The characteristics of a left-handed traveling-wave transistor, which is formulated as two composite right- and left-handed (CRLH) transmission lines with both passive and active couplings, are discussed for generating unattenuated waves having left-handedness. The design criteria for convective instability are described, together with results of numerical calculations that solve the transmission equation for the device.

Quantification of the hip cartilages is clinically important. In this study, we propose an automatic technique for segmentation and visualization of the acetabular and femoral head cartilages based on clinically obtained multi-slice T1-weighted MR data and a hybrid approach. We follow a knowledge based approach by employing several features such as the anatomical shapes of the hip femoral and acetabular cartilages and corresponding image intensities. We estimate the center of the femoral head by a Hough transform and then automatically select the volume of interest. We then automatically segment the hip bones by a self-adaptive vector quantization technique. Next, we localize the articular central line by a modified canny edge detector based on the first and second derivative filters along the radial lines originated from the femoral head center and anatomical constraint. We then roughly segment the acetabular and femoral head cartilages using derivative images obtained in the previous step and a top-hat filter. Final masks of the acetabular and femoral head cartilages are automatically performed by employing the rough results, the estimated articular center line and the anatomical knowledge. Next, we generate a thickness map for each cartilage in the radial direction based on a Euclidian distance. Three dimensional pelvic bones, acetabular and femoral cartilages and corresponding thicknesses are overlaid and visualized. The techniques have been implemented in C++ and MATLAB environment. We have evaluated and clarified the usefulness of the proposed techniques in the presence of 40 clinical hips multi-slice MR images.

Networking technologies have recently been evolving and network applications are now expected to support flexible composition of upper-layer network services, such as security, QoS, or personal firewall. We propose a multi-platform framework called FreeNA* that extends existing applications by incorporating the services based on user definitions. This extension does not require users to modify their systems at all. Therefore, FreeNA is valuable for experimental system usage. We implemented FreeNA on both Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems, and evaluated their functionality and performance. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of FreeNA including details on how to insert network services into existing applications and how to create services in a multi-platform environment. We also give an example implementation of a service with SSL, a functionality comparison with relevant systems, and our performance evaluation results. The results show that FreeNA offers finer configurability, composability, and usability than other similar systems. We also show that the throughput degradation of transparent service insertion is 2% at most compared with a method of directly inserting such services into applications.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a critical technology in 3G evolution systems, which can effectively avoid intra-cell interference, but may bring with serious inter-cell interference. Inter-cell interference cancellation is one of effective schemes taken in mitigating inter-cell interference, but for many existing schemes in inter-cell interference cancellation, various generalized spatial diversities are taken, which always bring with extra interference and blind spots, or even need to acquire extra information on source and channel. In this paper, a novel inter-cell interference mitigation method is proposed for 3G evolution systems. This method is based on independent component analysis in blind source separation, and the input signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) is set as objective function. By generalized eigenvalue decomposition and algorithm iterations, maximum signal noise ratio (SNR) can be obtained in output. On the other hand, this method can be worked with no precise knowledge of source signal and channel information. Performance evaluation shows that such method can mitigate inter-cell interference in a semi-blind state, and effectively improve output SNR with the condition that lower input SINR, higher input SNR and longer lengths of the processing frame.

In this paper, the performance of the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) using fixed relay nodes and Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology was evaluated based on the correlated channel capacity of MIMO system and the number of sensor node served by the system. Moreover, the performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm, which is used to find the optimum distance to place the relay nodes from sink node, is done not only with AF relaying and spatial correlation effect, but also with Decode-and-Forward (DF) relaying scheme. The results show that the relay gain (a ratio between the maximum number of sensors satisfying the required channel capacity in 7-cell topology to the number of sensor nodes in sink cell) is affected strongly by the spatial correlation at high required channel capacity but little at low required channel capacity. The results also show that the relay gain can be improved remarkably by using the DF relaying scheme, and that the validity of the proposed algorithm holds for any relaying scheme, spatial correlation effect and different antenna size.

The RFID tag system has received attention as an identification source. Each RFID tag is attached to some object. With the unique ID of the RFID tag, a user identifies the object provided with the RFID tag, and derives appropriate information about the object. One of important applications of the RFID technology is the position estimation of RFID tags. It can be very useful to acquire the location information concerning the RFID tags. It can be applied to navigation systems and positional detection systems for robots etc. In this paper, we propose a new position estimation method of RFID tags by using a probabilistic approach. In this method, mobile objects (person and robot, etc.) with RFID readers estimate the positions of RFID tags with multiple communication ranges. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulations.

In this paper, the feasibility of composite right/left-handed transmission lines for realizing proximity coupled interconnects is reported. The proposed interconnects' resonant length can be miniaturized due to the zeroth order resonance supported by a composite right/left-handed transmission line resonator. In addition, the proposed interconnects can achieve broadside coupling because the zeroth order resonance occurs in the fast-wave region. Simulated and measured electric field distributions are shown to explain the broadside coupling phenomenon. To validate the arbitrary size and broadside coupling of the proposed interconnects, simulated and measured transmission characteristics are presented. The results show that low insertion loss can be achieved by using single and double broadside coupling between interconnects.

This paper presents new approaches for the estimation of range between the preceding vehicle and the experimental vehicle, estimation of vehicle size and its projective size, and dynamic camera calibration. First, our proposed approaches adopt a camera model to transform coordinates from the ground plane onto the image plane to estimate the relative position between the detected vehicle and the camera. Then, to estimate the actual and projective size of the preceding vehicle, we propose a new estimation method. This method can estimate the range from a preceding vehicle to the camera based on contact points between its tires and the ground and then estimate the actual size of the vehicle according to the positions of its vertexes in the image. Because the projective size of a vehicle varies with respect to its distance to the camera, we also present a simple and rapid method of estimating a vehicle's projective height, which allows a reduction in computational time for size estimation in real-time systems. Errors caused by the application of different camera parameters are also estimated and analyzed in this study. The estimation results are used to determine suitable parameters during camera installation to suppress estimation errors. Finally, to guarantee robustness of the detection system, a new efficient approach to dynamic calibration is presented to obtain accurate camera parameters, even when they are changed by camera vibration owing to on-road driving. Experimental results demonstrate that our approaches can provide accurate and robust estimation results of range and size of target vehicles.

The line-based method has been one of the most commonly-used methods of hardware implementation of two-dimensional (2D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT). However, data buffer is required between the row DWT processor and the column DWT processor to solve the data flow mismatch, which increases the on-chip memory size and the output latency. Since the incompatible data flow is induced from the intrinsic property of adopted lifting-based algorithm, a decomposed lifting algorithm (DLA) is presented by rearranging the data path of lifting steps to ensure that image data is processed in raster scan manner in row processor and column processor. Theoretical analysis indicates that the precision issue of DLA outperforms other lifting-based algorithms in terms of round-off noise and internal word-length. A memory-efficient and high-performance line-based architecture is proposed based on DLA without the implementation of data buffer. For an N M image, only 2N internal memory is required for 5/3 filter and 4N of that is required for 9/7 filter to perform 2D DWT, where N and M indicate the width and height of an image. Compared with related 2D DWT architectures, the size of on-chip memory is reduced significantly under the same arithmetic cost, memory bandwidth and timing constraint. This design was implemented in SMIC 0.18 µm CMOS logic fabrication with 32 kbits dual-port RAM and 20 K equivalent 2-input NAND gates in a 1.00 mm 1.00 mm die, which can process 512 512 image under 100 MHz.

In this paper, a novel illumination invariant face recognition algorithm is proposed for face recognition. This algorithm is composed of two phases. In the first phase, we reduce the effect of illumination changes using a nonlinear mapping of image intensities. Then, we modify the distribution of the coefficients of wavelet transform in certain sub-bands. In this step, the recognition performance is more important than image quality. In the second phase, we used the unitary factor of polar decomposition of enhanced image as a feature vector. In the recognition phase, the correlation-based nearest neighbor rule is applied for the matching. We have performed some experiments on several databases and have evaluated the proposed method in different aspects. Experimental results in recognition show that this approach provides a suitable representation for overcoming illumination effects.

In this paper, we present a forecasting method for the view of Mt. Fuji as an application of Earth observation data (EOD) obtained by satellites. We defined the Mt. Fuji viewing index (FVI) that characterises how well the mountain looks on a given day, based on photo data produced by a fixed-point observation. A long-term predictor of FVI, ranging from 0 to 30 days, was constructed through support vector machine regression on climate and earth observation data. It was found that the aerosol mass concentration (AMC) improves prediction performance, and such performance is particularly significant in the long-term range.

Localization is one of the fundamental problems in many wireless sensor networks applications, but most of them require the node to equip special range-determining or angle-determining hardware in order to obtain the position related information. In this paper, we propose a concentric beacons localization algorithm which is a range-free approach. Four anchors are set in the four corners of the square target region, and emit localizing beacons at different power levels, with the information of their position and the estimated range of the beacon. The nodes in this region receive these beacons and compute their positions correspondingly. In region of different scale, we propose two alternative schemes. The one for small scale has lower calculation complexity, and the other has better stability on large scale applications. Simulation results show the estimation error is less than 0.4 times the beacon interval.

When handover events occur during the transmission of multimedia traffic, efficient handover control procedures and radio resource allocation are necessary to maintain the same QoS of transmitted multimedia traffic because the QoS may be degraded by additional delay and information loss. In this paper we propose a new handover control method for the next generation mobile multimedia networks, in which the handover setup process is done in advance of a handover request by predicting the handover cell from mobile terminal's current position. The handover procedures for real-time sessions are performed based on the handover cell information and the resource reservation condition. The radio resources in the estimated adjacent cells should be reserved and allocated to guarantee the continuity of the real-time sessions. We conduct a simulation model that is focused on the handover failure rate and packet loss rate. The simulation results show that our proposed method provides better performance than the previous methods.

We describe a co-channel interference rejection scheme that is suitable for QR-decomposition maximum likelihood detection (MLD) in multiple-input and multiple output (MIMO) systems. A pre-whitening matrix for interference rejection is decomposed into a triangular matrix and its Hermitian matrix by using a complex Gaxpy version of the Cholesky algorithm. The decomposed triangular matrix is used as a spatial pre-filter to whiten co-channel interference. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can suppress co-channel interference streams at the cost of receive diversity order and achieves better transmission performance than QR-decomposition MLD itself in MIMO channels with co-channel interference.

Nonbinary M-ary data processed by data entry systems, such as keyboard devices and character recognition systems, often have various types of error, such as symbol-substitution errors, deletion errors, insertion errors, and adjacent-symbol-transposition errors. This paper proposes nonsystematic M-ary codes capable of correcting these errors. The code is defined as a set of codewords that satisfy three conditions required to correct substitution, deletion/insertion, and adjacent-symbol-transposition errors. Since symbol-substitution errors in data entry systems are usually asymmetric, this paper also presents asymmetric-symbol-substitution error correcting codes capable of correcting deletion, insertion, and adjacent-symbol-transposition errors. For asymmetric-symbol-substitution error correction, we employ a mapping derived from the vertex coloring in an error directionality graph. The evaluation shows that the asymmetric codes have three to five times larger number of codewords than the symmetric codes.

A critical problem after a natural/manmade disaster is to provide immediate post-disaster communication links between the disaster victims and some overlay networks. This paper proposes a novel scheme that uses the surviving Mobile handSets (MS) as sensing nodes to form an auto-configured Hierarchical Cognitive Radio Network (H-CRN). The implementation of this H-CRN is explained through detailed problem scenario statement and step-by-step implementation of automatic identification of emergency situation by the MS nodes. An overview of the cross-layer framework used by the MS nodes is also presented. This novel scheme is tested through some hypothesis along with probability calculations for successful identification of emergency situation, formation of ad hoc group and Emergency Beacon Message (EBM) transmission.

In this paper the time-domain analysis of two parallel traces is investigated. First, the telegrapher's equations for transmission line are applied to the parallel traces on printed circuit board (PCB), and are solved by using the mode decomposition technique. The time-domain solutions are then obtained by using the inverse Laplace transform. Although the Fourier-transform technique is also applicable for this problem, the solution is given numerically. Contrarily, the inverse Laplace transform successfully leads to an analytical expression for the transmission characteristics. The analytical expression is represented by series, which clearly explains the coupling mechanism. The analytical expression for the fundamental section of a meander delay line is investigated in detail. The analytical solution is validated by measurements, and the characteristics of the distortions in the output waveforms of meander delay lines due to the crosstalk are also investigated.

In this paper, we study the capacity and performance of nonorthogonal pulse position modulation (NPPM) for Ultra-Wideband (UWB) communication systems over both AWGN and IEEE802.15.3a channels. The channel capacity of NPPM is determined for a time-hopping multiple access UWB communication system. The error probability and performance bounds are derived for a multiuser environment. It is shown that with proper selection of the pulse waveform and modulation index, NPPM can achieve a higher capacity than orthogonal PPM, and also provide better performance than orthogonal PPM with the same throughput.

The inflection S-shaped software reliability growth model (SRGM) proposed by Ohba (1984) is one of the well- known SRGMs. This paper deals with the optimal software release problem with regard to the expected software cost under this model based on the Bayesian approach. To reflect the effect of the learning experience for the updated software system, we consider several improvement factors to adjust the values of parameters characterizing the inflection S-shaped SRGM. Appropriate prior distributions are assumed for such factors and the expected total software cost is formulated. The optimal release time is shown to be finite and uniquely determined. Because of the flexibility of prior distributions, the proposed Bayesian methods may be applied in many different situations. Numerical results are presented on the basis of the real data.

This letter presents a new approach to provide inter-domain service compositions for OSGi environments. Our proposal of remote wire objects extends OSGi's wiring capability across the framework boundaries, so that even remote services can join in the composition. Hence, a better composition is made possible with a richer set of candidate services from foreign domains.