This letter mainly focuses on improving current noise reduction methods to solve the critical speech distortion problems with robust noise reduction in noisy speech signals for speech enhancement over IP networks. For robust noise reduction with packet loss recovery, we propose a novel optimized Wiener filtering technique that uses the estimated SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) with packet loss recovery method which is applied as post-filtering over IP-networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides better reduction and recovery rates with considering packet loss and SNR environment than other methods.

With the increasing complexity of LSI, Built-In Self Test (BIST) is a promising technique for production testing. We herein propose a method for diagnosing multiple stuck-at faults based on the compressed responses from BIST. We refer to fault diagnosis based on the ambiguous test pattern set obtained by the compressed responses of BIST as post-BIST fault diagnosis [1]. In the present paper, we propose an effective method by which to perform post-BIST fault diagnosis for multiple stuck-at faults. The efficiency of the success ratio and the feasibility of diagnosing large circuits are discussed.

Robust automatic language identification (LID) is the task of identifying the language from a short utterance spoken by an unknown speaker. The mainstream approaches include parallel phone recognition language modeling (PPRLM), support vector machine (SVM) and the general Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). These systems map the cepstral features of spoken utterances into high level scores by classifiers. In this paper, in order to increase the dimension of the score vector and alleviate the inter-speaker variability within the same language, multiple data groups based on supervised speaker clustering are employed to generate the discriminative language characterization score vectors (DLCSV). The back-end SVM classifiers are used to model the probability distribution of each target language in the DLCSV space. Finally, the output scores of back-end classifiers are calibrated by a pair-wise posterior probability estimation (PPPE) algorithm. The proposed language identification frameworks are evaluated on 2003 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE) databases and the experiments show that the system described in this paper produces comparable results to the existing systems. Especially, the SVM framework achieves an equal error rate (EER) of 4.0% in the 30-second task and outperforms the state-of-art systems by more than 30% relative error reduction. Besides, the performances of proposed PPRLM and GMMs algorithms achieve an EER of 5.1% and 5.0% respectively.

This paper proposes a robust omnidirectional audio-visual (AV) talker localizer for AV applications. The proposed localizer consists of two innovations. One of them is robust omnidirectional audio and visual features. The direction of arrival (DOA) estimation using an equilateral triangular microphone array, and human position estimation using an omnidirectional video camera extract the AV features. The other is a dynamic fusion of the AV features. The validity criterion, called the audio- or visual-localization counter, validates each audio- or visual-feature. The reliability criterion, called the speech arriving evaluator, acts as a dynamic weight to eliminate any prior statistical properties from its fusion procedure. The proposed localizer can compatibly achieve talker localization in a speech activity and user localization in a non-speech activity under the identical fusion rule. Talker localization experiments were conducted in an actual room to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed localizer. The results confirmed that the talker localization performance of the proposed AV localizer using the validity and reliability criteria is superior to that of conventional localizers.

Reducing the rate of false positives is of vital importance in enhancing the usefulness of signature-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). To reduce the number of false positives, a network administrator must thoroughly investigate a lengthy list of signatures and carefully disable the ones that detect attacks that are not harmful to the administrator's environment. This is a daunting task; if some signatures are disabled by mistake, the NIDS fails to detect critical remote attacks. We designed a NIDS, TrueAlarm, to reduce the rate of false positives. Conventional NIDSs alert administrators that a malicious message has been detected, regardless of whether the message actually attempts to compromise the protected server. In contrast, TrueAlarm delays the alert until it has confirmed that an attempt has been made. The TrueAlarm NIDS cooperates with a server-side monitor that observes the protected server's behavior. TrueAlarm only alerts administrators when a server-side monitor has detected deviant server behavior that must have been caused by a message detected by a NIDS. Our experimental results revealed that TrueAlarm reduces the rate of false positives. Using actual network traffic collected over 14 days, TrueAlarm produced 46 false positives, while Snort, a conventional NIDS, produced 818.

A design of a low-power CMOS ring oscillator for an application to a 13.56 MHz clock generator in an implantable RFID tag is proposed. The circuit is based on a novel voltage inverter, which is an improved version of the conventional current-source loaded inverter. The proposed circuit enables low-power operation and low sensitivity of the oscillation frequency, fOSC, to decay of the power supply VDD. By employing a gm-boosting subcircuit, power dissipation is decreased to 49 µW at fOSC=13.56 MHz. The sensitivity of fOSC to VDD is reduced to -0.02 at fOSC=13.56 MHz thanks to the use of composite high-impedance current sources.

Effect of the post-growth annealing on the morphology of a Ge mesa selectively grown on Si was studied from the viewpoint of near-infrared photodiode applications. By ultrahigh-vacuum chemical vapor deposition, Ge mesas were selectively grown at 600 on Si (001) substrates partially covered with SiO2 masks. The as-grown Ge mesas showed trapezoidal cross-sections having a top (001) surface and {311} sidewall facets, as similar to previous reports. However, after the subsequent post-growth annealing at ~800 in the ultrahigh-vacuum chamber, the mesas were deformed into rounded shapes having a depression at the center and mounds near the edges. Such a deformation cannot be observed for the samples annealed once after cooled and exposed to the air. The residual hydrogen atoms on the Ge surface from the germane (GeH4) decomposition is regarded as a trigger to the observed morphological instability, while the final mesa shape is determined in order to minimize a sum of the surface and/or strain energies.

This paper addresses the on-resistance (Ron) extraction of the DMOS based driver in Power IC designs. The proposed method can extract Ron of a driver from its layout data for the arbitrarily shaped metallization patterns. Such a driver is usually composed of arbitrarily shaped metals, arrayed vias, and DMOS transistors. We use FEM to extract the parasitic resistance of the source/drain metals since its strong contribution to Ron. In order to handle the large design case and accelerate the extraction process, a domain decomposition with virtual terminal insertion method is introduced, which succeeds in extraction for a set of industrial test cases including those the FEM without domain decomposition failed in. For a layout in which the DMOS cells are regularly placed, a sub-domain reuse procedure is also proposed, which obtained a dramatic speedup for the extraction. Even without the sub-domain reuse, our method still shows advantage in runtime and memory usage according to the simulation results.

A rate control scheme is described for zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) multiuser multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems with a QR-decomposition maximum likelihood detector (MLD) at the receiver. For selected users, a modulation-and-coding set is selected for each substream by estimating the per-substream post-MLD signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio. Iterative modified QR-decomposition MLD is employed at the receiver to achieve the throughput expected from the transmitter. The simulation results demonstrated that the proposed rate-control scheme achieved the target packet error rate while increasing the throughout for ZFBF-MU-MIMO systems as the number of user candidates increases.

This paper discusses the behavior of the second-order modes (Hankel singular values) of linear continuous-time systems under variable transformations with positive-real functions. That is, given a transfer function H(s) and its second-order modes, we analyze the second-order modes of transformed systems H(F(s)), where 1/F(s) is an arbitrary positive-real function. We first discuss the case of lossless positive-real transformations, and show that the second-order modes are invariant under any lossless positive-real transformation. We next consider the case of general positive-real transformations, and reveal that the values of the second-order modes are decreased under any general positive-real transformation. We achieve the derivation of these results by describing the controllability/observability Gramians of transformed systems, with the help of the lossless positive-real lemma, the positive-real lemma, and state-space formulation of transformed systems.

This paper presents a methodology for performing on-line voltage risk identification (VRI) in power supply networks using hyperrectangular composite neural networks (HRCNNs) and synchronized phasor measurements. The FHRCNN presented in this study integrates the paradigm of neural networks with the concept of knowledge-based approaches, rendering them both more useful than when applied alone. The fuzzy rules extracted from the dynamic data relating to the power system formalize the knowledge applied by experts when conducting the voltage risk assessment procedure. The efficiency of the proposed technique is demonstrated via its application to the Taiwan Power Provider System (Tai-Power System) under various operating conditions. Overall, the results indicated that the proposed scheme achieves a minimum 97 % success rate in determining the current voltage security level.

We propose a simple asynchronous UWB (Ultra Wide Band) position location algorithm with low complexity, power consumption and processing delay. In the proposed algorithm, only a single RTTX (Round-Trip Transmission) of UWB pulses is utilized based on the ToA (Time of Arrival) principle. Hence, the proposed algorithm decreases power consumption and processing delay as compared to the basic ToA based on triple RTTXs. Moreover, unlike the TDoA (Time Difference of Arrival) algorithm, the proposed algorithm can perform the position location with low complexity since it does not require strict synchronization between multiple beacons. Simulation results using IEEE 802.15.4a UWB channel models reveal that the proposed algorithm achieves closely comparable position location performance of the basic ToA and TDoA algorithms.

KEM (Key Encapsulation Mechanism) and DEM (Data Encapsulation Mechanism) were introduced by Shoup to formalize the asymmetric encryption specified for key distribution and the symmetric encryption specified for data exchange in ISO standards on public-key encryption. Shoup defined the "semantic security (IND) against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks (CCA2)" as a desirable security notion of KEM and DEM, that is, IND-CCA2 KEM and IND-CCA2 DEM. This paper defines "non-malleability (NM)" for KEM, which is a stronger security notion than IND. We provide three definitions of NM for KEM, and show that these three definitions are equivalent. We then show that NM-CCA2 KEM is equivalent to IND-CCA2 KEM. That is, we show that NM is equivalent to IND for KEM under CCA2 attacks, although NM is stronger than IND in the definition (or under some attacks like CCA1). In addition, this paper defines the universally composable (UC) security of KEM and DEM, and shows that IND-CCA2 KEM (or NM-CCA2 KEM) is equivalent to UC KEM and that "IND against adaptive chosen plaintext/ciphertext attacks (IND-P2-C2)" DEM is equivalent to UC DEM.

A novel Uniform Discrete Multitone (DMT) transceiver is proposed, utilizing a wavelet packet based filter bank transmultiplexer in conjunction with a DMT transceiver. The proposed transceiver decomposes the channel spectrum into subbands of equal bandwidth. The objective is to minimize the bit error rate (BER), which is increased by channel-noise amplification. This noise amplification is due to the Zero-Forcing equalization (ZFE) technique. Quantization of the channel-noise amplification is presented, based on post-equalization signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and probability of error in all subbands of the Uniform DMT system. A modified power loading algorithm is applied to allocate variable power according to subband gains. A BER performance comparison of the Uniform DMT with variable and uniform power-loading and with a conventional DMT system in a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) channel is presented.

Identity-based encryption (IBE) is one of the most important primitives in cryptography, and various security notions of IBE (e.g., IND-ID-CCA2, NM-ID-CCA2, IND-sID-CPA etc.) have been introduced. The relations among them have been clarified recently. This paper, for the first time, investigates the security of IBE in the universally composable (UC) framework. This paper first defines the UC-security of IBE, i.e., we define the ideal functionality of IBE, FIBE. We then show that UC-secure IBE is equivalent to conventionally-secure (IND-ID-CCA2-secure) IBE.

In this paper we analyze the characteristics of vehicle mobility and propose a novel Mobility Prediction Progressive Routing (MP2R) protocol for Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) that is based on cross-layer design. MP2R utilizes the additional gain provided by the directional antennas to improve link quality and connectivity; interference is reduced by the directional transmission. Each node learns its own position and speed and that of other nodes, and performs position prediction. (i) With the predicted progress and link quality, the forwarding decision of a packet is locally made, just before the packet is actually transmitted. In addition the load at the forwarder is considered in order to avoid congestion. (ii) The predicted geographic direction is used to control the beam of the directional antenna. The proposed MP2R protocol is especially suitable for forwarding burst traffic in highly mobile environments. Simulation results show that MP2R effectively reduces Packet Error Ratio (PER) compared with both topology-based routing (AODV [1], FSR [2]) and normal progressive routing (NADV [18]) in the IVC scenarios.

This paper presents a study to estimate the composition of an electric load, i.e. to determine the amount of each load class by the direct measurements of the total electric current waveform from instrument reading. Kalman filter algorithm is applied to estimate the electric load composition on a consumer side of a distributed power system. The electric load supplied from the different voltage level by using a non-ideal delta-wye transformer is also studied with consideration of the practical environment for a distributed power system.

In this paper, we address the issue of mobile positioning and tracking after measurements have been made on the distances and possibly directions between an MS (mobile station) and its nearby base stations (BS's). The measurements can come from the time of arrival (TOA), the time sum of arrival (TSOA), the time difference of arrival (TDOA), and the angle of arrival (AOA). They are in general corrupted with measurement noise and NLOS (non-line-of-sight) error. The NLOS error is the dominant factor that degrades the accuracy of mobile positioning. Assuming specific statistic models for the NLOS error, however, we propose a scheme that significantly reduces its effect. Regardless of which of the first three measurement types (i.e. TOA, TSOA, or TDOA) is used, the proposed scheme computes the MS location in a mathematically unified way. We also propose a method to identify the TOA measurements that are not or only slightly corrupted with NLOS errors. We call them nearly NLOS-error-free TOA measurements. From the signals associated with TOA measurements, AOA information can be obtained and used to aid the MS positioning. Finally, by combining the proposed MS positioning method with Kalman filtering, we propose a scheme to track the movement of the MS.

In this paper, we propose a converting technique based method to solve nonlinear multi-commodity network flow (NMNF) problems with a large number of capacity constraints and discuss the associated implementation. We have combined this method with a successive quadratic programming (SQP) method and a parallel dual-type (PDt) method possessing decomposition effects. We have tested our method in solving a kind of lattice-type network system examples of NMNF problems. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient for solving NMNF problems and successfully handles a large number of coupling capacity constraints. Furthermore, the computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm is more significant while the numbers of capacity constraints are increased.

A multiple-output function can be represented by a binary decision diagram for characteristic function (BDD_for_CF). This paper presents a method to represent multiple-output incompletely specified functions using BDD_for_CFs. An algorithm to reduce the widths of BDD_for_CFs is presented. This method is useful for decomposition of incompletely specified multiple-output functions. Experimental results for radix converters, adders, a multiplier, and lists of English words show that this method is useful for the synthesis of LUT cascades. An implementation of English words list by LUT cascades and an auxiliary memory is also shown.