In this paper, we propose a descriptor as a shape signature and the projective refinement as a verification method for recognizing 2D curved objects with occlusions from their partial views. For an extracted curve segment, we compute a series of the geometric invariance of equally spaced five co-planar points on the curve. Thus the resulting descriptor is invariant only under rotation, translation, and scale, but sufficient similarity is preserved even under large distortions. It is more stable and robust since it does not need derivatives. We use this transformation-invariant descriptor to index a hash table. We show the efficiency of the method through experiments using seriously distorted images of 2-D curved objects with occlusions.

A maximal-ratio-combining (MRC) digital beamformer has been studied to attain open-loop and automatic self-beam steering towards both desired and multipath signals at the same time and diversity combining of the signals, which are made possible by spatial digital signal processing. This paper describes the performance of this beamformer under the multipath signal arrivals with various path delays using numerical simulation, aimed at application to future mobile radios with high spatial utilization efficiency. The results indicate the robustness of the MRC beamformer in a multipath environment. It features multidirectional beam steering when there is small path delay in the multipath signal and gain suppression in multipath signals when their path delay is more than about one symbol. Moreover, improvement in suppression by employing low-sidelobe amplitude distribution is discussed as a means to reduce inter-symbol interference without null-beam steering.

By treating each different output pattern as a state, we propose a low power architecture for pipelined circuits using bipartition. It is possible that the output of a pipelined circuit transit mainly among some of different states. If some few states dominate most of the time, we could partition the combinational portion of a pipelined circuit into two blocks: one that contains the few states with high activity is small and the other that contains the remainder with low activity is big. The original pipelined circuit is bipartitioned into two individual pipelined circuits. An additional combination logic block is introduced to control which of the two partitioned blocks to work. Power reduction is based on the observation that most time the small block is at work and the big one is at idle. In order to minimize the power consumption of this architecture, we present an algorithm that can improve the efficiency of this additional control block. Experiments with MCNC benchmarks show high percentage of power saving by using our new architecture for low power pipelined circuit design.

In indoor optical channels, intersymbol interference (ISI) due to multipath propagation prevents high data rate transmission. In this paper, a new Optical Multi-Wavelength Modulation technique has been investigated for improving the quality of transmission. In this technique, parallel transmission is used, which lowers the data rate per channel and thus reduces the effects of ISI. Furthermore, parallel coding is used in predetermined parallel branches, so that coding can correct errors without changing the system data rate. Simulation results show that a combination of these methods can achieve high quality transmission without reduction of the total data rate.

Users of computer communication systems and their requirements are rapidly increasing and changing. In order to deal such a situation a rapid development method of communication systems is necessary. One of the such development methods is to change an existing specification of the system to obtain the desired specification of the system. However, a very little work has been done to support making changes in formal specifications. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for making changes in formal protocol specifications by adding protocol functions in an existing protocol specification.

A formal necessary and sufficient condition on the general Petri net reachability problem is presented by eliminating all spurious solutions among known nonnegative integer solutions of state equation and unifying all the causes of those spurious solutions into a maximal-strongly-connected and siphon-and-trap subnet Nw. This result is based on the decomposition of a given net (N, Mo) with Md and the concepts of "no immature siphon at the reduced initial marking Mwo" and "no immature trap at the reduced end marking Mwd" on Nw which are both extended from "no token-free siphon at the initial marking Mo" and "no token-free trap at the end marking Md" on N, respectively, which have been both effectively, explicitly or implicitly, used in the well-known fundamental and simple subclasses.

In this paper, Wavelength Division Multiple access (WDM) ring is proposed for interconnection in workstation clusters or parallel machines. This network consists of ring connected routers each of which selectively passes signals addressed in some particular wavelengths. Other wavelengths are once converted to electric signals, and re-transmitted being addressed in different wavelengths. Wavelengths are assigned to divisors of the number of nodes in the system. Using the regular WDM ring with imaginary nodes, the diameter and average distance are reduced even if the number of nodes has few divisors. It provides better diameter and average distance than that of the uni-directional torus. Although the diameter and average distance is worse than that of ShuffleNet, the physical structure of the WDM ring is simple and the available number of nodes is flexible.

In this paper we consider a parallel and distributed computation of genetic algorithms on loosely-coupled multiprocessor systems. Loosely-coupled ones are more suitable for massively parallel processing and also more easily VLSI implementation than tightly-coupled ones. However, communication overhead on parallel processing is more serious for loosely-coupled ones. We propose in this paper a parallel and distributed execution method of genetic algorithm on loosely-coupled multiprocessor systems of fixed network topologies in which each processor element carries out genetic operations on its own chromosome set and communicates with only the neighbors in order to save communication overhead. We evaluate the proposed method on the multiprocessor systems with ring, torus, and hypercube topologies for benchmark problem instances. From the results, we find that the ring topology is more suitable for the proposed parallel and distributed execution since variety of chromosomes in the ring is kept much more than that in the others. Moreover, we also propose a new network topology called cone which is a hierarchical connection of ring topologies. We show its effectiveness by experimental evaluation.

A two stage Combline Bandpass Filter (C-BPF) of the Vertically Installed Planar (VIP) structure has been investigated, which is essentially composed of a strongly coupled microstrip lines terminated with a planar fin and through-hole combined with the tapping feed approach. The principle and performance of this filter is studied approximately by an equivalent circuit model and also by the normalized 3D-FDTD method more exactly. The time domain iteration in the FDTD analysis is performed in an expanded time dimension resulting in a reduced CPU time. Some of the obtained numerical results are compared well with the measured ones. A modified VIP combline BPF has the advantages of simple structure, easy tuning, low cost, versatile bandwidth control and good skirt characteristics brought about by two attenuation poles.

The characteristics of circular polarization from a slot with a parasitic dipole are investigated analytically. It is derived that its phase is linearly dependent upon the angle of the dipole and is independent of that of slot. This interesting behavior is also confirmed by experiments.

FIR digital filters composed of parallel multiple subfilters are proposed. A binary expression of an input signal is decomposed into multiple shorter words, which drive the subfilters having different length. The output error is evaluated by mean squared and maximum spectra. A fast algorithm is also proposed to determine optimal filter lengths and coefficients of subfilters. Many examples confirm that the proposed filters generate smaller output errors than conventional filters under the condition of specified number of multiplications and additions in filter operations. Further, multiplier and adder structures (MAS) to perform the operations of the proposed filters are also presented. The number of gates used in the proposed MAS and its critical path are estimated. The effectiveness of the proposed MAS is confirmed.

A simulation model for natural convection was developed for determining the surface temperature distribution in base plates with rectangular vertical fins in communication equipment. An estimated velocity derived from the buoyancy and pressure drop equations in a duct was used for laminar forced convection cooling simulations in parallel plates. Temperature distributions in finned plates were calculated by numerical integration of the heat conduction equation. An experimental study was also performed, to check these simulation results, by changing the height of fins, the pitch of fins, and the heat generation conditions. Experimental results and analytical results were found to agree well. Also, this simulation method was extended to analyze natural convection cooling in vertical base plates with inclined parallel fins. We placed alternately on the plates the sections without fins and the sections with fins on the plates. Using the inclined fins, air flow rate between fins was large and fresh air flew into the fins from the side of the plates. The natural convective heat-transfer rate for inclined fins was found to be 14% higher than that for vertical fins.

As MOSFET sizes and wire widths become very small in recent years, influence of resistive component of interconnects on the estimation of propagation delay and power dissipation can no longer be neglected. In this paper we present formulas of output waveform at driving point and short-circuit power dissipation for static CMOS logic gates driving a CRC π load. By representing the short-circuit current and the current flowing in the resistance of a CRC π load by piece-wise linear functions, a closed-form formula is derived. On the gate delay the error of our formula is less than 8% from SPICE in our experiments. These formulas will contribute to faster estimation of circuit speed and power dissipation of VLSI chips on timing level simulators.

We present an experimental and theoretical study of multiple diffraction rings of a cw Ar+ laser beam from a nitrobenzene solution of BDN (bis-(4-dimethylaminodithiobenzil)-nickel) caused by the spatial self-phase modulation. We examine in detail the effect of the intensity and phase shift profiles of the beam in the nonlinear medium by comparing the measured ring patterns with the theoretical results based on the Fraunhofer diffraction. Although the thickness of the sample is only 180 µm in our experiment, it is found that the intensity and phase shift profiles are broadened owing to the self-defocusing effect. It is also found that the phase shift profile is further broadened by the thermal diffusion. These two effects become remarkable when the focused beam is used.

This paper describes the fiber unit blowing length of an optical fiber distribution system for business buildings which employs pipe cable, fiber units and the fiber unit blowing technique. The relationship between the applied force and the length of a fiber unit blown into a straight pipe is investigated theoretically and experimentally and the fiber unit blowing length is estimated. Moreover, the pipe bending radius which has a small bending resistance force is clarified. Cables, fiber units and unit blowing equipment are manufactured based on the results and their transmission and mechanical characteristics are confirmed to be stable.

This study presents a novel window-based token protocol which supports two priority levels of ATM-like bursty traffic. The proposed protocol ensures that packets arriving during a given window period are always transmitted prior to those arriving during subsequent window periods. During which periods, high priority (delay-sensitive) packets are served by a nonpreemptive priority service discipline. Under this window-based token protocol, the delay bounds for packets of both priority levels are derived when the traffic streams satisfy the traffic descriptors. Hence, a call admission control policy based on delay bounds can be employed to guarantee QoS parameters such as the packet delay and packet loss-free requirement for each traffic stream. The protocol proposed herein can achieve tighter delay bounds than the IEEE 802. 5 token protocol and the timed token protocol used in FDDI, particularly for high priority bursty traffic, thereby making it highly attractive for supporting not only real-time multimedia VBR or CBR services such as in ATM networks but also ATM encapsulation such as in Cells In Frames (CIF) protocol.

Solder joint reliability was studied for hybrid ICs, in which chip components such as FETs, resistors and capacitors were mounted with Sn-Sb solder on an insulated Al substrate and transfer-molded with epoxy resin. Suitable resin selection for molding was also studied. The structure was estimated to have a lifetime of more than ten thousand cycles in the thermal cycling test under the condition of -55/150, for FETs and passive elements. Equivalent plastic strains generated in the soldering layer for the non-molded structure were 4. 6% for the FETs and 3.5% for the passive elements. But, these strains were approximately 1/3 to 1/2 and 1/10 for the molded structure, respectively. This was the main reason for high reliability of the molded structure. Resins with a wide range of thermal expansion coefficient(8-26 ppm/)could be put to practical use, because of the higher reliability of the molded structure. However, a thermal expansion coefficient of about 15 ppm/ was prefered to decrease stress at the interface between the substrate and the molding resin.

This letter newly proposes the polarity-reversing type photonic receiving scheme based on bipolar correlation for optical CDMA signal in radio highway. The proposed scheme can more improve the limitation of the number of radio base stations connected to radio highway and more reduce the peak laser power at the radio base station than the conventional unipolar type receiving scheme using prime codes.

A more judicious choice of trial functions to implement the Improved Circuit Theory (ICT) application to multi-element antennas is achieved. These new trial functions, based on Tai's modified variational implementation for single element antennas, leads to an ICT implementation applicable to much longer co-planar dipole arrays. The accuracy of the generalized impedance formulas is in good agreement with the method of moments. Moreover, all these generalized formulas including the radiation pattern expressions are all in closed-form. This leads to an ICT implementation which still requires much shorter CPU time and lesser computer storage compared to method of moments. Thus, for co-planar dipole arrays, the proposed implementation presents a relatively very efficient method and would therefore be found useful in applications such as CAD/CAE systems.

The structure of bidirectional syndrome decoding for binary rate (n-1)/n convolutional codes is investigated. It is shown that for backward decoding based on the trellis of a syndrome former HT, the syndrome sequence must be generated in time-reversed order using an extra syndrome former H*T, where H* is a generator matrix of the reciprocal dual code of the original code. It is also shown that if the syndrome bits are generated once and only once using HT and H*T, then the corresponding two error sequences have the intersection of n error symbols, where is the memory length of HT.