The logic mapping problem and the problem of finding a largest sub-crossbar with no defects in a nano-crossbar with nonprogrammable-crosspoint defects and disconnected-wire defects are known to be NP-hard. This paper shows that for nano-crossbars with only disconnected-wire defects, the former remains NP-hard, while the latter can be solved in polynomial time.

Recent advances in cooperative communication and wireless Network Coding (NC) may lead to huge performance gains in relay systems. In this context, we focus on the two-way relay scenario, where two nodes exchange information via a common relay. We design a practical Superposition Coding (SC) based NC scheme for Decode-and-Forward (DF) half-duplex relaying, where the goal is to increase the achievable rate. By taking advantage of the direct link and by providing a suboptimal yet efficient power division among the superposed layers, our proposed SC two-way relaying scheme outperforms the reference schemes, including the well-known 3-step DF-NC scheme and the capacity of 2-step schemes for a large set of SNRs, while approaching closely the performance bound.

We proposed a method for reducing LCD motion blur in MPEG domain and analyzing the cause of LCD motion blur. The problem of LCD motion blur is caused by slow response time of liquid crystal and hold-type displaying method of LCDs. The proposed method uses MPEG motion vectors and frequency coefficients of DCT blocks to improve the motion blurs. First, we interpreted the aperture and response time effect of LCD in frequency domain then, modeled sharpening mask filters for the compensation. We confirmed the reduction of motion blurs in LCDs by a motion image simulator.

In this paper, we consider the behavior of an autoregressive (AR) detector for partial-response (PR) signaling against offtrack interference (OTI) environment in perpendicular magnetic recording. Based on the behavior, we derive the optimum branch metric to construct the detector by the Viterbi algorithm. We propose an optimum AR detector for OTI that considers an optimum branch metric calculation and an estimation of noise power due to OTI in order to calculate an accurate branch metric. To evaluate the reliability of soft-output likelihood values calculated by our proposed AR detector, we demonstrate a bit error rate performance (BER) of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes under OTI existing channel by computer simulation. Our simulation results show the proposed AR detector can achieve a better LDPC-coded BER performance than the conventional AR detector. We also show the BER performance of our proposal can keep within 0.5 dB of the case that perfect channel state information regarding OTI is used in the detector. In addition, we show that the partial-response maximum-likelihood (PRML) detector is robust against OTI even if OTI is not handled by the detector.

In this paper, we propose a new motion vector smoothing algorithm using weighted vector median filtering based on edge direction for frame interpolation. The proposed WVM (Weighted Vector Median) system adjusts the weighting values based on edge direction, which is derived from spatial coherence between the edge direction continuity of a moving object and motion vector (MV) reliability. The edge based weighting scheme removes the effect of outliers and irregular MVs from the MV smoothing process. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can correct wrong motion vectors and thus improve both the subjective and objective visual quality compared with conventional methods.

In this paper we propose an unsupervised method of optimizing structuring elements (SEs) used for impulse noise reduction in texture images through the opening operation which is one of the morphological operations. In this method, a genetic algorithm (GA), which can effectively search wide search spaces, is applied and the size of the shape of the SE is included in the design variables. Through experiments, it is shown that our new approach generally outperforms the conventional method.

The authors focus on the improvement of Visible Light Communication Identification (VLID) system that provides positioning information via LED light bulb, which is a part of Visible Light Communication (VLC) system. The conventional VLID system provides very low positioning estimation accuracy at room level. In our approach, neither additional infrastructure nor modification is required on the transmitter side. On the receiver side, 6-axis sensor is embedded to provide 3-axis of Azimuth and 3-axis of Tilt angulations information to perform positioning estimation. We verify the proposed system characteristics by making both empirical and numerical analysis, to confirm the effectiveness of proposed system. We define two words to justify the characteristic of the proposed system, which are Field-of-View (FOV: ψc) Limit and Sensitivity (RXS) Limit. Both FOV and Sensitivity Limits have crucial impact on positioning estimation accuracy. Intuitively, higher positioning accuracy can be achieved with smaller FOV configuration in any system that has FOV. Conversely, based on system characteristics of VLID, we propose a positioning estimation scheme, namely Switching Estimated Receiver Position (SwERP) yields high accuracy even with wide FOV configuration. Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of error distance and Root Mean Square of Error Distance (RMSED) between experimental positions and estimated receiver positions are used to indicate the system performance. We collected 440 samples from 3 receivers' FOV configurations altogether 1320 samples within the experimental area of 1200 mm5000 mm2050 mm. The results show that with the proposed scheme, the achievable RMSEDs are in the range of 298 and 463 mm under different FOV configurations, which attained the maximum accuracy improvement over 80% comparing to the one without positioning estimation scheme. The proposed system's achievable accuracy does not depend on transmitters' orientation; only one transmitter is required to perform positioning estimation.

Image registration is an important topic in medical image analysis. It is usually used in 2D mosaics to construct the whole image of a biological specimen or in 3D reconstruction to build up the structure of an examined specimen from a series of microscopic images. Nevertheless, owing to a variety of factors, including microscopic optics, mechanisms, sensors, and manipulation, there may be great differences between the acquired image slices even if they are adjacent. The common differences include the chromatic aberration as well as the geometry discrepancy that is caused by cuts, tears, folds, and deformation. They usually make the registration problem a difficult challenge to achieve. In this paper, we propose an efficient registration method, which consists of a feature-based registration approach based on analytic robust point matching (ARPM) and a refinement procedure of the feature-based Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (FLM), to automatically reconstruct 3D vessels of the rat brains from a series of microscopic images. The registration algorithm could speedily evaluate the spatial correspondence and geometric transformation between two point sets with different sizes. In addition, to achieve subpixel accuracy, an FLM method is used to refine the registered results. Due to the nonlinear characteristic of FLM method, it converges much faster than most other methods. We evaluate the performance of proposed method by comparing it with well-known thin-plate spline robust point matching (TPS-RPM) algorithm. The results indicate that the ARPM algorithm together with the FLM method is not only a robust but efficient method in image registration.

Square-related functions such as square, inverse square, square-root and inverse square-root operations are widely used in digital signal processing and digital communication algorithms, and their efficient realizations are commonly required to reduce the hardware complexity. In the implementation point of view, approximate realizations are often desired if they do not degrade performance significantly. In this paper, we propose new linear approximations for the square-related functions. The traditional linear approximations need multipliers to calculate slope offsets and tables to store initial offset values and slope values, whereas the proposed approximations exploit the inherent properties of square-related functions to linearly interpolate with only simple operations, such as shift, concatenation and addition, which are usually supported in modern VLSI systems. Regardless of the bit-width of the number system, more importantly, the maximum relative errors of the proposed approximations are bounded to 6.25% and 3.13% for square and square-root functions, respectively. For inverse square and inverse square-root functions, the maximum relative errors are bounded to 12.5% and 6.25% if the input operands are represented in 20 bits, respectively.

Introducing diffusion bonding of laminated thin metal plates to the fabrication of slotted waveguide arrays enlightens the high potential and the feasibility of multi-layer antennas with high-performance. It is a promising process with low cost even for a double-layer antenna, because the number of etching patterns for thin metal plates is only five. In this paper, a double-layer antenna for broadband characteristics is designed in 39 GHz band as demonstration. A 20 20-element antenna is composed of 2 2 sub-arrays by installing a partially-corporate feed circuit in the bottom layer underneath radiating waveguides in the top layer. The five-element sub-arrays in both the feeding and radiating parts are designed first. A new structure for the last slot coupler with shortened termination is also proposed to avoid an extra slot-free region when assembling the neighbor sub-arrays. As the simulation results by HFSS, the maximum gain of 34.55 dBi with the antenna efficiency of 85.5% is estimated at 38.5 GHz. The test antenna is fabricated by the diffusion bonding of thin copper plates. As the measurement results, a very high aperture efficiency of 83.2% with the directivity of 34.5 dBi is realized at the center frequency of 38.75 GHz, where the antenna gain of 34.4 dBi with the high antenna efficiency of 81.4% is achieved. The bandwidth of 5.0% defined as 1 dB down from the maximum gain is achieved.

Hydrogenated polymorphous Silicon allows to fabricate TFTs with very interesting characteristics including better threshold voltage stability than a-Si TFTs, lower leakage current than µc-Si:H TFTs and excellent uniformity. Investigation of threshold voltage shift mechanisms of pm-Si:H TFTs has shown a specific semiconductor material degradation with different activation energies compared to a-Si:H TFTs. TEM analysis has evidenced for the first time a significant structural difference between pm-Si:H and a-Si:H materials, in the TFT device configuration. Pm-Si:H appears to be very suitable for low cost and high performance AM-OLED fabrication.

This paper examines the structural relationships between Information Technology (IT) governance and Enterprise Architecture (EA), with the objective of enhancing business value in the enterprise society. Structural models consisting of four related hypotheses reveal the relationship between IT governance and EA in the improvement of business values. We statistically examined the hypotheses by analyzing validated questionnaire items from respondents within firms listed on the Japanese stock exchange who were qualified to answer them. We concluded that firms which have organizational ability controlled by IT governance are more likely to deliver business value based on IT portfolio management.

In this paper, we propose a new speaker-class modeling and its adaptation method for the LVCSR system and evaluate the method on the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ). In this method, closer speakers are selected from training speakers and the acoustic models are trained by using their utterances for each evaluation speaker. One of the major issues of the speaker-class model is determining the selection range of speakers. In order to solve the problem, several models which have a variety of speaker range are prepared for each evaluation speaker in advance, and the most proper model is selected on a likelihood basis in the recognition step. In addition, we improved the recognition performance using unsupervised speaker adaptation with the speaker-class models. In the recognition experiments, a significant improvement could be obtained by using the proposed speaker adaptation based on speaker-class models compared with the conventional adaptation method.

In this paper, we present the sexual dimorphism analysis in 3D human face and perform gender classification based on the result of sexual dimorphism analysis. Four types of features are extracted from a 3D human-face image. By using statistical methods, the existence of sexual dimorphism is demonstrated in 3D human face based on these features. The contributions of each feature to sexual dimorphism are quantified according to a novel criterion. The best gender classification rate is 94% by using SVMs and Matcher Weighting fusion method. This research adds to the knowledge of 3D faces in sexual dimorphism and affords a foundation that could be used to distinguish between male and female in 3D faces.

This paper proposes a method of correcting annotation errors in a treebank. By using a synchronous grammar, the method transforms parse trees containing annotation errors into the ones whose errors are corrected. The synchronous grammar is automatically induced from the treebank. We report an experimental result of applying our method to the Penn Treebank. The result demonstrates that our method corrects syntactic annotation errors with high precision.

We proposed a new motion vector (MV) smoothing using fuzzy weighting and vector median filtering for frame rate up-conversion. A fuzzy reasoning system adjusts the weighting values based on the local characteristics of MV field including block difference and block boundary distortion. The fuzzy weighting removes the affect of outliers and irregular MVs from the MV smoothing process. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently correct wrong MVs and thus improve visual quality of the interpolated frames better than conventional methods.

The construction of annotated corpora requires considerable manual effort. This paper presents a pragmatic method to minimize human intervention for the construction of Korean part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus. Instead of focusing on improving the performance of conventional automatic POS taggers, we devise a discriminative POS tagger which can selectively produce either a single analysis or multiple analyses based on the tagging reliability. The proposed approach uses two decision rules to judge the tagging reliability. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively control the quality of corpus and the amount of manual annotation by the threshold value of the rule.

This paper proposes a new multi-band received signal strength (MRSS) fingerprinting based indoor location system, which employs the frequency diversity on the conventional single-band received signal strength (RSS) fingerprinting based indoor location system. In the proposed system, the impacts of frequency diversity on the enhancements of positioning accuracy are analyzed. Effectiveness of the proposed system is proved by experimental approach, which was conducted in non line-of-sight (NLOS) environment under the area of 103 m2 at Yagami Campus, Keio University. WLAN access points, which simultaneously transmit dual-band signal of 2.4 and 5.2 GHz, are utilized as transmitters. Likewise, a dual-band WLAN receiver is utilized as a receiver. Signal distances calculated by both Manhattan and Euclidean were classified by K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier to illustrate the performance of the proposed system. The results confirmed that Frequency diversity attributions of multi-band signal provide accuracy improvement over 50% of the conventional single-band.

The singular points of fingerprints, viz. core and delta, are important referential points for the classification of fingerprints. Several conventional approaches such as the Poincare index method have been proposed; however, these approaches are not reliable with poor-quality fingerprints. This paper proposes a new core and delta detection employing singular candidate analysis and an extended relational graph. Singular candidate analysis allows the use both the local and global features of ridge direction patterns and realizes high tolerance to local image noise; this involves the extraction of locations where there is high probability of the existence of a singular point. Experimental results using the fingerprint image databases FVC2000 and FVC2002, which include several poor-quality images, show that the success rate of the proposed approach is 10% higher than that of the Poincare index method for singularity detection, although the average computation time is 15%-30% greater.

This paper proposes and verifies a specific absorption rate (SAR) measurement procedure for multi-antenna transmitters that requires measurement of two-dimensional electric field distributions for the number of antennas and calculation in order to obtain the three-dimensional SAR distributions for arbitrary weighting coefficients of the antennas prior to determining the average SAR. The proposed procedure is verified based on Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) calculation and measurement using electro-optic (EO) probes. For two reference dipoles, the differences in the 10 g SAR obtained based on the proposed procedure compared numerically and experimentally to that based on the original calculated three-dimensional SAR distribution are at most 4.8% and 3.6%, respectively, at 1950 MHz. At 3500 MHz, this difference is at most 5.2% in the numerical verification.