In this paper, we propose an enhanced signal to interference ratio (SIR) measurement algorithm and evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in a WCDMA forward link receiver with closed-loop fast transmit power control. The proposed algorithm reduces measured SIR offset by using a pilot channel (CPICH) to compensate for the attenuated signal power in fading channel environment. The proposed SIR measurement algorithm outperforms conventional SIR measurement algorithm with regard to mean SIR values and jitter, especially in high speed mobile channel environment. Also, performance results with closed loop power control show that the proposed algorithm has better performance than the conventional algorithm.

We have developed a stereoscopic large LED display with parallax barrier for use by the general public and stereoscopic cameras to show real world images in 3D. This paper aims to analyze stereoscopic camera separation and convergence angle to make the most use of a field of interest and the reproducible space provided by the large stereoscopic LED display. We describe the principle of a stereoscopic LED display with a parallax barrier and its reproducible space that is determined by the allowable range of disparity to fuse stereoscopic images. By using a model of stereoscopic imaging and display process, we introduce the formulas of the reproduced positions on our developed stereoscopic LED display. Furthermore, we analyze relationships between the stereoscopic camera separation, the convergence angle, the area of a field of interest, and the depth range of the reproduced space. The results show there are four categories in camera configurations: there are three kinds of camera configurations that have different characteristics and one configuration that is not recommended. Category A configuration reproduces a wide area of the field of interest in a long range of depth. Category B functions as a reduction of the field of interest. Category C functions as a magnification of the field of interest. In Category D, a narrow area of the field is reproduced in a short range of depth. In particular, for use by stereoscopic LED display with a rather low resolution, Category A and Category C are recommended because they fully use the reproducible positions.

In this letter, we propose a symbol repetition technique combined with parallel channel encoding for multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems with ultra wideband channels. It can resolve timing asynchronous cochannel interference from another simultaneously operating piconet. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the effect of the interference.

3D virtual environment provides a limited amount of information, mainly focusing on visual information. This is the main cause of users losing the sense of direction in the environment. Many researches for developing a navigation tools that address this problem have been carried out. In this study, a navigation tool is designed by applying topic map, one of the technologies for semantic web construction, to a 3D virtual environment. Topic map constructs a semantic link map by defining the connection relation between topics. According to an experiment done to evaluate the proposed navigation tool, the tool was more helpful in finding detailed object than highly represented objects. Also, it could be seen that providing the surrounding knowledge is effective for object selection by users when that target for searching is not defined.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems applying macroscopic selection diversity (MSD) are analyzed in composite fading channels through derived expressions of capacity outage probability. The MSD system uses a maximum capacity MIMO base station (BS) selection algorithm, where the results show a significant improvement in outage capacity.

Reduction of the intensity noise in semiconductor lasers is important subject to extend application range of the device. Blue-violet InGaN laser reveals high quantum noise when the laser is operated with low output power. The authors proposed a new scheme of noise reduction both for the optical feedback noise and the quantum noise by applying electric feedback which is positive type at a high frequency and negative type for lower frequency range. Noise reduction effect down to a level lower than the quantum noise was experimentally confirmed even under the optical feedback.

We report a specially designed encoding technique for sign language video sequences supposing that the technique is for sign telecommunication such as that using mobile videophones with a low bitrate. The technique is composed of three methods: gradient coding, precedence macroblock coding, and not-coded coding. These methods are based on the idea to distribute a certain number of bits for each macroblock according to the evaluation of importance of parts of the picture. They were implemented on a computer and encoded data of a short clip of sign language dialogue was evaluated by deaf subjects. As a result, the efficiency of the technique was confirmed.

Since a human object is an important element of the moving pictures being processed by mobile terminals, establishing a human object extraction method encourages dissemination of new applications. In accordance with the requirement of mobile applications, this paper proposes a low-cost human object extraction method, which consists of a face object and a hair object extraction based on their color information and a simple body extraction utilizing the position information of the face object. In the proposed method, skin color and hair color are estimated through color space segmentation, and a human object is effectively extracted by using a radial active contour model. Simulation results of the human object extraction with the use of XScale processor claims that QCIF 15 fps video sequences can be processed in real time.

This paper investigates the design curves of class E amplifier with nonlinear capacitance for any output Q and finite dc-feed inductance. The important results are; 1) the capacitance nonlinearity strongly affects the design parameters for low Q, 2) the value of dc-feed inductance is hardly affected by the capacitance nonlinearity, and 3) the input voltage is an important parameter to design class E amplifier with nonlinear capacitance. By carrying out PSpice simulations, we show that the simulated results agree with the desired ones quantitatively. It is expected that the design curves in this paper are useful guidelines for the design of class E amplifier with nonlinear capacitance.

We consider oscillators consisting of a reactance circuit and a negative resistor. They may happen to have multi-mode oscillations around the anti-resonant frequencies of the reactance circuit. This kind of oscillators can be easily synthesized by setting the resonant and anti-resonant frequencies of the reactance circuits. However, it is not easy to analyze the oscillation phenomena, because they have multiple oscillations whose oscillations depend on the initial guesses. In this paper, we propose a Spice-oriented solution algorithm combining the harmonic balance method with Newton homotopy method that can find out the multiple solutions on the homotopy paths. In our analysis, the determining equations from the harmonic balance method are given by modified equivalent circuit models of "DC," "Cosine" and "Sine" circuits. The modified circuits can be solved by a simulator STC (solution curve tracing circuit), where the multiple oscillations are found by the transient analysis of Spice. Thus, we need not to derive the troublesome circuit equations, nor the mathematical transformations to get the determining equations. It makes the solution algorithms much simpler.

Digital watermarks on pictures are more useful when they are better able to survive image processing operations and when they cause less degradation of picture quality. Random geometric distortion is one of the most difficult kinds of image processing for watermarks to survive because of the difficulty of synchronizing the expected watermark patterns to the watermarks embedded in pictures. This paper proposes three methods to improve a previous method that is not affected by this difficulty but that is insufficient in maintaining picture quality and treating other problems in surviving image processing. The first method determines the watermark strength in L*u*v* space, where human-perceived degradation of picture quality can be measured in terms of Euclidian distance, but embeds and detects watermarks in YUV space, where the detection is more reliable. The second method, based on the knowledge of image quantization, uses the messiness of color planes to hide watermarks. The third method reduces detection noises by preprocessing the watermarked image with orientation-sensitive image filtering, which is especially effective in picture portions where pixel values change drastically. Subjective evaluations have shown that these methods improved the picture quality of the previous method by 0.5 point of the mean evaluation score at the representative example case. On the other hand, the watermark strength of the previous method could be increased by 30% through 60% while keeping the same picture quality. Robustness to image processing has been evaluated for random geometric distortion, JPEG compression, Gaussian noise addition, and median filtering and it was clarified that these methods reduced the detection error ratio to 1/10 through 1/4. These methods can be applied not only to the previous method but also to other types of pixel-domain watermarking such as the Patchwork watermarking method and, with modification, to frequency-domain watermarking.

Sinusoidal representation has been widely applied to speech modification, low bit rate speech and audio coding. Usually, speech signal is analyzed and synthesized using the overlap-add algorithm or the peak-picking algorithm. But the overlap-add algorithm is well known for high computational complexity and the peak-picking algorithm cannot track the transient and syllabic variation well. In this letter, both algorithms are applied to speech analysis/synthesis. Peaks are picked in the curve of power spectral density for speech signal; the frequencies corresponding to these peaks are arranged according to the descending orders of their corresponding power spectral densities. These frequencies are regarded as the candidate frequencies to determine the corresponding amplitudes and initial phases according to the least mean square error criterion. The summation of the extracted sinusoidal components is used to successively approach the original speech signal. The results show that the proposed algorithm can track the transient and syllabic variation and can attain the good synthesized speech signal with low computational complexity.

An impulse generation circuit using an SRD was made as an experiment. The circuit, which is used for UWB pulse radars, etc., was designed using PSpice, a SPICE simulator. Since there is no SRD model in SPICE, the pn junction model was substituted. The experimental and simulated waveforms were compared, and could be made almost to match by adjusting the parameters of the SPICE diode model.

Data clustering is a technique for grouping similar data items together for convenient understanding. Conventional data clustering methods, including agglomerative hierarchical clustering and partitional clustering algorithms, frequently perform unsatisfactorily for large text collections, since the computation complexities of the conventional data clustering methods increase very quickly with the number of data items. Poor clustering results degrade intelligent applications such as event tracking and information extraction. This paper presents an unsupervised document clustering method which identifies topic keyword clusters of the text corpus. The proposed method adopts a multi-stage process. First, an aggressive data cleaning approach is employed to reduce the noise in the free text and further identify the topic keywords in the documents. All extracted keywords are then grouped into topic keyword clusters using the k-nearest neighbor approach and the keyword clustering technique. Finally, all documents in the corpus are clustered based on the topic keyword clusters. The proposed method is assessed against conventional data clustering methods on a web news corpus. The experimental results show that the proposed method is an efficient and effective clustering approach.

In order to control the moving speed of an endoscopic capsule in the human intestine, electrical stimulation method is proposed in this paper. The miniaturized endoscopic capsule with the function of various electrical stimulations has been designed and implemented. An in-vivo animal experiment has been performed to show the ability of controlling the movement speed of the endoscopic capsule according to the level of electrical stimulation. In-vivo experiments were performed by inserting the implemented capsule into a pig's intestinal tract. From the experimental results, the activation of peristaltic movement and the relationship between the moving speed of capsule and the stimulation amplitude could be found. It is shown that the moving speed of capsule in the intestine can be controlled by adjustment of the stimulation level applied in the capsule electrodes. The results of the in-vivo experiment verify that the degree of contraction in the intestinal tract is closely related with the level of stimulating electrical voltage, suggesting that the moving speed of capsule in the human gastrointestinal tract can be controlled by externally adjusting the amplitude of stimulating pulse signal.

Micro/picocellular architectures for wireless networks have been proposed to provide higher capacity under limited radio spectrum. With smaller cell size, the frequency of hand-off events will increase. This will in turn increase the overheads for processing hand-off events. To reduce the overheads due to frequent hand-off, a cell-cluster concept has been proposed in [1]. In this paper, we propose a call admission control policy for cluster-based micro/picocellular wireless networks, that employs two levels of admission thresholds: one at the cell level and the other at the cluster level. An analytical method is developed to analyze the performance of the proposed policy. The analytical method is then applied to find the values of the admission thresholds such that the throughput of the network is maximized under the condition that a predetermined bound on the call hand-off dropping probability is guaranteed. Compared with call admission policies that employ a single threshold either at the cell level or at the cluster level under the condition that the policies provide the same predetermined maximum level of call hand-off dropping probability, the proposed call admission policy provides significantly better performance.

A minimum mean square error (MMSE) nulling partial parallel interference cancellation (PPIC) receiver for downlink multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multicarrier (MC)-CDMA systems is proposed. Our analysis shows that, for multiuser MIMO MC-CDMA systems, interference due to frequency selectivity in multipath fading channel causes detrimental effects on cancelling, thus V-BLAST receiver shows severe performance degradation. The proposed receiver with multistage processing does not produce an error floor in frequency selective fading channel environments and achieves substantial performance gains. The system performance of the proposed receiver was evaluated through computer simulations. The simulation results show that, with two stage PPIC processing, the proposed receiver achieves performance gains of 2.5-4 dB at target BER of 10-3 over the linear MMSE receiver.

Path following circuits (PFC's) are circuits for solving nonlinear problems on the circuit simulator SPICE. In the method of PFC's, formulas of numerical methods are described by circuits, which are solved by SPICE. Using PFC's, numerical analysis without programming is possible, and various techniques implemented in SPICE will make the numerical analysis very efficient. In this paper, we apply the PFC's of the homotopy method to various nonlinear problems (excluding circuit analysis) where the homotopy method is proven to be globally convergent; namely, we apply the method to fixed-point problems, linear programming problems, and nonlinear programming problems. This approach may give a new possibility to the fields of applied mathematics and operations research. Moreover, this approach makes SPICE applicable to a broader class of scientific problems.

An efficient, scalable speech recognition architecture combining topic detection and topic-dependent language modeling is proposed for multi-domain spoken language systems. In the proposed approach, the inferred topic is automatically detected from the user's utterance, and speech recognition is then performed by applying an appropriate topic-dependent language model. This approach enables users to freely switch between domains while maintaining high recognition accuracy. As topic detection is performed on a single utterance, detection errors may occur and propagate through the system. To improve robustness, a hierarchical back-off mechanism is introduced where detailed topic models are applied when topic detection is confident and wider models that cover multiple topics are applied in cases of uncertainty. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated when combined with two topic detection methods: unigram likelihood and SVMs (Support Vector Machines). On the ATR Basic Travel Expression Corpus, both methods provide a significant reduction in WER (9.7% and 10.3%, respectively) compared to a single language model system. Furthermore, recognition accuracy is comparable to performing decoding with all topic-dependent models in parallel, while the required computational cost is much reduced.

This paper presents the analysis of the stopping maneuver of the human driver by using a new three-dimensional driving simulator that uses CAVE, which provides stereoscopic immersive vision. First of all, the difference in the driving behavior between 3D and 2D virtual environments is investigated. Secondly, a GMDH is applied to the measured data in order to build a mathematical model of driving behavior. From the obtained model, it is found that the acceleration information has less importance in stopping maneuver under the 2D and 3D environments.