We present a method for estimating activities of multiple, interacting objects detected by a video surveillance system. The activities are described in a stochastic context because our method is concerned with humans and uses noisy features detected from video. To monitor activities in this context, we introduce the concept of an attribute set for each blob, consisting of object type, action, and interaction. Using probabilistic relations introduced by a specific Markov model of these attribute sets, the activity descriptions are estimated from surveillance video.

DANSE (Dynamically Adaptive Networking Service Environment) is a new architecture for adaptive network service systems. In this paper, a framework for context-aware service construction based on DANSE architecture is presented. In DANSE, any hardware, software, information, and services that are available on a network are treated as network resources. DANSE coordinates the construction of an end user's service based on the user's requests and situation or context (i.e., user's location, schedule, co-workers, etc.). To provide users with satisfactory services, it monitors user context continuously and searches for network resources that are convenient for a target user. Moreover, it detects changes in user context and invokes service construction if needed. If the desired service is not available, alternative services are automatically constructed. With those capabilities, DANSE enables ubiquitous provision of services any time, anywhere.

This report describes a new methodology for the optimal placement of decoupling capacitors on the printed circuit board (PCB). This method searches the optimal position of decoupling capacitor so that the impedance characteristics at the power supply is minimized in the specified frequency range. In this method, the PCB is modeled by the PEEC method to handle the 3-dimensional structures and Krylov-subspace technique is applied to obtain efficiently the impedance characteristics in the frequency domain.

Today software piracy is a major concern to electronic commerce since a digitized product such as software is vulnerable to redistribution and unauthorized use. This paper presents an enhanced electronic software distribution and software protection model. Authentication scheme of the proposed model is based on zero-knowledge (ZK) proof which requires limited computation. The proposed model considers post installation security using authentication agent. It prevents software piracy and illegal copy. It also provides secure and efficient software live-update mechanism based on traitor tracing scheme. Even if software or personal key is copied illegally, a merchant can trace back to its original owner from the electronic license and personal key. The proposed model provides security and reasonable performance and safety.

Nowadays, many IP based communication systems are connected by high-speed networks to realize high-speed TCP/IP communication. However, since the mechanism of TCP/IP protocols is based on a best effort service, the quality of the communication may change by the time or the route of the traffic. Therefore, it is important for network providers to investigate the quality of their users' communication. In order to analyze the traffic on an Internet backbone, the realtime analysis is one of the important factors. So far, several tools were developed for the purpose of the traffic measurement. However, none of them can analyze sufficient statistics to evaluate the quality for each end user's communication in realtime. Therefore, we have designed and implemented a performance monitor, which collects the statistics representing the performance such as TCP throughput while capturing the traffic. The statistics are collected by every pair of IP addresses and by every application. The monitor also provides the function to analyze effectively for the statistics records such as sorting and filtering of the records and the graphical user interface to operate the software tool. This paper describes the design and implementation of the performance monitor.

This paper describes a switched-capacitor type DC-DC up converter with high efficiency and low-ripple voltage. Identical charge pumps operating sequentially in the proposed DC-DC converter reduce the magnitude of the ripple voltage to 20% of the conventional converters. A new charge pump adopting PMOS switches near the output stage improves the power efficiency of the DC-DC converter by 10%. The proposed DC-DC converter is applied, as a test vehicle, to a phase-locked loop circuit which is sensitive to power supply noise. All circuits are fabricated and measured in a 0.65-µm CMOS process.

Stand-alone photovoltaic (PV) power systems are potential power sources for telecommunications equipment especially equipment installed outdoors. To be practical, they must have a high conversion efficiency and a long lifetime. We have proposed a stand-alone photovoltaic power system that uses electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs) and lead acid batteries as power storage devices. This system smooths out the fluctuations in power generated by the PV array by using the EDLC's charge-and-discharge power; this reduces the number of battery charge-and-discharge cycles. We simulated the system's operating characteristics and evaluated the photovoltaic array mismatching loss, system conversion loss, battery contribution factor, averaged battery state-of-charging, and maximum depth-of-discharging. The results show that the system is effective at reducing the mismatching loss and battery contribution factor, so the system efficiency is expected to be improved by using high conversion efficiency DC-DC converters. Moreover the system can maintain the averaged battery state-of-charging during operation. This indicates that smaller batteries can be used. The maximum depth-of-discharging can be kept lower than in the conventional system. Consequently, the proposed system should have a longer battery lifetime.

Various shadows are one of main factors that cause errors in vision based vehicle detection. In this paper, two simple methods, land mark based method and BS & Edge method, are proposed for vehicle detection and shadow rejection. In the experiments, the accuracy of vehicle detection is higher than 98%, during which the shadows arisen from roadside buildings grew considerably. Based on these two methods, vehicle counting, tracking, classification, and speed estimation are achieved so that real-time traffic parameters concerning traffic flow can be extracted to describe the load of each lane.

Using the chirped grating with temperature control, we demonstrated the adaptive dispersion compensation at 40 Gbit/s RZ transmission. The simple monitoring of the 40 GHz frequency component enables us to automatic control of the adaptive dispersion compensator.

Using the chirped grating with temperature control, we demonstrated the adaptive dispersion compensation at 40 Gbit/s RZ transmission. The simple monitoring of the 40 GHz frequency component enables us to automatic control of the adaptive dispersion compensator.

We demonstrate, through numerical simulations, the possibility of trans-oceanic single channel transmission at 160 Gbit/s with no active control. This was achieved using short period dispersion management, which supports short pulse propagation at practical map strengths. We demonstrate that through careful selection and optimisation of the system parameters the performance of this system can be extended. We also define the tolerable limits of the system to the residual dispersion slope and polarisation mode dispersion.

We demonstrate, through numerical simulations, the possibility of trans-oceanic single channel transmission at 160 Gbit/s with no active control. This was achieved using short period dispersion management, which supports short pulse propagation at practical map strengths. We demonstrate that through careful selection and optimisation of the system parameters the performance of this system can be extended. We also define the tolerable limits of the system to the residual dispersion slope and polarisation mode dispersion.

The common packet channel (CPCH) adopted by 3GPP is used to carry small and medium sized packets, such as SMS (short message service) and web data. We analyze the system performance of the non-real time channel monitoring scheme when the periodic broadcast method is deployed. If user equipment (UE) can continuously monitor the CPCH status, the performance of the channel monitoring scheme is satisfactory. However, in practice, a CPCH status broadcast period exists and, therefore, an UE can request a CPCH channel based on incorrect CPCH status information. This incorrect CPCH status information results in performance degradation in the channel monitoring scheme. We analyze this performance degradation and show the relationship between system performance and the status broadcast period.

We propose middleware which works on widely-used commercial off-the-shelf platforms (UDP/IP, FastEthernet, and Windows NT or commercial real-time kernels) to realize real-time distributed services for plant monitoring and control systems. It is not suitable to use TCP/IP for the systems because of its unpredictable re-transmission, while, as well known, UDP/IP does not guarantee certain arrivals of packets and it is also not acceptable for the systems. With UDP/IP, packets are lost mainly because of collisions in a network and buffer overflows. To avoid these packet losses, the middleware controls scheduling of all the packets transmitted between the nodes in a distributed system and prevents excessive collisions and buffer overflows. The middleware provides a necessary set of functions for plant monitoring and control applications. The middleware on each node in a distributed system consists of library functions and run-time modules. An application program on the node is required to use these library functions according to the rules the middleware provides. In this way the middleware can manage all the traffic among the nodes in the system. Receiving requests from the application via library functions, the run-time module of the middleware schedules transmission of messages to other nodes, avoiding unexpected delivery delays or buffer overflows. The module also guarantees application-to-application quality of service (QoS), such as transmission period and delivery deadline, required by the applications. This is achieved by assigning the resources not shared by other services to each distributed service and scheduling these resources so as not to violate the assignment. Here, resources include maximum numbers of packets which a node can receive or send in a specific period (20 msec, for example). We show implementation of the middleware to make it clear how to guarantee application-to-application QoS with some application examples.

It is always difficult to monitor stringent cell loss ratio (CLR), e.g. 10-9, in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks, because its measurement period is too long for real-time measurement. In this paper, we propose new performance monitoring mechanisms for stringent CLR. We consider virtual ATM switches whose resources are much smaller than the real system and thus much higher CLRs will be obtained within a relatively short measurement period. By applying some regression methods in the CLRs obtained from the virtual system, we can estimate the actual CLR of the real system quite accurately and our performance monitoring mechanisms will be operated based on the estimation. Through the numerical examples, our mechanisms are not only more accurate than the traditional methods, but also have shorter measurement periods compared with direct measurement.

A broadcast distribution system (BDS) is a system for the distribution of digital contents over broadcast channel where the data supplier broadcasts the contents in encrypted form and gives each subscriber a decoder containing a secret decryption key. A traitor is a subscriber who offers the information which allows to decrypt the broadcast. When a pirate decoder is captured, if at least one traitor can be identified from it, a BDS is said to be traitor-tracing. If the data supplier can prevent subscribers from obtaining the contents without recalling their decoders, a BDS is said to be subscriber-excluding. In this paper, we propose an efficient BDS which is both subscriber-excluding and traitor-tracing. We use similar mathematics to a threshold cryptosystem. In the proposed BDS, the maximum number of excluded subscribers reaches the maximum number of traitors in a coalition for which at least one traitor can be identified. We prove that the proposed BDS is secure against ciphertext-only attack if and only if ElGamal cryptosystem is secure against the attack and the discrete logarithm problem is hard. The proposed BDS is the first one which satisfies all the following features: Both subscriber-excluding and traitor-tracing, identifying all the traitors, black box tracing and public key system.

The delta-sigma modulator (DSM) is an excellent choice for high-resolution analog-to-digital converters. Recently, a band-pass DSM has been a desirable choice for direct conversion of an IF signal into a digital bit stream. This paper proposes a quadrature band-pass DSM for digitizing a narrow-band IF signal. This modulator can achieve a lower total order, higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and higher bandwidth when compared with conventional band-pass modulators. An experimental prototype employing the quadrature topology has been integrated in 0.6 µm, double-poly, double-metal CMOS technology with capacitors synthesized from a stacked poly structure. This system clocked at 13 MHz and digitized a 200 kHz bandwidth signal centered at 4.875 MHz with 100 dB of dynamic range. Power consumption is 190 mW at 5 V.

We investigated the dependence of the desired echo return loss on frequency for various hands-free telecommunication conditions by subjective assessment. The desired echo return loss as a function of frequency (DERLf) is an important factor in the design and performance evaluation of a subband echo canceller, and it is a measure of what is considered an acceptable echo caused by electrical loss in the transmission line. The DERLf during single-talk was obtained as attenuated band-limited echo levels that subjects did not find objectionable when listening to the near-end speech and its band-limited echo under various hands-free telecommunication conditions. When we investigated the DERLf during double-talk, subjects also heard the speech in the far-end room from a loudspeaker. The echo was limited to a 250-Hz bandwidth assuming the use of a subband echo canceller. The test results showed that: (1) when the transmission delay was short (30 ms), the echo component around 2 to 3 kHz was the most objectionable to listeners; (2) as the transmission delay rose to 300 ms, the echo component around 1 kHz became the most objectionable; (3) when the room reverberation time was relatively long (about 500 ms), the echo component around 1 kHz was the most objectionable, even if the transmission delay was short; and (4) the DERLf during double-talk was about 5 to 10 dB lower than that during single-talk. Use of these DERLf values will enable the design of more efficient subband echo cancellers.

A novel SC (Switched-Capacitor) offset- and gain-compensated sample/hold circuit is presented. It is implemented by a new topology which reduces the effects due to the imperfections of op-amp. Simulation results indicate that the circuit achieves high accuracy without requiring high-quality components.

This paper describes an all-optical label swapping for the photonic label switching router (LSR). The optical code routing photonic LSR in which label is mapped onto an optical code is one of the most promising photonic network technologies. It utilizes such unique features of optical code division multiplexing (OCDM) as asynchronous transmission, tell-and-go access protocol, and high degree of scalability. In practical photonic LSRs, all optical code conversion will play an important role. All-optical code conversion of 10 Gbit/s binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) codes by use of cross-phase modulation (XPM) in an optical fiber without wavelength-shift is proposed for the photonic LSR and experimentally demonstrated.