The visual secret sharing scheme (VSSS) proposed by Naor and Shamir provides a way to encrypt a secret black-white image into shares and decrypt the shares without using any cryptographic computation. This paper proposes an extension of VSSS to sharing of color or gray-scale images. In this paper (k,n) VSSS for images with J different colors is defined as a collection of J disjoint subsets in n-th product of a finite lattice. The subsets can be sequentially constructed as a solution of a certain simultaneous linear equation. In particular, the subsets are simply expressed in (n,n), (n-1,n) and (2,n) cases. Any collections of k-1 shares reveal no information on a secret image while stacking of k arbitrary shares reproduces the secret image.

Huynen has already provided a method to decompose a Mueller matrix in order to retrieve detailed target information in a polarimetric radar system. However, this decomposition sometimes fails in the presence of small error or noise in the elements of a Mueller matrix. This paper attempts to improve Huynen's decomposition method. First, we give the definition of stable decomposition and present an example, showing a problem of Huynen's approach. Then two methods are proposed to carry out stable decompositions, based on the nonlinear least square method and the Newton's method. Stability means the decomposition is not sensitive to noise. The proposed methods overcomes the problems on the unstable decomposition of Mueller matrix, and provides correct information of a target.

In this paper, we propose an idea for intramedia synchronization control using a method of end-to-end delay monitoring to estimate future delay in delay compensation protocol. The estimated value by Kalman filtering at the presentation site is used for feedback control to adjust the retrieval schedule at the source according to the network conditions. The proposed approach is applicable for the real time retrieving application where `tightness' of temporal synchronization is required. The retrieval schedule adjustment is achieved by two resynchronization mechanisms-retrieval offset adjustment and data unit skipping. The retrieval offset adjustment is performed along with a buffer level check in order to compensate for the change in delay jitter, while the data unit skipping control is performed to accelerate the recovery of unsynchronization period under severe conditions. Simulations are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. It is found that with a limited buffer size and tolerable latency in initial presentation, using a higher efficient delay estimator in our proposed resynchronization scheme, the synchronization performance can be improved particularly in the critically congested network condition. In the study, Kalman filtering is shown to perform better than the existing estimation methods using the previous measured jitter or the average value as an estimate.

Rapid system prototyping is one of the main applications for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). At the stage of rapid system prototyping, design specifications can often be changed since they cannot be determined completely. In this paper, layout design change is focused on and a layout reconfiguration algorithm is proposed for FPGAs. The target FPGA architecture is developed for transport processing. In order to implement more various circuits flexibly, it has three-input lookup tables (LUTs) as minimum logic cells. Since its logic granularity is finer than that of conventional FPGAs, it requires more routing resources to connect them and minimization of routing congestion is indispensable. In layout reconfiguration, the main problem is to add LUTs to initial layouts. Our algorithm consists of two steps: For given placement and global routing of LUTs, in Step 1 an added LUT is placed with allowing that the position of the added LUT may overlap that of a preplaced LUT; Then in Step 2 preplaced LUTs are moved to their adjacent positions so that the overlap of the LUT positions can be resolved. Global routes are updated corresponding to reconfiguration of placement. The algorithm keeps routing congestion small by evaluating global routes directly both in Steps 1 and 2. Especially in Step 2, if the minimum number of preplaced LUTs are moved to their adjacent positions, our algorithm minimizes routing congestion. Experimental results demonstrate that, if the number of added LUTs is at most 20% of the number of initial LUTs, our algorithm generates the reconfigured layouts whose routing congestion is as small as that obtained by executing a conventional placement and global routing algorithm. Run time of our algorithm is within approximately one second.

This paper proposes a new design method of a nonlinear filtering algorithm in continuous-time stochastic systems. The observed value consists of nonlinearly modulated signal and additive white Gaussian observation noise. The filtering algorithm is designed based on the same idea as the extended Kalman filter is obtained from the recursive least-squares Kalman filter in linear continuous-time stochastic systems. The proposed filter necessitates the information of the autocovariance function of the signal, the variance of the observation noise, the nonlinear observation function and its differentiated one with respect to the signal. The proposed filter is compared in estimation accuracy with the MAP filter both theoretically and numerically.

Let T1, , Tn be n spanning trees rooted at node r of graph G. If for any node v, n paths from r to v, each path in each spanning tree of T1, , Tn, are internally disjoint, then T1, , Tn are said to be independent spanning trees rooted at r. A graph G is called an n-channel graph if G has n independent spanning trees rooted at each node of G. We generalize the definition of n-channel graphs. If for any node v of G, among the n paths from r to v, each path in each spanning tree of T1, , Tn, there are k internally disjoint paths, then T1, , Tn are said to be (k,n)-independent spanning trees rooted at r of G. A graph G is called a (k,n)-channel graph if G has (k,n)-independent spanning trees rooted at each node of G. We study two fault-tolerant communication tasks in (k,n)-channel graphs. The first task is reliable broadcasting. We analyze the relation between the reliability and the efficiency of broadcasting in (k,n)-channel graphs. The second task is secure message distribution such that one node called the distributor attempts to send different messages safely to different nodes. We should keep each message secret from the nodes called adversaries. We give two message distribution schemes in (k,n)-channel graphs. The first scheme uses secret sharing, and it can tolerate up to t+k-n listening adversaries for any t < n if G is a (k,n)-channel graph. The second scheme uses unverifiable secret sharing, and it can tolerate up to t+k-n disrupting adversaries for any t < n/3 if G is a (k,n)-channel graph.

This paper addresses the optimum routing problem of multipoint connection in large-scale networks. A number of algorithms for routing of multipoint connection have been studied so far, most of them, however, assume the availability of complete network information. Herein, we study the problem under the condition that only partial information is available to routing nodes and that routing decision is carried out in a distributed cooperative manner. We consider the network being partitioned into clusters and propose a cluster-based routing approach for multipoint connection. Some basic principles for network clustering are discussed first. Next, the original multipoint routing problem is defined and is divided into two types of subproblems. The global optimum multicast tree then can be obtained asymptotically by solving the subproblems one after another iteratively. We propose an algorithm and evaluate it with computer simulations. By measuring the running time of the algorithm and the optimality of resultant multicast tree, we show analysis on the convergent property with varying network cluster sizes, multicast group sizes and network sizes. The presented approach has two main characteristics, 1) it can yield asymptotical optimum solutions for the routing of multipoint connection, and 2) the routing decisions can be made in the environment where only partial information is available to routing nodes.

The asymptotic behavior of the recurrence time with fidelity criterion is discussed. Let X= be a source and Y= a database. For a Δ>0 and an integer l>0 define (Y,X,Δ) as the minimum integer N satisfying dl(,) Δ subject to a fidelity criterion dl. In this paper the following two i. i. d. cases are considered: (A) Xi P and Yi Q, where P and Q are probability distributions on a finite alphabet, and (B) Xi N(0,1) and Yi N(0,1). In case (A) it is proved that (1/l)log2(Y,X,Δ) almost surely converges to a certain constant determined by P, Q and Δ as l. The Kac's lemma plays an important role in the proof on the convergence. In case (B) it is shown that there is a quantity related to (1/l)log2 (Y,X,Δ) that converges to the rate-distortion bound in almost sure sense.

Increasingly, 3D Graphics is becoming the main stream feature rather than the early adopters unique advantage in PC platform. In such circumstances, most of the graphics chips focus on the acceleration of the rendering capabilities. However, there are very few or almost no attempts made for the acceleration of the geometry process. This universal 3D graphics geometry processor offers a unique and optimized performance advantage for such 3D geometry calculations. By offloading such operations from the CPU, this 3D graphics geometry processor (hereinafter called 3DGP) delivers a well balanced 3D graphics acceleration environment in the PC.

Originally intended for application to B-ISDN, which is carrier oriented, ATM technology has been actively studied for application to LAN based environments since the beginning of the 1990s. One of the most notable things in LAN area is development of a rich set of application services. A number of technical specifications for major application services have been developed, which include LAN Emulation, IP over ATM, Multi-protocol over ATM, Voice and Telephony over ATM, as well as Native ATM services such as MPEG2 over ATM. Development of these new services raises new challenges related to traffic management. Keeping pace with the development, a number of traffic control mechanisms have also been developed to maximize the performance of these services. Traffic control and management techniques, however, are still in the early stage of their learning curve. Network engineers are facing challenging problems related to traffic management. This paper reviews major service-related technologies and discusses traffic management issues associated with these services. Especially, it describes the real world traffic management as practiced by average network engineers with state-of-the-art products. Although the thechnology developments have advanced through many research works, there seems to be a considerable gaps between the practice and principles. This paper discusses the traffic issues of ATM LAN from this perspective and points out some challenges for the future. Most of the difficulties in handling traffic issues stems from the differences in implementation details. To alleviate this difficulty, the introduction of a unified node model which describes the traffic handling capability of ATM nodes in sufficient detail is suggested.

BTS (Binary-tree Timing Simulator) is a waveform-based switch-level timing simulator for VLSI circuits and the primary goal is to obtain an accurate waveform during the transient period. To achieve high accuracy, the internal charge effect should be considered because the delay behavior of a CMOS gate is dramatically influenced by internal charges stored in the internal nodes. However, the delay estimation will become a difficult problem when the charge sharing effect is considered. Therefore, this paper presents a recursive algorithm based on Modified Threaded Binary (MTB) tree for efficiently performing the internal-charge-delay estimation in transistor groups using the switch-level delay model. The algorithm CSEE (Charge Sharing Effect Estimation) can determine the charge distribution among the internal nodes, and then increases the accuracy of the waveform approximate technique used in BTS.

A new type of fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer buried in a fiber connector housing was proposed. The transmission spectra revealed double peaks due to birefringence in the fiber and the peak separation showed a temperature dependence as large as -7. 7 MHz/deg, which was 2 orders of magnitude larger than that estimated from the thermal characteristics of its component materials.

Pb(ZrxTi1-x)O3 (PZT) thin films were prepared on various electrodes. When Ir system materials were used as electrodes, fatigue properties of PZT thin films were improved. Moreover, in the case of the PZT thin film on an Ir/IrO2 electrode, not only fatigue but imprint properties were clearly improved. We could find these improvements were caused by good barrier effect of IrO2 from secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS) analysis. By applying these Ir system electrodes, we fabricated stacked capacitors on polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) plugs. In spite of high temperature thermal processing, we found poly-Si plugs were ohmically connected with the bottom electrodes of the capacitors from hysteresis measurements and I-V characteristics, and could greatly expect them for practical use.

Many Ziv-Lempel algorithms have a similar property, that is, slow encoding and fast decoding. This paper proposes a simple improved Ziv-Lempel algorithm to encode a large amount of data quickly as well as compactly by using multiple-processor system.

A new numerical approach for the analysis of electromagnetic scattering from a body moving in an arbitrary direction is described. A time dependent grid generation is applied to solve these problems. We are treating this method for a quasi-stationary field. Some numerical results are compared with the exact ones and excellent agreement between them is obtained.

We show that under some conditions an attacker can break the public-key cryptosystem proposed by J. Schwenk and J. Eisfeld at Eurocrypt '96 which is based on the difficulty of factoring over the ring Z/nZ [x], even though its security is as intractable as the difficulty of factoring a rational integer. We apply attacks previously reported against RSA-type cryptosystems with a low exponent to the Schwenk-Eisfeld cryptosystem and show a method of breaking the Schwenk-Eisfeld signature with a low exponent.

We developed a glass ferrule fiber optic connector. During development, we also studied wear-resistant coating technology for preventing scratches on the surface of a glass ferrule. The method of coating was sputtering, and the material was alumina. We confirmed that a thin uniform coating could be formed on the ferrule surface to improve the durability of glass ferrule connectors.

This paper investigates some Z4 codes formed as the Z4-analog (Hensel lifting) of the binary BCH construction. Such codes with length 105 and dimension 13 have been constructed. They are described with their parameters. Some examples of their generator polynomials are given when Hamming weight and Lee weight are different.

Given a binary picture represented by a region quadtree, it is desirable to identify the amount of (rightward and downward) shifts of the foreground components such that it gives the minimum number of nodes of its quadtree. This problem is called "quadtree normalization. " For this problem, it is unknown whether there exists a linear time algorithm with respect to the size of given images (i. e. , the number of pixels). In this study, we investigate the "one-dimensional version" of the quadtree normalization problem, i. e. , given a binary string represented by a regional binary tree, the task is to identify the amount of (rightward) shift of the foreground components such that it gives the minimum number of nodes of its binary tree. We show that there exists a linear time algorithm for this version.

The showering arc waveforms generated when contact is being separate have poor reproducibility whose causes are not sufficiently clear. This paper describes that the contact surface conditions which change with the number of contact operations are deeply related to the showering arc waveforms. First, it is experimentally shown that the contacts' surface roughness increases with the number of contact operations, and the growth model of contact surface roughness is proposed based on the change of contact resistance for the number of contact operations. Second, the growth model of molten metal bridge is proposed based on the fact that the showering arc waveforms change with the number of contact operations and the evaluation indexes of showering arc are proposed.