimited scaleability of the switching systems and of the network as a whole. Whereas the support of permanent connections, i. e. the application of simple VP-crossconnects, was adequate for the first trial networks, on-demand connections controlled by powerful signaling systems have to be provided in the future broadband networks. Moreover, the rather simple resource allocation and traffic management functions used in the first ATM networks have to be extended to be able to guarantee an application specific quality of service while optimizing the use of the available network resources and, thus, to be able to fully exploit the inherent capabilities of the ATM principle. Another crucial point for the success of the ATM multiservice platform is the efficient interworking with existing networks, especially with the narrowband ISDN, the Frame Relay or SMDS based public data networks and with TCP/IP based Internets. This paper describes a new generation ATM switch which fully exploits the capabilities of todays technology to implement the full functionality necessary to cope with these requirements. It introduces the basic architectural concepts, the functionality and some implementation aspects of this large, highly reliable ATM switch which has been specifically designed for application in the core of a future B-ISDN. Special emphasis is put on the concept and realization of the switch fabric which can be scaled from a few Gbit/s into the Tbit/s range.

Although ATM networks support various traffic requirements, but many data applications are unable to precisely specify traffic parameters such as bit rate. These applications generally require a dynamic share of the available bandwidth among all active connections, they are called available-bit-rate (ABR) service. Due to bursty and unpredictable pattern of an ABR data stream, its traffic control is more challenging than other services. In this paper, we present an improved ABR traffic control approach, called Offset Proportional Rate Control Algorithm (OPRCA). The proposed approach achieves high link utilization, low delay and weighted fair sharing among contenting sources according to the predefined OPR. The implementation is much simpler than that of existing schemes. OPRCA combines an end-to-end rate control with link-by-link feedback control, and employs a buffering scheme that avoids Head-of-Line (HOL) blocking. It can dynamically regulate the transmission rate of source traffic and maintain the real fairness among all active connections. Simulation results have shown the effectiveness of OPRCA in several performance aspects.

The paper is focused on the architectural and technological solutions that will allow the transition from small to huge capacity ATM Switching Systems. This path starts from the industrial nodes available today and will arrive at the photonic switching architecture. The progressive introduction of photonics has already started with the use of optical interconnections in ATM nodes of hundreds of Gbit/s. A balanced use of microelectronics and photonics is the correct answer to the Terabit/s switching system challenge. After presenting a modular ATM Switching System, some technological solutions like Multichip Modules and Optical Interconnections are presented in order to explain how node capacity can be expanded. Some results of the research activity on photonic Switching are finally shown in order to exploit the great attitude of this technique to obtain very high throughput nodes.

This paper presents a new architecture of a high-speed ATM switch. The switch, called FSM (Factorial Style Memory) switch, uses Dual-Port memories to construct a factorial style memory for eliminating the bus contention problem. In order to fit the various applications, based on the proposed switch architecture, several kinds of models are also proposed to construct the larger size of switches. With the same required throughput and cell loss probability, the performance analysis of the switch shows that the number of buffers and average cell delay can be significantly reduced in the proposed switch while comparing to the ATM switches with central shared memory. For satisfying applications that require larger switches, three types of expansion methods which contain size expansion, memory expansion, and size-memory combined expansion are discussed.

Detection of facial emotions are mainly addressed by computer vision researchers based on facial display. Also detection of vocal expressions of emotions is found in research work done by acoustic researchers. Most of these research paradigms are devoted purely to visual or purely to auditory human emotion detection. However we found that it is very interesting to consider both of these auditory and visual informations together, for processing, since we hope this kind of multimodal information processing will become a datum of information processing in future multimedia era. By several intensive subjective evaluation studies we found that human beings recognize Anger, happiness, Surprise and Dislike by their visual appearance, compared to voice only detection. When the audio track of each emotion clip is dubbed with a different type of auditory emotional expression, still Anger, Happiness and Surprise were video dominant. However Dislike emotion gave mixed responses to different speakers. In both studies we found that Sadness and Fear emotions were audio dominant. As a conclusion to the paper we propose a method of facial emotion detection by using a hybrid approach, which uses multimodal informations for facial emotion recognition.

This paper proposes a design method of feature spaces in a two-stage image recognition method that improves the recognition accuracy and efficiency in statistical image recognition. The two stages are (1) image screening and (2) image recognition. Statistical image recognition methods require a lot of calculations for spatially matching between subimages and reference patterns of the specified objects to be detected in input images. Our image screening method is effective in lowering the calculation load and improving recognition accuracy. This method selects a candidate set of subimages similar to those in the object class by using a lower dimensional feature vector, while rejecting the rest. Since a set of selected subimages is recognized by using a higher dimensional feature vector, overall recognition efficiency is improved. The classifier for recognition is designed from the selected subimages and also improves recognition accuracy, since the selected subimages are less contaminated than the originals. Even when conventional recognition methods based on linear transformation algorithms, i. e. principal component analysis (PCA) and projection pursuit (PP), are applied to the recognition stage in our method, recognition accuracy and efficiency may be improved. A new criterion, called a screening criterion, for measuring overall efficiency and accuracy of image recognition is introduced to efficiently design the feature spaces of image screening and recognition. The feature space for image screening are empirically designed subject to taking the lower number of dimensions for the feature space referred to as LS and the larger value of the screening criterion. Then, the recognition feature space which number of dimensions is referred to as LR is designed under the condition LSLR. The two detection tasks were conducted in order to examine the performance of image screening. One task is to detect the eye- and-mouth-areas in a face image and the other is to detect the text-area in a document image. The experimental results demonstrate that image screening for these two tasks improves both recognition accuracy and throughput when compared to the conventional one-stage recognition method.

The act of finding or constructing a model for a portion of a given polynomial or Bezier parametric surface from the whole original one is an encountered problem in surface modeling. A new method is described for constructing polynomial or Bezier piecewise model from an original one. It is based on the "Parametric Piecewise Model," abbreviated to PPM, of curve representation. The PPM representation is given by explicit expressions in terms of only control points or polynomial coefficients. The generated piecewise model behaves completely as a normal, polynomial or Bezier model in the same way as the original one for the piece of region considered. Also it has all characteristics, i. e, order and number of control points as the original one, and satisfies at the boundaries all order continuities. The PPM representation permits normalization, piecewise modeling, PPM reduction and systematic processes.

In this paper, a dynamic constructive algorithm for fault tolerant feedforward neural network, called DCFTA, is proposed. The algorithm starts with a network with single hidden neuron, and a new hidden unit is added dynamically to the network whenever it fails to converge. Before inserting the new hidden neuron into the network, only the weights connecting the new hidden neuron to the other neurons are trained (i. e. , updated) until there is no significant reduction of the output error. To generate a fault tolerant network, the relevance of each synaptic weight is estimated in each cycle, and only the weights which have their relevance less than a specified threshold are updated in that cycle. The loss of a connections between neurons (which are equivalent to stuck-at-0 faults) are assumed. The simulation results indicate that the network constructed by DCFTA has a significant fault tolerance ability.

Considering the pattern classification/recognition tasks, the influence of the activation function on fault tolerance property of feedforward neural networks is empirically investigated. The simulation results show that the activation function largely influences the fault tolerance and the generalization property of neural networks. It is found that, neural networks with symmetric sigmoid activation function are largely fault tolerant than the networks with asymmetric sigmoid function. However the close relation between the fault tolerance and the generalization property was not observed and the networks with asymmetric activation function slightly generalize better than the networks with the symmetric activation function. First, the influence of the activation function on fault tolerance property of neural networks is investigated on the XOR problem, then the results are generalized by evaluating the fault tolerance property of different NNs implementing different benchmark problems.

The channel throughput and packet delay of wireless medium access control (MAC) protocols with Rayleigh fading, shadowing and capture effect are analyzed. We consider CSMA/CA protocols as the wireless MAC protocols, since CSMA/CA protocols are based on the standard for wireless Local Area Networks (LANs) IEEE 802. 11. We analyze the channel throughput and packet delay for three types of CSMA/CA protocols; Basic CSMA/CA, Stop-and-Wait CSMA/CA and 4-Way Handshake CSMA/CA. We calculate the capture probability of an Access Point (AP) in a channel with Rayleigh fading, shadowing, and near-far effects, and we derive the throughput and packet delay for the various protocols. We have found that the performance of CSMA/CA in a radio channel model is 50 percent less than in an error free channel model in low traffic load, while the throughput and packet delay of CSMA/CA in a radio channel model show better performance than in an error free channel model in high traffic load. We also found that the 4-Way Handshake CSMA/CA protocol is superior to the other CSMA/CA protocols in high traffic load.

This paper presents a practical fault-tolerant architecture for mesh parallel machines that has t spare processors and has 2(t+2) communication links per processor while tolerating at most t+1 processor and link faults. We also show that the architecture presented here can be laid out efficiently in a linear area with wire length at most O(t).

A new flow algorithm is described on the basis of the primal-dual method, which is to be adopted dedicatedly for the regeneration of optimal layouts for functional cells of the standard-cell level. In advance of discussing this main theme, the present paper first outlines a practical scheme of reusing those layouts which have been once generated for functional cells in an old fabrication technology, and then formulates an optimization problem for regenerating optimal layouts of functional cells under the constraints incurred by the renewal of design rules. An efficient algorithm proposed here aims at solving this optimization problem with the use of solution concepts for the minimum cost flow problem. A part of experimental results is also shown, which indicates that the proposed altorithm is the fastest for this optimization problem.

In this paper, three issues concerning the linear adaptive receiver using the LMS algorithm for single-user demodulation in direct-sequence/code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) systems are considered. First, the convergence rate of the LMS algorithm in DS/CDMA environment is considered theoretically. Both upper and lower bounds of the eigenvalue spread of the autocorrelation matrix of receiver input signals are derived. It is cleared from the results that the convergence rate of the LMS algorithm becomes slow when the signal power of interferer is large. Second, fast converging technique using a prefilter is considered. The LMS based adaptive receiver using an adaptive prefilter adjusted by a Hebbian learning algorithm to decorrelate the input signals is proposed. Computer simulation results show that the proposed receiver provides faster convergence than the LMS based receiver. Third, the complexity reduction of the proposed receiver by prefiltering is considered. As for the reduced complexity receiver, it is shown that the performance degradation is little as compared with the full complexity receiver.

The proposed high-power-factor converter is constructed with a flyback converter, and locates the energy-storage capacitor on the secondary side of the transformer. A high power-factor can be obtained without needing to detect any current, and the ZVS operation can be achieved without auxiliary switches. To make the best use of these advantages in the converter, ZVS operations and power-factor characteristics in the converter were analyzed. From the analytical results, the effective control method for achieving ZVS was examined. Using a bread-board circuit controlled by this method, a power-factor of 0.99 and a conversion efficiency of 88% were measured.