With a view to applying to the active matrix displays, micromechanical electrostatic switches having Si-N both-ends-fixed beam of size 1.4 µm by 23 µm grown with LP-CVD on Si wafer were studied about its kinetic switching characteristics, especially its switching speed and hysteresis behavior. Electrostatic beam sticking problems were improved with the additional inverse polarity and short duration pulse following on the turn-on signal. The switching beam deflection of 0.16 µm with the switching time of less than 100 nsec. was measured by tightly focused laser interferometric method. Observed turn-on threshold voltages were more than 30 V, and the on/off hysteresis widths were from one third to two thirds of its threshold voltage. The memory function was experimented for the 2 msec. long holding period with the hold voltage of 25 V following on the writing pulse with the duration of 2 µsec. and the amplitude of 32 V. Now, planarization process has been considered to imtroduce the contact electrodes that were not built-in for these experiments. Although conductive actual switches were not tested, with the obtained results, it seems that the micromechanical electrostatic switch has the large potentials as an active matrix element in display panel especially in electro-luminescent devices or field-emission devices.

In the correspondence discrete Wigner higher order spectra (WHOS) of harmonizable random signals are addressed and their relations with polyspectra (HOS) are illustrated. It is shown, that discrete WHOS of a random stationary signal do not reduce to the aliased polyspectra in a similar way as Wigner distribution (WD) reduces to the power spectrum of a random signal. Wigner 2nd-order time-frequency distribution of deterministic signals and the 3rd-order spectrum of stationary signals are presented in their modified forms to be used to estimate time-varying third-order spectrum of discrete nonstationary random harmonizable processes.

This is an attempt to examine the contact resistance of a composite material which is used for sliding contacts. The composite material used here is sintered by dispersing the solid lubricant WS2 into the metallic base alloy Cu-Sn. A method based on Greenwood's formula is applied to determine how the calculated values are related to the contact resistance values obtained in our experiments. As a result, the composite material mated with the carbon specimen is found nearly to corresponds to the values of those calculated by the extended Greenwood's formula, whereas its value mated with the tungsten specimen does not. In short, it is concluded that the composite material mated with the carbon specimen consists of multispots.

Memory type polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) can be applied to a thermal addressing display device cell. Making use of its easy fabrication of large area display using flexible film substrate, the PDLC film can be used as reusable paper for direct-view mode display. In this study, memory type PDLC cells are prepared with an aluminum reflector deposited onto one side of the substrate and the reflection property in the PDLC cell with the reflector is clarified and compared to that without the reflector in the off-, on- and memory-states. The increase of contrast ratio and the decrease of driving voltage can be concurrently realized by decreasing the cell thickness by attaching the reflector. In addition, the reflected light in the off-state is bright and colorless due to the reflector, as compared with the weak, bluish reflected light in the cell without the reflector. Reflected light in the on-state and the memory-state are tinged with blue.

Most current management systems employ graphic-user-interface displays to visualize the networks being managed. Some networks are so large that it is difficult to display all network elements in a single window alone, and therefore, the hierarchical multi-window style presentation is commonly used. This form of presentation has disadvantages, however, including the fact that window manipulations are complex. Our approach (bifocal network visualization) is able to display both the context and any detail of a network within a single window, and overcomes the disadvantages of hierarchical multi-window presentation. We implemented this bifocal network visualization on a workstation using a frame buffer memory called DUALQUEST that is able to generate images in real-time and is simple to operate. This paper describes bifocal network visualization and its implementation. Furthermore, we present an experiment to compare our interface with conventional hierarchical multi-window presentation.

This paper proposes that a combination of pre-chirping and dispersion compensation is effective in suppressing the waveform distortion due to the self-phase modulation and the group-velocity dispersion in 10 Gb/s repeaterless transmission using 1.3-µm zero-dispersion single-mode fibers (SMF) operating at a wavelength of 1.55µm. The following results were obtained through simulation. 1) Setting the α-parameter of a LiNbO3 optical modulator negative (α1.0) gives a large tolerance of the launched power Pin. 2) For 90-km SMF transmission, the maximum Pin is obtained when the dispersion compensation ratio β is from 50% to 70%. 3) For the allowable β as a function of the transmission distance when a dispersion compensator is located in the receiver (post-compensation scheme), the lower limit of β is determined by the constant residual dispersion value, which agrees well with the dispersion tolerance without dispersion compensation. Our 90-km SMF transmission experiments using a LiNbO3 optical modulator and a dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) confirmed the simulation results regarding the optimum value of β and the large tolerance of the fiber launched power. Based on the above investigations, we achieved a 10-Gb/s repeaterless 140-km SMF transmission with α1.0 and post-compensation.

This letter proposes the method using a filter to suppress the very large noise obstructive to the radio pulsar surveys. This noise suppression filter is constructed from the average of the amplitude spectrum of pulsar signal for each channel. Using this method, the dispersion measure, one of the important parameters in the pulsar surveys, can easily be extracted.

In this paper, we propose the architecture of BALANCE (Better Adaptive Load-balancing through Acquiring kNowledge of Characteristic of an Environment) in which users can submit their jobs without acquiring either a status of an environment or characteristics of jobs and servers even in a widely connected heterogeneous network. The architecture of BALANCE includes three types of information bases and two types of daemons. Information bases, namely job, resource, and environment information base, manage the knowledge of job characteristics, available resources for CPUs, and status of the environment, respectively, as a proxy for users. The dispatching daemon selects an adequate server for each job using knowledge stored in the information bases. A service daemon executes each job. On completing each job, a service daemon gets a statistic of the job and returns it to the dispatching daemon where the job came from so that the statistic will be available at the next dispatching time. BALANCE enables an environment (1) to balance the load, (2) to share software functions as well as hardware facilities, and (3) to learn a user's job characteristics. We have implemented a prototype with more than 50 heterogeneous UNIX workstations connected by different networks. Two simple experiments on this prototype are presented. These experiments show a load balancing scheme that takes the characteristics of each job into account.

A three-dimensional analysis of Whispering-Gallery modes (W. G. modes) in a coaxial dielectric resonator is proposed and presented. The coaxial dielectric resonator is constructed from a lossy dielectric disk and ring which have diameters of several tens times as large as wavelength. Eigenvalue equations of the W. G. modes are derived rigorously from field expressions and boundary conditions. The resonant frequencies, unloaded Q values and field distributions are calculated numerically from the eigenvalue equations. These calculated results are in good agreement with experimental ones for an X band model. As a result, it is shown that a considerable quantity of modal energy can be confined in a loss-less gap between the disk and ring, and then the unloaded Q value is higher than that of a conventional dielectric disk and ring resonator.

Three-dimensional display technologies that require special glasses are not suitable for telecommunications because wearing glasses is inconvenient and it is defficult to observe facial expressions. Our previous 6.3-inch 3D display was inadequate for presenting images with realistic sensation. In this paper, a direct view 15-inch 3D display is described. The display is made up of a l5-inch TFT LCD and a composite lenticular sheet (LS), and uses the head tracking technique. Quantitative evaluation of the stereoscopic sensation of the display was studied using the 3D display, and better stereoscopic sensation values were obtained compared with a 2D display mode, thus comfirming the display's usefulness.

In this paper, we first discuss on a framework for a 3D image display system which is the combination of passive sensing and active display technologies. The passive sensing enables to capture real scenes under natural condition. The active display enables to present arbitrary views with proper motion parallax following the observer's motion. The requirements of passive sensing technology for 3D image displays are discussed in comparison with those for robot vision. Then, a new stereo algorithm, called SEA (Stereo by Eye Array), which satisfies the requirements is described in detail. The SEA uses nine images captured by a 33 camera array. It has the following features for depth estimation: 1) Pixel-based correspondence search enables to obtain a dense and high-spatial-resolution depth map. 2) Correspondence ambiguity for linear edges with the orientation parallel to a particular baseline is eliminated by using multiple baselines with different orientations. 3) Occlusion can be easily detected and an occlusion-free depth map with sharp object boundaries is generated. The feasibility of the SEA is demonstrated by experiments by using real image data.

This paper is concerned with the data compression and interpolation of multi-view image set. In this paper, we propose a novel disparity compensation scheme based on geometric relationship. We first investigate the geometric relationship between a point in the object space and its projection onto view images. Then, we propose the disparity compensation scheme which utilize the geometric constraints between view images. This scheme is used to compress the multi-view image into the structure of the triangular patches and the texture data on the surface of patches. This scheme not only compresses the multi-view image but also synthesize the view images from any viewpoints in the viewing zone. Also, this scheme is fast and have compatibility with 2-D interframe coding. Finally, we report the experiment, where two sets multi-view image were used as original images and the amount of data was reduced to 1/19 and 1/20 with SNR 34 dB and 20 dB, respectively.

Contextual classification of multispectral image data in remote sensing is discussed and concretely two improved contextual classifiers are proposed. The first is the extended adaptive classifier which partitions an image successively into homogeneously distributed square regions and applies a collective classification decision to each region. The second is the accelerated probabilistic relaxation which updates a classification result fast by adopting a pixelwise stopping rule. The evaluation experiment with a pseudo LANDSAT multispectral image shows that the proposed methods give higher classification accuracies than the compound decision method known as a standard contextual classifier.

An improvement of Q evaluation is discussed. The Resonance Curve Area method was confirmed to give a deviation in the order of 6104. The result was three times more accurate than the widely known Q evaluating method which utilizes the cursor function installed in a network analyzer. A discussion is also made on the physical validity of the RCA method. It is shown that the application of the RCA method improves the accuracy of the cavity perturbation method. Actual measurements have shown that the deviation of dielectric constant is less than 1% and that of the loss tangent is less than 3%, in the order of 104. The accuracy of the RCA method was estimated to be three times that of the conventional cavity perturbation technique. The consistency of the perturbation with other methods has also confirmed. The accuracy comparison to more accurate formulae derived from a rigorous solution have shown that the difference is sufficiently small.

This paper discusses a new image resolution conversion method which converts not only spatial resolution but also amplitude resolution. This method involves considering impulse responses of image devices and human visual characteristics, and can preserve high image quality. This paper considers a system that digitizes the multilevel input image with high spatial resolution and low amplitude resolution using an image scanner, and outputs the image with low spatial resolution and high amplitude resolution on a CRT display. The algorithm thus reduces the number of pixels while increasing the number of brightness levels. Since a CRT display is chosen as the output device, the distribution of each spot in the display, which is modeled as a Gaussian function, is taken as the impulse response. The output image is then expressed as the summation of various amplitudes of the impulse response. Furthermore, human visual perception, which bears a nonlinear relationship to the spatial frequency component, is simplified and modeled with a cascade combination of low-pass and high-pass filters. The output amplitude is determined so that the error between the output image and the input image, after passing through the visual perception filter, is minimized. According to the results of a simulation, it is shown that image quality can be largely preserved by the proposed method, while significant image information is lost by conventional methods.

This paper uses both network analysis and experiments to confirm that the neural network learning algorithm that minimizes output variation (BPV) provides much more robustness than back-propagation (BP) or BP with noise-modified training samples (BPN). Network analysis clarifies the relationship between sample displacement and what and how the network learns. Sample displacement generates variation in the output of the output units in the output layer. The output variation model introduces two types of deformation error, both of which modify the mean square error. We propose a new error which combines the two types of deformation error. The network analysis using this new error considers that BPV learns two types of training samples where the modification is either towards or away from the category mean, which is defined as the center of sample distribution. The magnitude of modification depends on the position of the training sample in the sample distribution and the degree of leaning completion. The conclusions is that BPV learns samples modified towards to the category mean more stronger than those modified away from the category mean, namely it achieves nonuniform learning. Another conclusion is that BPN learns from uniformly modified samples. The conjecture that BPV is much more robust than the other two algorithms is made. Experiments that evaluate robustness are performed from two kinds of viewpoints: overall robustness and specific robustness. Benchmark studies using distorted handprinted Kanji character patterns examine overall robustness and two specifically modified samples (noise-modified samples and directionally-modified samples) examine specific robustness. Both sets of studies confirm the superiority of BPV and the accuracy of the conjecture.

It was more than 10 years ago that the first map navigation system, as an example of invehicle information system, has appeared in the market in Japan. Today's navigation system has been improved to the level that the latest system has 10 micro-processors, 7 MBytes of memories, and 4 GBytes of external data storage for map database. From the viewpoint of the automobile driver, there are still some problems with the system. Major problems in general are a lack of traffic information, better human interface, and a need for cost-reduction. The introduction of application specific ICs (ASICs) is expected to make systems smaller, costless, and give higher speed response. Today's in-vehicle information systems are reviewed function by function to discover what functions need to be implemented into ASICs for future systems, what ASICs will be required, and what technology has to be developed. It is concluded that more integration technology is expected including high parformance CPUs, large capacity memories, interface circuits, and some analog circuits such as DA converter. To develop this technology, some, major problems such as power consumption, number of input/output signals, as well as design aid and process technology are pointed out.

A method to measure the displacement from the phase rotation of the Doppler signal including the displacement information of the moving body is proposed, where the displacement resolution can be improved 4 times by making the phase rotation faster. Furthermore, this test system is applied in clinical use. The test system is built up by using a two-phase microwave Doppler sensor covering a 10GHz band, where the Doppler frequency is multiplied 4 times by signal processing. Thus, the resolution is improved from a conventional 12.6mm (in case of 11.9GHz) to 3.15mm, and practical utilization has been attained. The microwave Doppler radar system described in this paper is adequate for the displacement measurement for a relatively fast moving body. As a medical sensor for clinical use, measurement examples of head movement in a vestibule examination (vestibule oculomotor reflexive inspection) and finger movement in a cerebellum function test are given. Furthermore by using two sets of this Doppler radar system, a 2-dimensional measurement of head movement is possible.

The physical system is considered more suitable for measurement purposes the greater is its linearity. However, in nature and engineering there are no purely linear physical transducing systems for convertion a primary onformation. The use of the linear features of the system in the measurement process finally causes the drawbacks: systematic error due to nonlinear distortions, low ratio informative signal/ noise, the necessity to evaluate a great number of the a priori parameters of the transducer in order to receive an absolute result, low thermostability because every a priori parameter itself has a temperature dependence. To exclude these drawbacks a method has been developed using nonlinear physical systems in the base of the displacements measurement. In this work is presented the realization of the method using electretic and electrostatic transducer as a converting physical system. A contactless transducer is placed parallelly to the surface of the object which displacements are measured. The transducer is driven to harmonic oscillations. Typical time intervals between even and odd extremums of the transducer output signal are measured. The object displacements are determined according to the changes of the typical time intervals. The method itself has no errors because approximations were not made while deriving the relations. The source of the errors is inaccurate registration of the start and the end of the typical time intervals. In the work are analysed the errors related to the concrete realization devices: analogue differentiator, peak detector and analog digital transducer. It is shown that the measurement is possible only if the physical system is nonlinear. The method is generalized to that case if the function of transformation of ths system has the form f(x) and monotonous character. The results of experimental investigations confirm the theoretical conclusions.

This paper discusses how to achieve eye contact in teleconferences attended by two or three conferees through a "Private Display Method." This method, which allows several images to be simultaneously displayed on a single screen, makes it possible to achieve eye contact. Each conferee can see a unique image, which is captured by a camera, which effectively acts as a substitute for the conferee in a counterparts room. The unique image is selected by a duoble-lenticular lens from images from two or three projectors. The effectiveness of the private display method has been demonstrated by ray-tracing simulation and by using a 50 double-lenticular screen. A prototype teleconferencing system for two persons was constructed with the 50 double-lenticular screen, a semi transparent silver coated mirror, two projectors and two cameras. Eye-contact with all counterparts can be achieved with the prototype teleconference system. The private display method is a promising way of achieving eye contact in teleconferences attended by two or three conferees.