The applications of biometrics in the real world include various types of large-scale "one-to-many" identification, which require high performance classification technology. This paper presents a system with a classification algorithm that integrates multiple features observed in a set of fingerprints and uses them, to pre-select candidates, for more efficient personal identification from a very large fingerprint enrollment database. The algorithm determines a fingerprint's pattern type by using both ridge structure analysis and direction-based neural networks. It measures such additional feature characteristics as core-delta distance and ridge counts in parallel, along with confidence indexes associated with each feature. The pre-selector then integrates the set of obtained features from multiple fingers, after weighting them according to each feature's inherent ability to contribute to the selection process and the expected errors in observations of that feature. The system calculates the similarity between pairs of sets on the basis of feature differences, statistically evaluates the conditional probability of each pair being a correct match, and selects most similar collection of candidates for detailed matching. Experimental results confirm that it achieves an effective pre-selecting capability of 0.2% average selection (false acceptance or penetration) rate with 2% selection error (false rejection) rate.

Whispering-Gallery mode resonator method has been presented for complex permittivity evaluation of low loss dielectric materials in millimeter wave region. As a problem, it has been found that the evaluation error slightly dependens on the frequency for a sample. It comes from approximated analysis which is used in the procedure. In this paper, a mode-matching method is applied to this evaluation technique to have improvement of the measrued results. It is confirmed experimentally that reliability of the presented method is improved for the millimeter wave permittivity measurement.

In this paper, a lifting implementation of variable-coefficient invertible deinterlacer with embedded motion detector is proposed. As previous works, the authors have developed invertible deinterlacing that suppresses comb-tooth artifacts caused by field interleaving for interlaced scanning video, which affect the quality of intraframe-based codec such as Motion-JPEG2000. To improve the local adaptability for given pictures, its variable-coefficient processing with motion detection has also been proposed so that filters can be changed according to local properties of motion pictures, while maintaining the invertibility. In this paper, it is shown that the variable-coefficient invertible deinterlacing can be realized by a lifting-based simple hardware architecture, and motion detector can also be embedded. Both of the motion detection and deinterlacing filters are shared by a special choice of their coefficients, and by adaptive selection of deinterlacing filters. The significance of our proposed architecture is verified by showing synthesis results from the VHDL models. The proposed implementation with embedded motion detector achieves about 28% reduction of the gate count compared with the corresponding separate implementation.

This paper presents an algorithm for fingerprint image restoration using Digital Reaction-Diffusion System (DRDS). The DRDS is a model of a discrete-time discrete-space nonlinear reaction-diffusion dynamical system, which is useful for generating biological textures, patterns and structures. This paper focuses on the design of a fingerprint restoration algorithm that combines (i) a ridge orientation estimation technique using an iterative coarse-to-fine processing strategy and (ii) an adaptive DRDS having a capability of enhancing low-quality fingerprint images using the estimated ridge orientation. The phase-only image matching technique is employed for evaluating the similarity between an original fingerprint image and a restored image. The proposed algorithm may be useful for person identification applications using fingerprint images.

A new technique to reduce the isolation network's size in a Marchand balun needed for perfect all-port matching and isolation is proposed. The proposed isolation circuit is realized using a coupled-line phase-inverter in place of the bulky 180line section that has been previously proposed. Analysis of the proposed circuit yields the required relationship between coupling coefficient and electrical length of the coupler. Based on the design equations, the circuit is experimentally demonstrated at 1.8 GHz and has shown excellent results. The obtained output return loss and isolation loss are more than 18 dB and 40 dB, respectively. The proposed balun was then applied to the application of a doubled-balanced ring-diode mixer. The designed mixer achieves a low conversion loss of 6 dB at its operating frequency, which is 1.5 dB lower than for a doubled-balanced diode mixer using a conventional impedance-transforming Marchand balun. The RF-IF and LO-IF isolations are well below 25 dB and 18 dB across 1 GHz RF operating bandwidth, respectively.

A pilot needs operational information about wind over sea as well as wave height to provide safety of hydroplane landing on water. Near-surface wind speed and direction can be obtained with an airborne microwave scatterometer, a radar designed for measuring the scatter characteristics of a surface. Mostly narrow-beam antennas are applied for such wind measurement. Unfortunately, a microwave narrow-beam antenna has considerable size that hampers its placement on flying apparatus. In this connection, a possibility to apply a conventional airborne radar altimeter as a scatterometer with a nadir-looking wide-beam antenna in conjunction with simultaneous range Doppler discrimination techniques for recovering the wind vector over sea at low speed of flight is discussed, and measuring algorithms of sea surface wind speed and direction are proposed. The principle considered and algorithms proposed in the paper can be used for creation an airborne radar system for operational measurement of the sea roughness characteristics and for safe landing of a hydroplane on water.

This paper describes a new training method of average voice model for speech synthesis in which arbitrary speaker's voice is generated based on speaker adaptation. When the amount of training data is limited, the distributions of average voice model often have bias depending on speaker and/or gender and this will degrade the quality of synthetic speech. In the proposed method, to reduce the influence of speaker dependence, we incorporate a context clustering technique called shared decision tree context clustering and speaker adaptive training into the training procedure of average voice model. From the results of subjective tests, we show that the average voice model trained using the proposed method generates more natural sounding speech than the conventional average voice model. Moreover, it is shown that voice characteristics and prosodic features of synthetic speech generated from the adapted model using the proposed method are closer to the target speaker than the conventional method.

A technique for the design of circular- and racetrack-shaped NRD guide ring resonators was developed based on the mode coupling theory. Besides the operating mode, a parasitic mode is generated at curved sections of the resonator as a result of the mode conversion. Resonance of the NRD guide ring resonator is derived by characteristic equations of the coupled modes and then employed in making the design diagrams, which are useful for determining the dimensions of the ring resonators. It is shown that the discrepancy between the experimental results and previous theory can be resolved by using the present theory. Low loss, small-sized ring resonators with curvature radii of less than 5.3 mm were fabricated at 60 GHz and a band rejection performance of more than 30 dB was observed. Moreover, a procedure for the design of the channel dropping filter was developed and a 2-pole filter, which has great advantages such as a low insertion loss of 1.2 dB and a compact size smaller than that of a golf ball, was successfully developed by using two racetrack-shaped ring resonators.

The millimeter wave bandpass filter using the Whispering-Gallery mode (WG mode) dielectric disk resonators is presented in this paper. A 4 stage maximally flat bandpass filter is constructed with the PTFE disk resonators. For the filter design, the coupling coefficients of this mode in the coupled disk resonators are calculated by an approximated separation of variables method. Furthermore, the external Q values of the disk resonator excited by a dielectric waveguide are investigated experimentally. Designed center frequency is 60 GHz and 3 dB band width is 150 MHz. Furthermore, as an attempt to improve the spurious characteristics, another filter structure which consists of some kinds of dielectric disk is tested. As a result, some spurious responses are reduced considerably.

A robust adaptive filtering algorithm was established recently (I. Yamada, K. Slavakis, K. Yamada 2002) based on the interactive use of statistical noise information and the ideas developed originally for efficient algorithmic solutions to the convex feasibility problems. The algorithm is computationally efficient and robust to noise because it requires only an iterative parallel projection onto a series of closed half spaces highly expected to contain the unknown system to be identified and is free from the computational load of solving a system of linear equations. In this letter, we show the potential applicability of the adaptive algorithm to the identification problem for the second order Volterra systems. The numerical examples demonstrate that a straightforward application of the algorithm to the problem soundly realizes fast and stable convergence for highly colored excited speech like input signals in possibly noisy environments.

Computation of scale space images requires numerical integration of partial differential equations, which demands large computational costs especially in nonlinear cases. In this paper, we present a computational scheme for nonlinear scale spaces based on iterated filtering of original images. This scheme is found to be a special case of numerical integration with a particularly adapted integration steplength. We show the stability of the iteration with local windows and that with global ones and analyze the deformation of edge waveforms in the filtering. Computational costs are evaluated experimentally for both local and global windows and finally we apply the nonlinear multi-scale smoothing to contrast enhancement of images.

In this paper, an optical signal processing beam forming network (BFN) for two-dimensional (2-D) beam steering is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Two lightwaves, called the signal and reference, are both Fourier transformed, combined, and then down-converted into RF signals using an optical heterodyne technique. A simple combination of orthogonal one-dimensional position scannings of the signal and reference lightwaves generates RF signals with phase distributions for 2-D beam steering. The system operation and optical losses are theoretically analyzed. Using graded index fiber (GIF) lensed single mode fibers (SMFs), total optical loss of the sampling fiber array is evaluated to be 4.5 dB from the fiber to fiber loss measurements. Using an experimental optical signal processing BFN at 25 GHz, 2-D beam steering is demonstrated at 0, 10, 20, and 30through the measured amplitudes and phases of RF signals for 16 position sets of the signal and reference fibers. The proposed method has the potential to provide ultra-fast beam scanning by utilizing optical switching technologies.

A frequency-tuning method in the microwave region, which maintains a high unloaded Q-factor, was demonstrated using a double-sapphire-loaded cavity which operates on the Whispering Gallery mode, WGH9,1,0. Two adjacent nominally identical sapphire cylinders were positioned in a copper cavity and tuned by changing their relative coupling. A frequency tuning range of 85 MHz and a maximum unloaded Q-factor of 1.3 105 was experimentally measured at room temperature. This is only 13% less than the single resonator Q-factor, which is a small compromise to pay for the increased tuning capacity.

A clustering scheme for ad hoc networks is aimed at managing a number of mobile devices by utilizing hierarchical structure of the networks. In order to construct and maintain an effective hierarchical structure in ad hoc networks where mobile devices may move at high mobility, the following requirements must be satisfied. (1) The role of each mobile device for the hierarchical structure is adaptive to dynamic change of the topology of the ad hoc networks. The role of each mobile device should thus change autonomously based on local information in each mobile device. (2) The overhead for management of the hierarchical structure is small. The number of mobile devices in each cluster should thus be almost equivalent. This paper proposes an adaptive multihop clustering scheme for highly mobile ad hoc networks. The results obtained by extensive simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme does not depend on mobility and node degree of mobile devices in the network, which satisfy the above requirements.

One of the most basic characteristics of the image is accompanied by its blur. It was 1962 that I had discovered for the first time in the world that the blur was a Gaussian type. In this paper the outline is described about historical details concerning this circumstances.

In this paper, we investigate the problem how to construct integer codes capable of correcting any single error in the set {1,t,...,tk-1} and generalize our results to obtain (e1,e2,...,es) single error correctable codes where ei's are different elements in A. Moreover, we shall give the exact form of the check matrix in most of the classes considered in this paper.

We demonstrate polarization-independent and highly-efficient optical fiber wavelength converters in a 10 Gb/s NRZ transmission system. They are based on synchronous phase or frequency modulations of the two orthogonally polarized pump lights, and can suppress not only the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) but also the spread of the converted spectrum without modulating the signal light.

In this letter, we present a new IPv6 multihoming scheme, which complements in both load sharing and delay aspects. The advantages of the proposed scheme are as follows: 1) it provides efficient load sharing algorithm. 2) Since it distributes concentrated tunneling overhead to many other border routers, it can solve a point of failure problem. 3) Finally, it can drastically reduce end-to-end delay by means of establishing alternative optimized path. The simulation results show the distinct performance of our approach.

In the problem of determining the major frequency components of a signal disturbed by noise, a model selection criterion has been proposed. In this paper, the criterion has been extended to cover a penalized cost function that yields a componentwise shrinkage estimator, and it exhibited a consistent model selection when the proposed criterion was used. Then, a simple numerical simulation was conducted, and it was found that the proposed criterion with an empirically estimated componentwise shrinkage estimator outperforms the original criterion.

An adaptive blind signal separation filter is proposed using a risk-sensitive criterion framework. This criterion adopts an exponential type function. Hence, the proposed criterion varies the consideration weight of an adaptation quantity depending on errors in the estimates: the adaptation is accelerated when the estimation error is large, and unnecessary acceleration of the adaptation does not occur close to convergence. In addition, since the algorithm derivation process relates to an H filtering, the derived algorithm has robustness to perturbations or estimation errors. Hence, this method converges faster than conventional least squares methods. Such effectiveness of the new algorithm is demonstrated by simulation.