This study proposes a mathematical model of a gesture-based pointing interface system for simulating pointing behaviors in various situations. We assume an interaction between a pointing interface and a user as a human-in-the-loop system and describe it using feedback control theory. The model is formulated as a hybrid of a target value follow-up component and a disturbance compensation one. These are induced from the same feedback loop but with different parameter sets to describe human pointing characteristics well. The two optimal parameter sets were determined individually to represent actual pointing behaviors accurately for step input signals and random walk disturbance sequences, respectively. The calibrated model is used to simulate pointing behaviors for arbitrary input signals expected in practical situations. Through experimental evaluations, we quantitatively analyzed the performance of the proposed hybrid model regarding how accurately it can simulate actual pointing behaviors and also discuss the advantage regarding the basic non-hybrid model. Model refinements for further accuracy are also suggested based on the evaluation results.

In this paper, we establish a novel bimodal emotion database from physiological signals and facial expression, which is named as PSFE. The physiological signals and facial expression of the PSFE database are respectively recorded by the equipment of the BIOPAC MP 150 and the Kinect for Windows in the meantime. The PSFE database altogether records 32 subjects which include 11 women and 21 man, and their age distribution is from 20 to 25. Moreover, the PSFE database records three basic emotion classes containing calmness, happiness and sadness, which respectively correspond to the neutral, positive and negative emotion state. The general sample number of the PSFE database is 288 and each emotion class contains 96 samples.

A vertex subset F ⊆ V(G) is called a cyclic vertex-cut set of a connected graph G if G-F is disconnected such that at least two components in G-F contain cycles. The cyclic vertex connectivity is the cardinality of a minimum cyclic vertex-cut set. In this paper, we show that the cyclic vertex connectivity of the trivalent Cayley graphs TGn is equal to eight for n ≥ 4.

Conceptual data modeling is an important activity in database design. However, it is difficult for novice learners to master its skills. In the conceptual data modeling, learners are required to detect and correct errors of their artifacts by themselves because modeling tools do not assist these activities. We call such activities self checking, which is also an important process. However, the previous research did not focus on it and/or the data collection of self checks. The data collection of self checks is difficult because self checking is an internal activity and self checks are not usually expressed. Therefore, we developed a method to help learners express their self checks by reflecting on their artifact making processes. In addition, we developed a system, KIfU3, which implements this method. We conducted an evaluation experiment and showed the effectiveness of the method. From the experimental results, we found out that (1) the novice learners conduct self checks during their conceptual data modeling tasks; (2) it is difficult for them to detect errors in their artifacts; (3) they cannot necessarily correct the errors even if they could identify them; and (4) there is no relationship between the numbers of self checks by the learners and the quality of their artifacts.

We target the estimation of antenna patterns of distributed array antenna (DAA) systems for satellite communications. Measuring DAA patterns is very difficult because of the large antenna separations involved, more than several tens of wavelengths. Our goal is to elucidate the accuracy of the DAA pattern estimation method whose inputs are actual antenna pattern data and array factors by evaluating their similarity to actually measured DAA radiation patterns. Experiments on two Ku band parabolic antennas show that their patterns can be accurately estimated even if we change the conditions such as frequency, antenna arrangement and polarization. Evaluations reveal that the method has high estimation accuracy since its errors are better than 1dB. We conclude the method is useful for the accurate estimation of DAA patterns.

Operations, such as text entry and zooming, are simple and frequently used on mobile touch devices. However, these operations are far from being perfectly supported. In this paper, we present our prototype, BackAssist, which takes advantage of back-of-device input to augment front-of-device touch interaction. Furthermore, we present the results of a user study to evaluate whether users can master the back-of-device control of BackAssist or not. The results show that the back-of-device control can be easily grasped and used by ordinary smart phone users. Finally, we present two BackAssist supported applications - a virtual keyboard application and a map application. Users who tried out the two applications give positive feedback to the BackAssist supported augmentation.

This paper derives highly accurate and effective closed-form formulas for the average upper bound on the pairwise error probability (PEP) of the multi-carrier index keying orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MCIK-OFDM) system with low-complexity detection (i.e., greedy detection) in two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP) fading channels. To be specific, we utilize an exact moment generating function (MGF) of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) under TWDP fading to guarantee highly precise investigations of error probability performance; existing formulas for average PEP employ the approximate probability density function (PDF) of the SNR for TWDP fading, thereby inducing inherent approximation error. Moreover, some special cases of TWDP fading are also considered. To quantitatively reveal the achievable modulation gain and diversity order, we further derive asymptotic formulas for the upper bound on the average PEP. The obtained asymptotic expressions can be used to rapidly estimate the achievable error performance of MCIK-OFDM with the greedy detection over TWDP fading in high SNR regimes.

Most people are concerned about their appearance, and the easiest way to change the appearance is to change the hairstyle. However, except for professional hairstylists, it is difficult to objectively judge which hairstyle suits them. Currently, oval faces are generally said to be the ideal facial shape in terms of suitability to various hairstyles. Meanwhile, field of visual perception (FVP), proposed recently in the field of cognitive science, has attracted attention as a model to represent the visual perception phenomenon. Moreover, a computation model for digital images has been proposed, and it is expected to be used in quantitative evaluation of sensibility and sensitivity called “kansei.” Quantitative evaluation of “goodness of patterns” and “strength of impressions” by evaluating distributions of the field has been reported. However, it is unknown whether the evaluation method can be generalized for use in various subjects, because it has been applied only to some research subjects, such as characters, text, and simple graphics. In this study, for the first time, we apply FVP to facial images with various hairstyles and verify whether it has the potential of evaluating impressions of female faces. Specifically, we verify whether the impressions of facial images that combine various facial shapes and female hairstyles can be represented using FVP. We prepare many combinational images of facial shapes and hairstyles and conduct a psychological experiment to evaluate their impressions. Moreover, we compute the FVP of each image and propose a novel evaluation method by analyzing the distributions. The conventional and proposed evaluation values correlated to the psychological evaluation values after normalization, and demonstrated the effectiveness of the FVP as an image feature quantity to evaluate faces.

In this letter, we present a new expression of ergodic capacity for two-wave with diffuse power (TWDP) fading channels. The derived formula is relatively concise and consists of well-known functions even in infinite series form. Especially, the truncated approximate expression and asymptotic formula are also presented, which enable us to obtain useful and physical insights on the effect of TWDP fading on the ergodic capacity for various fading conditions.

New deblocking artifact, or blocking artifact reduction, algorithms based on nonlinear adaptive soft-threshold anisotropic filter in wavelet are proposed. Our deblocking algorithm uses soft-threshold, adaptive wavelet direction, adaptive anisotropic filter, and estimation. The novelties of this paper are an adaptive soft-threshold for deblocking artifact and an optimal intersection of confidence intervals (OICI) method in deblocking artifact estimation. The soft-threshold values are adaptable to different thresholds of flat area, texture area, and blocking artifact. The OICI is a reconstruction technique of estimated deblocking artifact which improves acceptable quality level of estimated deblocking artifact and reduces execution time of deblocking artifact estimation compared to the other methods. Our adaptive OICI method outperforms other adaptive deblocking artifact methods. Our estimated deblocking artifact algorithms have up to 98% of MSE improvement, up to 89% of RMSE improvement, and up to 99% of MAE improvement. We also got up to 77.98% reduction of computational time of deblocking artifact estimations, compared to other methods. We have estimated shift and add algorithms by using Euler++(E++) and Runge-Kutta of order 4++ (RK4++) algorithms which iterate one step an ordinary differential equation integration method. Experimental results showed that our E++ and RK4++ algorithms could reduce computational time in terms of shift and add, and RK4++ algorithm is superior to E++ algorithm.

In this study, the effect of atomically flat Si(100) surface on Hf-based Metal-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon (MONOS) structure was investigated. After the atomically flat Si(100) surface formation by annealing at 1050/60min in Ar/4%H2 ambient, HfO2(O)/HfN1.0(N)/HfO2(O) structure with thickness of 10/3/2nm, respectively, was in-situ deposited by electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma sputtering. The memory window (MW) of Al/HfO2/HfN1.0/HfO2/p-Si(100) diodes was increased from 1.0V to 2.5V by flattening of Si(100) surface. The program and erase (P/E) voltage/time were set as 10V/5s and -8V/5s, respectively. Furthermore, it was found that the gate current density after the 103P/E cycles was decreased one order of magnitude by flattening of Si(100) surface in Ar/4.0%H2 ambient.

In this study, the effect of nitrogen-doped (N-doped) LaB6 bottom-contact electrodes and interfacial layer (IL) on n-type pentacene-based organic field-effect transistor (OFET) was investigated. The scaled OFET was fabricated by using photolithography for bottom-contact electrodes. A 20-nm-thick N-doped LaB6 bottom-contact electrodes were formed on SiO2/n+-Si(100) substrate by RF sputtering followed by the surface treatment with sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide mixture (SPM) followed by diluted hydrofluoric acid (DHF; 1% HF) at room temperature (RT). Then, a 1.2-nm-thick N-doped LaB6 IL was deposited at RT. Finally, a 10-nm-thick pentacene film was deposited at 100°C followed by the Al back-gate electrode formation by using thermal evaporation. The current of electron injection was observed in the air due to the effect of surface treatment and N-doped LaB6 IL.

Channel capacity is a useful numerical index not only for grasping the upper limit of the transmission bit rate but also for comparing the abilities of various digital transmission schemes commonly used in radio-wave propagation environments because the channel capacity does not depend on specific communication methods such as modulation/demodulation schemes or error correction schemes. In this paper, modeling of the noncoherent capacity in a highly underspread WSSUS channel is investigated using a new approach. Unlike the conventional method, namely, the information theoretic method, a very straightforward formula can be obtained in a statistical manner. Although the modeling in the present study is carried out using a somewhat less rigorous approach, the result obtained is useful for roughly understanding the channel capacity in doubly selective fading environments. We clarify that the radio wave propagation parameter of the spread factor, which is the product of the Doppler spread and the delay spread, can be related quantitatively to the effective maximum signal-to-interference ratio by a simple formula. Using this model, the physical limit of wireless digital transmission is discussed from a radio wave propagation perspective.

Motivated by the observation that certain convolutional channels of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) exhibit object specific responses, we seek to discover and exploit the convolutional channels of a CNN in which neurons are activated by the presence of specific objects in the input image. A method for explicitly fine-tuning a pre-trained CNN to induce object specific channel (OSC) and systematically identifying it for the human faces has been developed. In this paper, we introduce a multi-scale approach to constructing robust face heatmaps based on OSC features for rapidly filtering out non-face regions thus significantly improving search efficiency for face detection. We show that multi-scale OSC can be used to develop simple and compact face detectors in unconstrained settings with state of the art performance.

In recent years, since Turbo and LDPC codes are very close to the Shannon limit, a great deal of attention has been placed on the capacity of AWGN and fading channels with arbitrary inputs. However, no closed-form solution has been developed due to the complicated Gaussian integrations. In this paper, we investigate the capacity of AWGN and fading channels with BPSK/QPSK modulation. First, a simple series representation with fast-convergence for the capacity of AWGN is developed. Further, based on the series expression, the capacity of fading channels including Rayleigh, Nakagami and Rice fading can be obtained through some special functions. Numerical results verify the accuracy and convergence speed of the proposed expressions for the capacity of AWGN and fading channels.

We have measured the Seebeck coefficient of a carbon fabric (CAF) using a homemade measurement system for flexible thermoelectric materials to evaluate Seebeck coefficient along the thickness direction. Our equipment consists of a thermocouple (TC) electrode contacted with a resistive heater and another TC electrode attached to a heat sink. A flexible sample is sandwiched with these TC electrodes and pressed by weights. The equipment is set on a weighing machine in order to confirm and hold the pressing force at the contact between the electrodes and the soft sample. Cu and Pb plates were measured as a reference material to calibrate and clarify the accuracy of our measurement system, and its validity was confirmed. The Seebeck coefficient of a single CAF layer ranged 4.3-5.1 µV/K, independent of extra weight. This fact indicates that the weight of heat sink is enough for stable contact at the TC-electrode/CAF interface. It was found that the Seebeck coefficient of layered CAF increases with an increase in the number of layers, which suggests the influence of the air between the CAF layers even though the heavy weight is used.

In this paper, operator-based reset control for a class of nonlinear systems with unknown bounded disturbance is considered using right coprime factorization approach. In detail, firstly, for dealing with the unknown bounded disturbance of the nonlinear systems, operator-based reset control framework is proposed based on right coprime factorization. By the proposed framework, robust stability of the nonlinear systems with unknown bounded disturbance is guaranteed by using the proposed reset controller. Secondly, under the reset control framework, an optimal design scheme is discussed for minimizing the error norm based on the proposed operator-based reset controller. Finally, for conforming effectiveness of the proposed design scheme, a simulation example is given.

At FSE 2014, Grosso et al. proposed LS-designs which are a family of bitslice ciphers aiming at efficient masked implementations against side-channel analysis. They also presented two specific LS-designs, namely the non-involutive cipher Fantomas and the involutive cipher Robin. The designers claimed that the longest impossible differentials of these two ciphers only span 3 rounds. In this paper, for the two ciphers, we construct 4-round impossible differentials which are one round more than the longest impossible differentials found by the designers. Furthermore, with the 4-round impossible differentials, we propose impossible differential attacks on Fantomas and Robin reduced to 6 rounds (out of the full 12/16 rounds). Both of the attacks need 2119 chosen plaintexts and 2101.81 6-round encryptions.

Neighborhood preserving embedding is a widely used manifold reduced dimensionality technique. But NPE has to encounter two problems. One problem is that it suffers from the small-sample-size (SSS) problem. Another is that the performance of NPE is seriously sensitive to the neighborhood size k. To overcome the two problems, an exponential neighborhood preserving embedding (ENPE) is proposed in this paper. The main idea of ENPE is that the matrix exponential is introduced to NPE, then the SSS problem is avoided and low sensitivity to the neighborhood size k is gotten. The experiments are conducted on ORL, Georgia Tech and AR face database. The results show that, ENPE shows advantageous performance over other unsupervised methods, such as PCA, LPP, ELPP and NPE. Another is that ENPE is much less sensitive to the neighborhood parameter k contrasted with the unsupervised manifold learning methods LPP, ELPP and NPE.

An increasing number of psychological studies have demonstrated that the six basic expressions of emotions are not culturally universal. However, automatic facial expression recognition (FER) systems disregard these findings and assume that facial expressions are universally expressed and recognized across different cultures. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of Western-Caucasian and East-Asian facial expressions of emotions based on visual representations and cross-cultural FER. The visual analysis builds on the Eigenfaces method, and the cross-cultural FER combines appearance and geometric features by extracting Local Fourier Coefficients (LFC) and Facial Fourier Descriptors (FFD) respectively. Furthermore, two possible solutions for FER under multicultural environments are proposed. These are based on an early race detection, and independent models for culture-specific facial expressions found by the analysis evaluation. HSV color quantization combined with LFC and FFD compose the feature extraction for race detection, whereas culture-independent models of anger, disgust and fear are analyzed for the second solution. All tests were performed using Support Vector Machines (SVM) for classification and evaluated using five standard databases. Experimental results show that both solutions overcome the accuracy of FER systems under multicultural environments. However, the approach which individually considers the culture-specific facial expressions achieved the highest recognition rate.