This paper propeses a new motion compensation (MC) technique which reduces blurring called drift in moving pictures down-scaled with layered coding system. Encoder of the system compresses large amounts of digital video data in the same way of MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) algorithm. Decoder, on the other hand, expands a part of the compressed data and reconstructs down scaled pictures. The purpose of this paper is to reduce blurring which is observed in the reconstructed pictures. In this paper, cause of the blurring is analyzed and the method is introduced as a solution to the problem. The new method is implemented by a little modification of motion compensation (MC) of the decoder, namely increasing the number of tap of interpolation fillters of the MC. Compressing moving pictures, its effectiveness is also confirmed by means of not only subjective test but also signal to noise ratio.

Wide-band, low-ripple underwater transducers with high-power acoustic radiation capability have been designed on the basis of multiple-mode filter synthesis theory. They are composed of triple acoustic matching plates and double backing plates with optimized specific acoustic impedances,besides piezoelectric ceramic elements. One of the backing plates employs a Fe damping-alloy to suppress unwanted response peaks in the frequency range above the passband region. Two 33 array transducers were fabricated, each with a center frequency of 200 kHz, one as a transmitter and the other as a receiver. The two transducers show high-sensitivity, low-ripple and wide-band transmitting and receiving responses. Then, the transducers were applied in a color video picture digital transmission system.Clear color video pictures, composed of 256240 pixels, were successfully received within one second.

Electromagnetic power absorption in multilayered tissue media including anisotropic muscle regions whose principal dielectric axes (that is, muscle fibers) have various directions are analyzed by using 44 matrix method. Numerical calculations in 10kHz-10MHz show the effects of orientation of muscle fibers and polarization of incident wave on absorbed power density in tissues.

New focused ion beam (FIB) methods for microscopic cross-sectioning and observation, microscopic crosssectioning and elemental analysis, and aluminum film microstructure observation are presented. The new methods are compared to the conventional methods and the conventional FIB methods, from the four viewpoints such as easiness of analysis, analysis time, spatial resolution, and pinpointing precision. The new FIB methods, as a result, are shown to be the best ones totally judging from the viewpoints shown above.

We analyze frame rates in low bit rate video coding and show that an optimal frame rate can be theoretically obtained. In low bit rate video coding the frame rate is usually forced to be decreased for reducing the total amount of coded information. The choice of frame rate, however, has a great effect on the picture quality in a trade-off relation between coded picture quality and motion smoothness. It is known from experience that in order to achieve an optimum balance between these two factors, a frame rate has to be selected which is appropriate for the coding scheme, property of the video sequences and coding bit rate. A theoretical analysis, however, on the existence of an optimal frame rate and how the optimal frame rate would be expressed has not been performed. In this paper, coding distortion measured by mean square error is analyzed by using video signal models such as a rate-distortion function for coded frames and inter-frame correlation coefficients for non-coded frames. Overall picture quality taking account of coded picture quality and motion smoothness simultaneously is expressed as a function of frame rate. This analysis shows that the optimum frame rate can be uniquely specified. The maximum frame rate is optimal when the coding bit rate is higher than a certain value for a given video scene, while a frame rate less than the maximum is optimal otherwise. The result of the theoretical analysis is compared with the results of computer simulation. In addition, the relation between this analysis and a subjective evaluation is described. From both comparisons this theoretical analysis can be justified as an effective scheme to indicate the optimal frame rate, and it shows the possibility of improving picture quality by selecting frame rate adaptively.

A new method by which images are coded with predictable and controllable subjective picture quality in the minimum cost of bit rate is developed. By using wavelet transform, the original image is decomposed into a set of subimages with different frequency channels and resolutions. By utilizing human contrast sensitivity, each decomposed subimage is treated according to its contribution to the total visual quality and to the bit rate. A relationship between physical errors (mainly quantization errors) incurred in the orthonormal wavelet image coding system and the subjective picture quality quantified as the mean opinion score (MOS) is established. Instred of using the traditional optimum bit allocation scheme which minimizes a distortion cost function under the constraint of a given bit rate, we develop an "optimum visually weighted noise power allocation" (OVNA) scheme which emphasizes the satisfying of a desired subjective picture quality in the minumum cost of bit rate. The proposed method enables us to predict and control the picture quality before the reconstruction and to compress images with desired subjective picture quality in the minimum bit rate.

Power transmission properties are investigated for a butt-joint which contains an air gap between an isotropic planar waveguide and an anisotropic one whose optical axis is lying in the plane defined by the propagation axis and the normal of the waveguide surface. New transmission coefficients are introduced for estimating the optical-power which is launched out into the gap from the incoming waveguide. Wave propagation through the gap is analyzed on the basis of the BPM concept. And the power transmitted across the interface between the gap and the outgoing waveguide is evaluated by means of the overlap integral of the field profiles. The effects of the air gap and the refractive index of filling liquid as well as axial displacement and angular misalignment are discussed on the basis of numerical results.

Mathematical morphology clarified geometrical properties of shape analysis algorithms for binary pictures. Results of labelling, distance transform, and adjacent numbering are, however, coded pictures. For full descriptions of shape analysis algorithms in the framework of mathematical morphology, it is necessary to extend morphological operations to code-labelled pictorial data. Nevertheless, extensions of morphology to code-labelled pictures have never discussed though the theory of gray morphology is well studied by several authors. Hence, this paper proposes a theory of the coded morphology which is based on the binary scaling of labels of pixels. The method uses n-layered binary sub-pictures for the processing of a picture with 2n labels. By introducing morphological operations for the coded point sets, we express some coding functions in the manner of the mathematical morphology. We also derive multidimensional array registers and gates which store and process coded pictures and morphological operations to them by proposing basic gates which compute parallelly logical operations for elements of Boolean layered arrays. These gates and registers are suitable for the implementation of the shape analysis processors on the three-dimensional VLSI and ULSI.

This paper describes a general interface system for speech input and output and a dialog management system, MASCOTS, which is a component of the interface system. The authors designed this interface system, paying attention to its generality; that is, it is not dependent on the problem-solving system it is connected to. The previous version of MASCOTS dealt with the dialog processing only for the speech input based on the SR-plans. We extend MASCOTS to cover the speech output to the user. The revised version of MASCOTS, named MASCOTS II, makes use of topic information given by the topic packet network (TPN) which models the topic transitions in dialogs. Input and output messages are described with the concept representation based on the case structure. For the speech input, prediction of user's utterance is focused and enhanced by using the TPN. The TPN compensates for the shortages of the SR-plan and improves the accuracy of prediction as to stimulus utterances of the user. As the dialog processing in the speech output, MASCOTS II extracts emphatic words and restores missing words to the output message if necessary, e.g., in order to notify the results of speech recognition. The basic mechanisms of the SR-plan and the TPN are shared between the speech input and output processes in MASCOTS II.

A system is constructed for the processing of question-answer dialogue as a subsystem of the speech response device. In order to increase the adaptability to dialogue topics, rules for dialogue processing are classified into three groups; universal rules, topic-dependent rules and task-dependent rules, and example-based description is adopted for the second group. The system is disigned to operate only with information on the content words of the user input. As for speech synthesis, a function is included in the system to control the focal position. Introduction and guidance of ski areas are adopted as the dialogue domain, and a prototype system is realized on a computer. The dialogue example performed with the prototype indicates the propriety of our method for dialogue processing.

Up to present, some automatically tunable active RC filters have been proposed for the monolithic integrated continuous-time filters. In this paper a synthesis method of monolithic active RC filters is presented, whose characteristic is hardly dependent on temperature, supply voltage and so on, theoretically. First, this paper describes a variable integrator controlled by bias current. Second, a resistor controlled current source circuit (RCCS) is also proposed, which contains the voltage controlled current source (VCCS) being identical with that used in the realization of the integrator and whose current is controlled by an external resistor. The use of this VCCS in the RCCS can completely compensate the variation of the integrator characteristics. Finally, these circuits are applied to realize a third-order elliptic low-pass filter, which is simulated on PSPICE. From the simulations, we obtain excellent results as follows: The deviation of gains in the passband due to the variation of temperature with a range of -10 to 60 is within 0.02 dB; A total harmonic distortion with a 1 Vp-p input voltage at 100 kHz is less than 0.4% when the cut-off frequency is 1 MHz and the supply voltage is 5 V.

A novel coding scheme using orthonormal wavelet transform is proposed. Various forms of transform coding and subband coding are first reviewed. Then a wavelet coding method is proposed adopting a new approach similar to the one used for transform coding. The approach differs to conventional ones which considers wavelet coding as a class of subband coding. Simulation work is carried out to evaluate the proposed coding method. Significant improvement is obtained in subjective quality, and some improvement is also obtained in signal to noise ratio. Wavelet coding is still in its early stage of development, but can be considered to be a promising technique for image coding.

Topographic maps begin to be recognized as one of the major computational structures underlying neural computation in the brain. They provide dimension-reducing projections between feature spaces that seem to be established and maintained under the participation of selforganizing, adaptive processes. In this contribution, we investigate how well the structure of such maps can be replicated by simple adaptive processes of the kind proposed by Kohonen. We will particularly address the important issue, how the dimensionality of the input space affects the spatial organization of the resulting map.