This paper explains a mechanism of common-mode generation on a printed circuit board with a narrow ground pattern. A transmission line has its value of degree of unbalance. At a connection point of two transmission lines having different degrees of unbalance, common mode voltage is generated proportional to the difference, and it drives common mode current. The authors propose a method to evaluate common mode current distribution and verify it by measurement. Although calculated common mode current is larger than measured one by a few dBs, both of them are proportional to the degree of unbalance. An EMI reduction technique, 'unbalance matching,' is also proposed.

Macrobending characteristics of a newly developed hetero-core splicing sensor is investigated from the viewpoint of the practical use intended both for relatively large distortion monitoring and for liquid adhesion detection. The hetero-core sensor can be simply fabricated by fusion splicing of a hetero-core fiber portion as short as approximately 5 mm in length, which is inserted in a typical low-transmission-loss single mode fiber with a 9-µm core diameter for the wavelength of 1.3 µm as a fiber network line. Two types of the sensor are typically realized in terms of the core diameters of 3 and 5 µm for the inserted hetero-core portion which are referred to as 9-3-9 and 9-5-9 types, respectively , with showing their distinct bending loss characteristics. This paper deals with the explorative applications of the two types of hetero-core sensors in which a bending-to-linear displacement converter and a liquid adhesion sensor are successfully examined using a 9-5-9 structure with its low insertion loss and a cladding interactive 9-3-9 structure with its high sensitivity, respectively. The low-insertion loss 9-5-9 sensor has shown the capability of monitoring millimeters-order distortion in low transmission loss fiber networks. On the other hand, the 9-3-9 type has found to be a prospective sensor for liquid adhesion detection. Operational mechanisms for these two sensors are also discussed in terms both of optical leaks occurring at the hetero-core interfaces and of the build-up of cladding modes which might interrogate the outer cladding boundary conditions of the hetero-core sensor.

The wavelength demultiplexer, using cascaded optical fiber gratings and circulators, was proposed and developed for application to optically amplified wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) submarine cable systems with 100 GHz channel spacing. Our proposed demultiplexer cannot only achieve high wavelength selectivity, small excess loss and effective allocation of dispersion compensation fibers for each channel, but also be upgraded without affecting other existing channels. By using this demultiplexer, it has been successfully confirmed that 8 WDM channels were demultiplexed even after 6,000 km transmission including separate compensation of accumulated chromatic dispersion in each channel.

The subject of the paper is to give an overview and latest results on the Legal Firing Sequence Problem of Petri nets (LFS for short). LFS is very fundamental in the sense that it appears as a subproblem or a simpler form of various basic problems in Petri net theory, such as the well-known marking reachability problem, the minimum initial resource allocation problem, the liveness (of level 4) problem, the scheduling problem and so on. However, solving LFS generally is not easy: it is NP -hard even for Petri nets having very simple structures. This intractability of LFS may have been preventing us from producing efficient algorithms for those problems. So research on LFS from computational complexity point of view seems to be rewarding.

The legal firing sequence problem (LFS) asks if it is possible to fire each transition some prescribed number of times in a given Petri net. It is a fundamental problem in Petri net theory as it appears as a subproblem, or as a simplified version of marking reachability, minimum initial resource allocation, liveness, and some scheduling problems. It is also known to be NP-hard, however, even under various restrictions on nets (and on firing counts), and no efficient algorithm has been previously reported for any class of nets having general edge weights. We show in this paper that LFS can be solved in polynomial time (in O(n log n) time) for a subclass of state machines, called cacti, with arbitrary edge weights allowed (if each transition is asked to be fired exactly once).

As a new idea for analyzing the wave scattering and diffraction from a finite periodic surface, this paper proposes the periodic Fourier transform. By the periodic Fourier transform, the scattered wave is transformed into a periodic function which is further expanded into Fourier series. In terms of the inverse transformation, the scattered wave is shown to have an extended Floquet form, which is a 'Fourier series' with 'Fourier coefficients' given by band-limited Fourier integrals of amplitude functions. In case of the TE plane wave incident, an integral equation for the amplitude functions is obtained from the the boundary condition on the finite periodic surface. When the surface corrugation is small, in amplitude, compared with the wavelength, the integral equation is approximately solved by iteration to obtain the scattering cross section. Several properties and examples of the periodic Fourier transform are summarized in Appendix.

This paper describes the implementation of a Bragg grating-based strain-monitoring system on the Viaduc des Vaux bridge during its construction in 1997 and 1998. The bridge was constructed in a cantilevered, push/pull incremental launching method, and data obtained from two tests were shown to reveal interesting features of the box-girder strain response during the push and pull phases, particularly with regard to limit loads and local buckling. When appropriate, data were compared to data obtained from conventional resistive strain gages and from simple analytical models.

In this paper, the evaluation of emission from a PCB by using crosstalk between a low frequency signal trace and a digital signal trace is investigated. These signal traces are closely routed in parallel to each other on the different several signal planes in the PCB. It is shown experimentally that the coupled signal trace with a cable section causes drastic increase of emission from the PCB. From the measurement results of current distribution on the cable section, it is shown that this current distribution contributes to the increase of emission from the PCB. Therefore, emission increasing by coupling between signal traces is evaluated by crosstalk between them. The measurement results of radiation and the calculation results of crosstalk on the PCB (deviation from results of the PCB which is referred, respectively) agree with each other within 2 dB range or 3.5 dB range. This result shows that reduction effect of emission from the PCB can be predicted by calculation results of crosstalk. Moreover, it is shown that evaluation of emission level by using crosstalk is useful to decide PCB's structure for reduction of emission from a high-density assembled PCB. From the viewpoint of practical application, it is effective for the reduction of emission from a PCB to separate a low frequency signal trace from a high-speed digital signal trace by ground plane of a PCB.

Graph coloring is a fundamental problem, which often appears in various scheduling problems like the file transfer problem on computer networks. In this paper, we survey recent advances and results on the edge-coloring, the f-coloring, the [g,f]-coloring, and the total coloring problem for various classes of graphs such as bipartite graphs, series-parallel graphs, planar graphs, and graphs having fixed degeneracy, tree-width, genus, arboricity, unicyclic index or thickness. In particular, we review various upper bounds on the minimum numbers of colors required to color these classes of graphs, and present efficient sequential and parallel algorithms to find colorings of graphs with these numbers of colors.

A correlation-based technique for measuring Brillouin gain spectrum distribution along an optical fiber is proposed, which employs frequency-modulated pump and probe lightwaves. The spatial-resolution of about 40 cm is demonstrated, which cannot be realized by the conventional pulse-based technique.

This paper surveys how geometric information can be effectively used for efficient algorithms with focus on clustering problems. Given a complete weighted graph G of n vertices, is there a partition of the vertex set into k disjoint subsets so that the maximum weight of an innercluster edge (whose two endpoints both belong to the same subset) is minimized? This problem is known to be NP-complete even for k = 3. The case of k=2, that is, bipartition problem is solvable in polynomial time. On the other hand, in geometric setting where vertices are points in the plane and weights of edges equal the distances between corresponding points, the same problem is solvable in polynomial time even for k 3 as far as k is a fixed constant. For the case k=2, effective use of geometric property of an optimal solution leads to considerable improvement on the computational complexity. Other related topics are also discussed.

Since river levee collapse causes great damage, it is socially very important to prevent such disasters by using a monitoring system which can detect changes in the state of a river levee. To investigate the possibility of detecting the collapse of a levee slope at an early stage, we performed an experiment in which we used artificial rainfall and penetration to collapse a full-scale levee model, and measured the change in the levee state using a detection system during collapse. The system consists of sensor plates, a distributed fiber optic strain sensor, and a personal computer. With this system, the stretching produced in the sensor plates by the force resulting from the movement of the soil on the levee slope face is detected as strain by a sensing optical fiber fixed to the plates. Since the distributed fiber optic strain sensor can measure strain continuously and for a long distance along a fiber, it is suitable for monitoring civil structures such as river levees. The experiment confirmed that a change in a levee can be clearly detected when the slope face collapse progresses near the place where the sensor plates are buried. The results suggest the feasibility of being able to foresee the collapse of a levee slope.

This paper presents a new data hiding scheme via steganographic image transformation, which is different from conventional data hiding techniques. The transformation is achieved in the frequency domain and the concept of Fourier filtering method is used. An input image is transformed into a fractal image, which can be used in Computer Graphic (CG) applications. One of the main advantages of this scheme is the amount of data to be hidden (embedded) is equal to that of the host signal (generated fractal image) while it is in general limited in the conventional data hiding schemes. Also both the opened fractal image and the hidden original one can be properly used depending on the situation. Unauthorized users will not notice the "secret" original image behind the fractal image, but even if they know that there is a hidden image it will be difficult for them to estimate the original image from the transformed image. Only authorized users who know the proper keys can regenerate the original image. The proposed method is applicable not only as a security tool for multimedia contents on web pages but also as a steganographic secret communication method through fractal images.

Visualization of 3-D ultrasound images is a challenging task due to the noisy and fuzzy nature of ultrasound imaging. This paper presents an efficient volume rendering technique for 3-D ultrasound image. A preprocessing technique of 2-D truncated-median filtering is proposed to reduce speckle noise of the ultrasound image. This paper also introduces an adaptive boundary detection method to reduce the computation time for volume rendering of ultrasound image. The proposed technique is compared to the conventional volume rendering methods with respect to the computation time and the subjective image quality. According to the comparison study, the proposed volume rendering method shows good performance for visualization of 3-D ultrasound image.

We have developed a new disparity mapping technique for image morphing which prevents synthesized images from blurring and a fast rendering technique which realizes interactive morphing animation. In the image morphing rendering process, all pixels are moved according to their disparity maps and then distorted images are mixed with each other. Calculation costs of this process tend to be high because pixel per pixel moving and mixing are included. And if the accuracy of the disparity maps is low, synthesized images become blurred. This paper describes new two techniques for overcoming these problems. One is a disparity mapping technique by which the edges in each input image are accurately mapped to each other. This technique reduces blurring in synthesized images. The other is a data transformation technique by which the morphing rendering process is replaced with texture mapping, orthographic camera, α-brending and z-buffering. This transformation enables the morphing rendering process to be accelerated by 3D accelerators, thus enabling interactive morphing animations to be achieved on ordinary PCs.

The use of Internet for various business applications and resource sharing has grown tremendously over the last few years. Internet security has become an important issue for both academic and industrial sectors. Much related network security research has been conducted such as user authentication, data confidentiality, and data integrity. In some applications, a critical document can be divided into pieces and allocated in different locations over the Internet for security access concern. To access such an important document, one must reconstruct the divided pieces from different locations under the given Internet environment. In this paper, a probability model for reconstructing secret sharing and algorithms to perform share assignment are presented. Also, an evaluation algorithm to measure the probability of secret sharing reconstruction is proposed. Illustrative examples and simulation results are provided to demonstrate the applicability of our method.

To provide QoS guarantees for each connection, efficient scheduling algorithms, such as WFQ, have been proposed. These algorithms assume a certain amount of buffer is allocated for each connection to provide loss free transmission of packets. This buffer allocation policy, however, requires much buffer space especially when many connections are sharing a link. In this paper we propose the use of partial buffer sharing (PBS) policy combined with usage parameter control (UPC) for efficient buffer management and flexible QoS control in ATM switches. We evaluate the feasibility of the proposed method by solving a Markov model. We also show that using the proposed method, we can control the cell loss ratio (CLR) independently of the delay. Numerical evaluations are presented, which indicates the PBS combined with UPC significantly reduces the buffer size required to satisfy given cell loss ratios.

The mathematical theory of bicomplex electromagnetic waves in two-dimensional scattering and diffraction problems is developed. The Vekua's integral expression for the two-dimensional fields valid only in the closed source-free region is generalized into the radiating field. The boundary-value problems for scattering and diffraction are formulated in the bicomplex space. The complex function of a single variable, which obeys the Cauchy-Riemann relations and thus expresses low-frequency aspects of the near field at a wedge of the scatterer, is connected with the radiating field by an integral operator having a suitable kernel. The behaviors of this complex function in the whole space are discussed together with those of the far-zone field or the amplitude of angular spectrum. The Hilbert's factorization scheme is used to find out a linear transformation from the far-zone field to the bicomplex-valued function of a single variable. This transformation is shown to be unique. The new integral expression for the field scattered by a thin metallic strip is also obtained.

This paper describes embeddings of chordal rings and pyramids into mesh-connected computers with multiple buses which have a bus on each row and each column, called MCCMBs. MCCMBs have two types of communication. The one is local communication, provided by local links, and the other is global communication, provided by buses. By efficiently combining the two types of communication, optimal or efficient embeddings are achieved. For a large set of chordal rings, optimal embeddings, whose expansion, load, dilation and congestion are 1, are given. For pyramids, an efficient embedding based on a two phase strategy is presented. The embedding balances dilation and congestion.

The MC-CDMA (multi-carrier code division multiple access) technique is known to be appropriate for high data-rate wireless communications such as mobile multimedia communication due to its robustness to multipath fading and its capability of handling high data rates with a simple one-tap equalizer. In this paper, the performance of an MC-CDMA system employing antenna array at the base station in a fading channel is presented. Following the discussion of optimal beamformer not requiring explicit DOA (direction of arrival) or training signals, it is shown that the interference from other users within a cell can be significantly reduced for both reverse link (mobile to base station) and forward link (base station to mobile) using an MC-CDMA with antenna array, thus increasing the system's user-capacity. Computer simulations that demonstrate user-capacity improvement of the proposed approach are discussed.