Recently, the compound element pseudo transient analysis, CEPTA, method is regarded as an efficient practical method to find DC operating points of nonlinear circuits when the Newton-Raphson method fails. In the previous CEPTA method, an effective SPICE3 implementation algorithm was proposed without expanding the Jacobian matrix. However the limitation of step size was not well considered. Thus, the non-convergence problem occurs and the simulation efficiency is still a big challenge for current LSI nonlinear cicuits, especially for some practical large-scale circuits. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new SPICE3 implementation algorithm and an embedding algorithm, which is where to insert the pseudo capacitors, for the CEPTA method. The proposed implementation algorithm has no limitation for step size and can significantly improve simulation efficiency. Considering the existence of various types of circuits, we extend some possible embedding positions. Numerical examples demonstrate the improvement of simulation efficiency and convergence performance.

In this paper, we propose a novel voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm based on the generalized normal-Laplace (GNL) distribution to provide enhanced performance in adverse noise environments. Specifically, the probability density function (PDF) of a noisy speech signal is represented by the GNL distribution; the variance of the speech and noise of the GNL distribution are estimated using higher-order moments. After in-depth analysis of estimated variances, a feature that is useful for discrimination between speech and noise at low SNRs is derived and compared to a threshold to detect speech activity. To consider the inter-frame correlation of speech activity, the result from the previous frame is employed in the decision rule of the proposed VAD algorithm. The performance of our proposed VAD algorithm is evaluated in terms of receiver operating characteristics (ROC) and detection accuracy. Results show that the proposed method yields better results than conventional VAD algorithms.

To achieve high recording density in a bit-patterned media recording system, the spacing between data bit islands in both the along-track and the across-track directions must be decreased, thus leading to the increase of two-dimensional (2D) interference. One way to reduce the 2D interference is to apply a 2D coding scheme on a data sequence before recording; however, this method usually requires many redundant bits, thus lowering a code rate. Therefore, we propose a novel 2D coding scheme referred to as a recorded-bit patterning (RBP) scheme to mitigate the 2D interference, which requires no redundant bits at the expense of using more buffer memory. Specifically, an input data sequence is first split into three tracks in which will then be rotated to find the best 3-track data pattern based on a look-up table before recording, such that the shifted data tracks yield the least effect of 2D interference in the readback signal. Numerical results indicate that the proposed RBP scheme provides a significant performance improvement if compared to a conventional system (without 2D coding), especially when the recording density is high and/or the position jitter noise is large.

In this study, the influence of Gd composition on current-induced domain wall motion in a Gd-Co ferrimagnetic nanowire was theoretically investigated with taking into account of composition dependence of magnetic properties. As a result, the intrinsic critical density to move domain wall significantly reduces near the compensation composition, which is achieved to be less than 105A/cm2. Moreover, the intrinsic critical current density also significantly reduces near a certain Gd composition where the domain wall energies of Bloch and Néel walls are almost the same.

To analyze the structure of a set of perfect sequences over a composition algebra of the real number field, transforms of a set of sequences similar to the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) are introduced. The discrete cosine transform, discrete sine transform, and generalized discrete Fourier transform (GDFT) of the sequences are defined and the fundamental properties of these transforms are proved. We show that GDFT is bijective and that there exists a relationship between these transforms and a convolution of sequences. Applying these properties to the set of perfect sequences, a parameterization theorem of such sequences is obtained.

Recognizing human action in complex scenes is a challenging problem in computer vision. Some action-unrelated concepts, such as camera position features, could significantly affect the appearance of local spatio-temporal features, and therefore the performance of low-level features based methods degrades. In this letter, we define the action-unrelated concept: the position of camera as high-level features. We observe that they can serve as a prior to local spatio-temporal features for human action recognition. We encode this prior by modeling interactions between spatio-temporal features and camera position features. We infer camera position features from local spatio-temporal features via these interactions. The parameters of this model are estimated by a new max-margin algorithm. We evaluate the proposed method on KTH, IXMAS and Youtube actions datasets. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper proposes a novel design method involving the stages from analog circuit design to layout synthesis in hope of suppressing the process-induced variations with a design style called transistor array. We manage to decompose the transistors into unified sub-transistors, and arrange the sub-transistors on a uniform placement grid so that a better post-CMP profile is expected to be achieved, and that the STI-stress is evened up to alleviate the process variations. However, since lack of direct theoretical support to the transistor decomposition, we analyze and evaluate the errors arising from the decomposition in both large and small signal analysis. A test chip with decomposed transistors on it confirmed our analysis and suggested that the errors are negligibly small and the design with transistor array is applicable. Based on this conclusion, a design flow with transistor array covering from circuit design to layout synthesis is proposed, and several design cases, including three common-source amplifiers, three two-stage OPAMPS and a nano-watt current reference, are implemented on a test chip with the proposed method, to demonstrate the feasibility of our idea. The measurement results from the chip confirmed that the designs with transistor array are successful, and the proposed method is applicable.

This paper presents a VLSI design of a Tomlinson-Harashima (TH) precoder for multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems. The TH precoder consists of LQ decomposition (LQD), interference cancellation (IC), and weight coefficient multiplication (WCM) units. The LQ decomposition unit is based on an application specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) architecture with floating-point arithmetic for high accuracy operations. In the IC and WCM units with fixed-point arithmetic, the proposed architecture uses an arrayed pipeline structure to shorten a circuit critical path delay. The implementation result shows that the proposed architecture reduces circuit area and power consumption by 11% and 15%, respectively.

The most important advantage of HMM-based TTS is its highly intelligible. However, speech synthesized by HMM-based TTS is muffled and far from natural, especially under limited data conditions, which is mainly caused by its over-smoothness. Therefore, the motivation for this paper is to improve the naturalness of HMM-based TTS trained under limited data conditions while preserving its intelligibility. To achieve this motivation, a hybrid TTS between HMM-based TTS and the modified restricted Temporal Decomposition (MRTD), named HTD in this paper, was proposed. Here, TD is an interpolation model of decomposing a spectral or prosodic sequence of speech into sparse event targets and dynamic event functions, and MRTD is one simplified version of TD. With a determination of event functions close to the concept of co-articulation in speech, MRTD can synthesize smooth speech and the smoothness in synthesized speech can be adjusted by manipulating event targets of MRTD. Previous studies have also found that event functions of MRTD can represent linguistic information of speech, which is important to perceive speech intelligibility, while sparse event targets can convey the non-linguistics information, which is important to perceive the naturalness of speech. Therefore, prosodic trajectories and MRTD event functions of the spectral trajectory generated by HMM-based TTS were kept unchanged to preserve the high and stable intelligibility of HMM-based TTS. Whereas MRTD event targets of the spectral trajectory generated by HMM-based TTS were rendered with an original speech database to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speech. Experimental results with small Vietnamese datasets revealed that the proposed HTD was equivalent to HMM-based TTS in terms of intelligibility but was superior to it in terms of naturalness. Further discussions show that HTD had a small footprint. Therefore, the proposed HTD showed its strong efficiency under limited data conditions.

In 2001, Boneh and Franklin realized the first Identity-Based Encryption (IBE), and at the same time they proposed a simple way to revoke users from the system. Later, Boldyreva et al. pointed out that Boneh-Franklin's revocation method is not scalable well and they proposed the first IBE scheme with efficient revocation. Recently, Tseng and Tsai [Computer Journal, Vol.55 No.4, page 475-486, 2012] claimed that Boldyreva et al.'s scheme requires a secure channel between each user and the key generation center in the key update phase, and proposed a new revocable IBE (RIBE) with a public channel by extending the Boneh-Franklin scheme. In this paper, we revisit Tseng and Tsai's result; we first point out that secure channels (except for the initial key setup) are not mandatory in the definition of RIBE scheme formalized by Boldyreva et al. Next, we show that Boldyreva et al.'s scheme does not require any secure channels (except for the initial key setup), which is different from what Tseng and Tsai claimed and so invalidates their contribution of the first RIBE with a public channel. Moreover, we point out that there are simple techniques to remove secure channels from the Boneh-Franklin RIBE. Interestingly, we show that the secure-channel-free Boneh-Franklin RIBE scheme is secure against decryption key exposure, whereas the Tseng-Tsai RIBE scheme is vulnerable to this attack.

Electromagnetic power transmission through two cyl-inder-penetrated circular apertures in parallel conducting planes is studied. The Weber transform and superposition principle are used to represent the scattered field. A set of simultaneous equations for the modal coefficients are constituted based on the mode-matching and boundary conditions. The whole integration path is slightly deformed into a new one below the positive real axis not to pass through the pole singularities encountered on the original path so that it is easily calculated by direct numerical quadrature. Computation shows the behaviors of power transmission in terms of aperture geometry and wavelength. The presented scheme is very amenable to numerical evaluations and useful for various electromagnetic scattering and antenna radiation analysis involved with singularity problems.

A joint superimposed sequence design, known as SuperImposed sequence for PAPR Reduction, or SIPR, using per-tone affine precoding technique is proposed to jointly estimate MIMO-OFDM channels and reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) for MIMO-OFDM systems. The proposed technique optimizes the trade-off between BER, MSE of the channel estimate, and PAPR reduction performance. Moreover, it does not require side information to be transmitted for the removal of the sequence at the receiver, and the transmit redundancy can be as small as 1 symbol/subcarrier. The superimposed sequence is designed by solving a convex quadratically constrained quadratic programming problem and has a computational complexity comparable to previous technique using linear programming. It is shown that SIPR can be regarded as a generalization of the popular tone reservation (TR) technique, and thus, is able to outperform TR in terms PAPR reduction performance, with less transmit overhead. Simulation results and transmit redundancy analysis of SIPR and TR are shown to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

In this paper, a multi-temporal analysis of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (Pol-SAR) data over the sandbank and oyster farm area is presented. Specifically, a four-component scattering model, being able to identify single bounce, double bounce, volume, and helix scattering power contributions, has been employed to retrieve information. Decomposition results of a time series RADARSAT Pol-SAR images acquired over the western Taiwan coast indicate that the coastal tide level plays a key role in the sandbank and oyster farm monitoring. At high tide levels, the underlying sandbank creates a shallow area with an increased roughness of the above sea surface, leading to an enhanced surface scattering power as compared to the ambient water. Contrarily, at low tide levels, the exposed sandbank appears to be a smooth scatterer, generating decreased backscattering power than the surrounding area. On the other hand, the double-bounce scattering power is shown to be highly correlated with the tide level in the oyster farms due to their vertical structures. This also demonstrates a promising potential of the four-component scattering power decomposition for coastal tide level monitoring applications.

In this paper, we present a real-time hand pose recognition method to provide an intuitive user interface through hand poses or gestures without a keyboard and a mouse. For this, the areas of right and left hands are segmented from the depth camera image, and noise compensation is performed. Then, the rotation angle and the centroid point of each hand area are calculated. Subsequently, joint points and end points of a finger are detected by expanding a circle at regular intervals from a centroid point of the hand. Lastly, the hand pose is recognized by matching between the current hand information and the hand model of previous frame and the hand model is updated for the next frame. This method enables users to predict the hidden fingers through the hand model information of the previous frame using temporal coherence in consecutive frames. As a result of the experiment on various hand poses with the hidden fingers using both hands, the accuracy showed over 95% and the performance indicated over 32fps. The proposed method can be used as a contactless input interface in presentation, advertisement, education, and game applications.

In this paper, we propose the Perceptual Shape Decomposition (PSD) to detect fingers for a Kinect-based hand gesture recognition system. The PSD is formulated as a discrete optimization problem by removing all negative minima with minimum cost. Experiments show that our PSD is perceptually relevant and robust against distortion and hand variations, and thus improves the recognition system performance.

This paper proposes the use of on-chip monitor circuits to detect process shift and process spread for post-silicon diagnosis and model-hardware correlation. The amounts of shift and spread allow test engineers to decide the correct test strategy. Monitor structures suitable for detection of process shift and process spread are discussed. Test chips targeting a nominal process corner as well as 4 other corners of “slow-slow”, “fast-fast”, “slow-fast” and “fast-slow” are fabricated in a 65nm process. The monitor structures correctly detects the location of each chip in the process space. The outputs of the monitor structures are further analyzed and decomposed into the process variations in threshold voltage and gate length for model-hardware correlation. Path delay predictions match closely with the silicon values using the extracted parameter shifts. On-chip monitors capable of detecting process shift and process spread are helpful for performance prediction of digital and analog circuits, adaptive delay testing and post-silicon statistical analysis.

We propose a composite DCT basis line test signal to evaluate the video quality of a DTV encoder. The proposed composite test signal contains a frame index, a calibration square wave, and 7-field basis signals. The results show that the proposed method may be useful for an in-service video quality verifier, using an ordinary oscilloscope instead of special equipment.

We propose an accurate and scalable solution to the perspective-n-point problem, referred to as ASPnP. Our main idea is to estimate the orientation and position parameters by directly minimizing a properly defined algebraic error. By using a novel quaternion representation of the rotation, our solution is immune to any parametrization degeneracy. To obtain the global optimum, we use the Grobner basis technique to solve the polynomial system derived from the first-order optimality condition. The main advantages of our proposed solution lie in accuracy and scalability. Extensive experiment results, with both synthetic and real data, demonstrate that our proposed solution has better accuracy than the state-of-the-art noniterative solutions. More importantly, by exploiting vectorization operations, the computational cost of our ASPnP solution is almost constant, independent of the number of point correspondences n in the wide range from 4 to 1000. In our experiment settings, the ASPnP solution takes about 4 milliseconds, thus best suited for real-time applications with a drastically varying number of 3D-to-2D point correspondences.

At Eurocrypt'03, Boneh, Gentry, Lynn and Shacham proposed a pairing based verifiably encrypted signature scheme (the BGLS-VES scheme). In 2004, Hess mounted an efficient rogue-key attack on the BGLS-VES scheme in the plain public-key model. In this letter, we show that the BGLS-VES scheme is not secure in the proof of possession (POP) model.

3D display systems without glasses are preferred because of the inconvenience wearing of special glasses while viewing 3D content. In general, non-glass type 3D displays work by sending left and right views of the content to the corresponding eyes depending on the user position with respect to the display. Since accurate user position estimation has become a very important task for non-glass type 3D displays, most of such systems require additional hardware or suffer from low accuracy. In this paper, an accurate user position estimation method using a single camera for non-glass type 3D display is proposed. As inter-pupillary distance is utilized for the estimation, at first the face is detected and then tracked using an Active Appearance Model. The pose of face is then estimated to compensate the pose variations. To estimate the user position, a simple perspective mapping function is applied which uses the average of the inter-pupillary distance. For accuracy, personal inter-pupillary distance can also be used. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method successfully estimated the user position using a single camera. The average error for position estimation with the proposed method was small enough for viewing 3D contents.