Physical optics(PO) and the aperture field integration method (AFIM) give accurate and similar field patterns near the first few sidelobes of reflector antennas. It is widely accepted that the use of AFIM is restricted to norrower angles than PO. In this paper, uniform equivalent edge currents of PO and AFIM are compared analytically and their equivalence in high frequency in discussed. It is asymptotically verified that the patterns by AFIM are almost identical to PO fields in the full 360angular region, provided that AFIM uses the equivalent surface currents consisting of two components, that is, the geometrical optics(GO) reflected fields from the reflector and the incident fields from the feed source, the latter of which are often neglected. Slightly weaker equivalence is predicted for cross polarization patterns. Numerical comparison of PO and AFIM confirms all these results, the equivalence holds not only for large but also for a very small refiector of the order of one wavelength diameter.

The transform coding scheme is often used for data compression of images, but the blocking effects peculiar to the scheme appear more clearly in reproduced images as a coding rate (bits/pixel) decreases. These effects can sometimes be viewed as a periodical square-grid overlaying the images. In this paper,we propose a new method for selectively measuring the above blocking effects among several types of image degradation by means of the techniques of nonlinear signal processing for spectral infomation (cepstral techniques), in order to compare the amount of blocking effects for the different coding images. First a two-component model which consists of DC and AC images, is discussed from a viewpoint of subimage-by-subimage coding, and some basic properties of cepstral information for the model are investigated. Then we show a procedure to compute the cepstral information for two-dimensional image signals taking the horizontal and vertical directions ioto account, and introduce a cepstral mean square error (CMSE) as a new measure to estimate the amount of blocking effects. The computer simulation results for some test images using different coding schemes show that the amount of blocking effects in each image can be easily measured and estimated by this method even when the blocking effects appear slightly.

In this paper, quantization method which can keep the phase and gain characteristics of a reference filter is proposed. The proposed method uses a genetic algorithm and a simulated annealing algorithm. The objective function used in this method is described with two kinds of weighting functions for identifying the phase and gain characteristics respectively. Therefore, the quantization accuracy on the gain characteristic is independent of the accuracy on the phase characteristic. Further, the proposed algorithm can be applied to any types of filters, because the chromosome expresses only their coefficients values. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is verified by some experiments.

This paper presents a new method for designing IIR Nyquist filters with zero intersymbol interference. It is shown that IIR Nyquist filters with zero intersymbol interference have some constraints on frequency response, i.e., both magnitude and phase error in passband are dependent on stopband error. Therefore, the frequency response is required to optimize only in stopband. The proposed procedure is based on the formulation of an eigenvalue problem by using Remez multiple exchange algorithm in stopband. Then, the filter coefficients can be computed by solving the eigenvalue problem, and the optimal solution with equiripple stopband response is easily obtained by applying an iteration procedure. The proposed procedure is more computationally efficient than the conventional methods.

This paper describes a trial of evaluating the proper characteristics of multiple sound insulatain systems from their output responses contaminated by unknown background noises. The unknown parameters of sound insulation systems are first estimated on the basis of hte linear time series on an intensity scale, describing functionally the input-output relation of the systems. Then, their output probability distributions are predicted when an arbitrary input noise passes through these insulation systems.

This paper proposes a fast timing recovery method with a decision feedback equalizer for baudrate sampling. The proposed method features two special techniques. The first one is for coarse estimation of the sampling phase. Internal signals of the oversampled analog-to-digital converter at different phases are directly taken out for parallel evaluation. The second technique provides fine tuning with a phase-modification stepsize which is adaptively controlled by the residual intersymbol interference. Simulation results by a full-duplex digital transmission system with a multilevel line code show superiority of the proposed method. The coarse timing estimation and the fine tuning reduce 75% and 40% of the time required by the conventional method,respectively. The overall saving in timing recovery is almost 60% over the conventional method. The proposed method could easily be extended to other applications with a decision feedback equalizer.

The up and coming multimedia services are based on real-time high-speed networks. For efficient operation of such services, real-time and precise network management is essential. In this paper, we show that presently available MIB designs are severely inadequate to support real-time network management. We point out and analyze the management constraints and bottlenecks. The concept of quality of management of management information is introduced and its importance in practical network management is discussed. We have proposed a new MIB architecture that will raise the quality of management information to meet the requirements of managing high-speed networks and multimedia services. Experimental results from a prototype implementation of the new MIB architecture are presented.

We report recent progress in the development of Liquid Crystal(LC) materials for the TN-TFT and ECB-TFT technologies, which require LC materials with positive and negative dielectric anisotropy, respectively. Many kinds of new LC materials have been synthesized and have been evaluated based on their fundamental physical properties. We have succeeded in identifying new LC materials, and developing new LC mixtures based on those, so that the current typical requirements of TFT-LCDs e.g. fast switching times, low power consumption, good viewing angles and wide operation temperature ranges together with high reliability can be fulfilled.

The characteristics of a-Si bottom-gate TFT test devices with several kinds of inorganic "quasi-black matrix," such as metal, semiconductor, and insulator, on the top were investigated for various black matrix(BM) resistivities. In the Ia-Vg characteristics, for a BM sheet resistance of about1 1012 Ω/, a high off current and large Vth shift were observed due to the back-gating effects when the BM is charged up. Accrding to the ac dynamic characteristics, there was almost no leakage due to the capacitive coupling between source and drain after 16.6 msec(one frame) when the BM sheet resistance was above 7 1013 Ω/ . It was found that hydrogenated amorphous silicon germanium(a-SiGe:H) film, which has enough optical density, with the sheet resistance above the order of 1014 Ω/ is a promising candidate for an inorganic BM on TFT array.

Super twisted nematic (STN) liquid crystal displays(LCDs) using spiral polymer aligned nematic (SPAN) liquid crystals have been achieved by photo-polymerization of some kinds of chiral monoacrylates in liquid crystalline hosts.The spiral polymer made of a chiral monoacrylate in STN LCD has effect to reduce the driving voltage without any disadvantages for the STN LCD. The relation of chemical structure of a chiral monoacrylate and nature of spiral polymer is discussed.

The objective of this paper is to find a parametric representation for the vocal-tract log-area function that is directly and simply related to basic acoustic characteristics of the human vocal-tract. The importance of this representation is associated with the solution of the articulatory-to-acoustic inverse problem, where a simple mapping from the articulatory space onto the acoustic space can be very useful. The method is as follows: Firstly, given a corpus of log-area functions, a parametric model is derived following a factor analysis technique. After that, the articulatory space, defined by the parametric model, is filled with approximately uniformly distributed points, and the corresponding first three formant frequencies are calculated. These formants define an acoustic space onto which the articulatory space maps. In the next step, an independent component analysis technique is used to determine acoustic and articulatory coordinate systems whose components are as independent as possible. Finally, using singular value decomposition, acoustic and articulatory coordinate systems are rotated so that each of the first three components of the articulatory space has major influence on one, and only one, component of the acoustic space. An example showing how the proposed model can be applied to the solution of the articulatory-to-acoustic inverse problem is given at the end of the paper.

Adapting the principle of parametron oscillation, a small implantable temperature sensor requiring no internal power supply is described. Since this sensor's oscillation frequency is half that of the excitation frequency, the oscillated signal can be measured from the reception side, free of any signal, interference, simply by positioning the sensor and the excitation antenna so that; 1) they are separated up to 95 cm in the air; 2) a 41 cm gap, the phantom equivalent of the thickness of the human abdomen maintain between them. In the temperature-dependent quartz resonator sensor, oscillation occurs only when frequency and temperature correspond. The excitation power is then adjusted so that the frequency bandwidth narrows. As a result, the margin of error in measuring the temperature is minimized; (0.07).

To overcome the problem of narrow viewing angle in active matrix liquid crystal displasy(LCDs) in the twisted nematic mode(TN mode), we have proposed a new LCD mode using a bend-alignment cell with an optical compensator. In this new mode, we have successfully obtained a black state with almost no leakage over a wide viewing angle range with very fast response. We describe the fundamental principle and design rule of the optical compensator and discuss the properties obtained in theoretical and experimental term.

Because the match phase in OPS5-type production systems requires most of the system's execution time and memory accesses, we proposed hash-based parallel production systems, CPPS (Clustered Parallel Production Systems), based on the RETE algorithm for distributed memory parallel computers, or multicomputers to reduce such a bottleneck. CPPS was effective in speeding up the match phase, but still left room for optimizations. In this paper, we introduce software cache techniques to memory nodes in the CPPS as one of the optimizations, and implement it on a multicomputer, nCUBE2. The benchmark results show that the CPPS with the software cache is about 2-fold faster than the original, and more than 7-fold faster than the simple hash method proposed by Acharya et al. for a large scale problem. The speed-up can be attributed to decreased communication costs.

An attenuation correction method was proposed for laser-produced plasma emission computed tomography (ECT), which is based on a relation of the attenuation coefficient and the emission coefficient in plasma. Simulation results show that the reconstructed images are dramatically improved in comparison to the reconstructions without attenuation correction.

Flurorinated liquid crystal compounds having fluorophenyl, difluorophenyl and trifluorophenyl moieties combined with ester linkages, 1,2-ethylenes and covalent bonds were prepared and checked for their physical properties i.e. mesophases, dielectric and optical anisotropy. viscosity, pretilt angle and threshold voltage. By introducing fluorine atom(s) into the molecules, optical anisotropy and threshold voltage decreased, though the nematic temperature range diminished. The investigated compounds were all chemically stable and by using the compounds nematic liquid crystalline mixtures having low threshold voltage, low viscosity, large optical anisotropy and wide nematic ranges which were suitable for AM-LCDs, could be obtained.

A protocol completion method is proposed to transform protocols synthesized from service specifications into error-free protocols. Communication service specifications described by message sequence charts can be synthesized into protocols. The synthesized protocols may include latent exceptional behaviors that are beyond the given service specifications. Therefore, even if the service specifications themselves are verified, these exceptional behaviors may produce protocol errors such as deadlock states or unspecified reception. Error-free protocols can be obtained from error-free service specifications by synthesizing and then completing the synthesized protocols. By taking account of each service specification through protocol completion, every exceptional behavior can be detected in the protocol entities including erroneous exceptional behaviors. This function can also be applied to resolution of feature interactions. The proposed method is applied to the synthesis of the X.227 protocol from its partial service specifications.

In the usual optical flow detection, the gradient constraint, which expresses the relationship between the gradient of the image intensity and its motion, is combined with the least-squares criterion. This criterion means assuming that only the time derivative of the image intensity contains noise. In this paper, we assume that all image derivatives contain noise and derive a new optical flow detection technique. Since this method requires the knowledge about the covariance matrix of the noise, we also discuss a method for its estimation. Our experiments show that the proposed method can compute optical flow more accurately than the conventional method.

The uncertainty involved in the gradient constraint for optical flow detection is often modeled as constant Gaussian noise added to the time-derivative of the image intensity. In this paper, we examine this modeling closely and investigate the error behavior by experiments. Our result indicates that the error depends on both the spatial derivatives and the image motion. We propose alternative uncertainty models based on our experiments. It is shown that the optical flow computation algorithms based on them can detect more accurate optical flow than the conventional least-squares method.

This paper is a brief survey of mobile applications of meteor burst communications (MBC). Though the capacity of MBC systems is generally not large, this unique long distance communication method has at least two selling points when applied to mobiles. First of all, it is cheap. Secondly, it can easily offer nationwide seamless service. Thus, since the late 1980s, mobile MBC systems have been attracting interests of the industry. Although MBC is today a well established communication technique, there are some difficulties to be overcome before it is widely applied to mobile systems. Two most serious problems are the rather large antenna size and high transmitter power inherent to this beyond line of sight communication which relies on weak reflections of low VHF (typically 35 to 50 MHz) radio waves from ionized meteor trails. Some reduced sized antennas which can be mounted on the roofs of trucks have been tested. The problem of large peak power (a few hundred watts for mobile remotes) is much alleviated by the very low duty cycle (usually less than 1%) of remote transmitters due to their bursty transmissions responding to the probe signals from the master station via infrequent meteor reflections. In this paper, some land and maritime mobile MBC systems are brieflyintroduced.