The perfect matched layer (PML) is formulated for the use in the constrained interpolation profile (CIP) method. Numerical results are presented to examine the performance of the proposed formulation of the PML in the case of two-dimensional TM wave. The results show that the proposed methods suppress the reflection effectively in comparison with the natural absorbing boundary condition of the CIP method. We have two methods to formulate the PML, and it is shown that the both methods have equal characteristics.

We theoretically analyze the performance of coherent ultrashort light pulse code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communication systems with a nonlinear optical thresholder. The coherent ultrashort light pulse CDMA is a promising system for an optical local area network (LAN) due to its advantages of asynchronous transmission, high information security, multiple access capability, and optical processing. The nonlinear optical thresholder is based on frequency chirping induced by self-phase modulation (SPM) in optical fiber, and discriminates an ultrashort pulse from multiple access interference (MAI) with picosecond duration. The numerical results show that the thermal noise caused in a photodetector dominates the bit error rate (BER). BER decreases as the fiber length in the nonlinear thresholder and the photocurrent difference in the photodetector increase. Using the nonlinear optical thresholder allows for the response time of the photodetector to be at least 100 times the duration of the ultrashort pulses. We also show that the optimum cut-off frequency at the nonlinear thresholder to achieve the minimum BER increases with fiber length, the total number of users, and the load resistance in the photodetector.

Fingerprints are useful for biometric purposes because of their well known properties of distinctiveness and persistence over time. However, owing to skin conditions or incorrect finger pressure, original fingerprint images always contain noise. Especially, some of them contain useless components, which are often mistaken for the terminations that are an essential minutia of a fingerprint. Mathematical Morphology (MM) is a powerful tool in image processing. In this paper, we propose a linear time algorithm to eliminate impulsive noise and useless components, which employs generalized and ordinary morphological operators based on Euclidean distance transform. There are two contributions. The first is the simple and efficient MM method to eliminate impulsive noise, which can be restricted to a minimum number of pixels. We know the performance of MM is heavily dependent on structuring elements (SEs), but finding an optimal SE is a difficult and nontrivial task. So the second contribution is providing an automatic approach without any experiential parameter for choosing appropriate SEs to eliminate useless components. We have developed a novel algorithm for the binarization of fingerprint images [1]. The information of distance transform values can be obtained directly from the binarization phase. The results show that using this method on fingerprint images with impulsive noise and useless components is faster than existing denoising methods and achieves better quality than earlier methods.

This paper analyzes automation surprises in human-machine systems with time information. Automation surprises are phenomena such that the underlying machine's behavior diverges from user's intention and may lead to critical situations. Thus, designing human-machine systems without automation surprises is one of fundamental issues to achieve reliable user interaction with the machines. In this paper, we focus on timed human-machine interaction and address their formal aspects. The presented framework is essentially an extension of untimed human-machine interaction and will cover the previously proposed methodologies. We employ timed automata as a model of human-machine systems with time information. Modeling the human-machine systems as timed automata enables one to deal with not only discrete behavior but also time constraints. Then, by introducing the concept of timed simulation of the machine model and the user model, conditions which guarantee the nonexistence of automation surprises are derived. Finally, we construct a composite model in which a machine model and a user model evolve concurrently and show that automation surprises can be detected by solving a reachability problem in the composite model.

The homomorphic property of the public key cryptosystem has been exploited in order to achieve asymmetric fingerprinting such that only a buyer can obtain fingerprinted content. However, this requires many computations and a wide-band network channel because the entire uncompressed content must be encrypted based on the public key cryptosystem. In this paper, instead of the homomorphic property, we introduce the management of the enciphering keys for the symmetric cryptosystem. Based on a buyer's identity, a trusted center issues the buyer a partial sequence which is one of the two elements in the entire sequence. Although a merchant shares the entire sequence with the center, he cannot extract the buyer's key sequence from it. Such an information gap enables our protocol to be asymmetric and efficient. For each packet of content, the merchant produces two marked packets that contains a "0" or "1" information bit, and they are enciphered using the two elements from the entire sequence. Subsequently, the buyer obtains the two ciphertexts (the encrypted marked packets) containing the information bits of his identity. Since the merchant does not know the ciphertext decrypted by the buyer, an asymmetric property is achieved. In our protocol, before trade between a buyer and a merchant, the merchant can produce and compress the marked packets; this enables the reduction of both the computational costs for the encryption and the amount of data for transmission. Since only the enciphering operation is performed by a merchant in the on-line protocol, real-time operation may be possible.

This paper presents fingerprint image enhancement and rotation schemes that improve the identification accuracy with the pixel-parallel processing of pixels. In the schemes, the range of the fingerprint sensor is adjusted to the finger state, the captured image is retouched to obtain the suitable image for identification, and the image is rotated to the correct angle on the pixel array. Sensor and pixel circuits that provide these operations were devised and a test chip was fabricated using 0.25-µm CMOS and the sensor process. It was confirmed in 150,000 identification tests that the schemes reduce the false rejection rate to 6.17% from 30.59%, when the false acceptance rate is 0.1%.

This paper describes a method of generating F0 contours from natural F0 segmental shapes for speech synthesis. The extracted shapes of the F0 units are basically held invariant by eliminating any averaging operations in the analysis phase and by minimizing modification operations in the synthesis phase. The use of natural F0 shapes has great potential to cover a wide variety of speaking styles with the same framework, including not only read-aloud speech, but also dialogues and emotional speech. A linear-regression statistical model is used to "manipulate" the stored raw F0 shapes to build them up into a sentential F0 contour. Through experimental evaluations, the proposed model is shown to provide stable and robust F0 contour prediction for various speakers. By using this model, linguistically derived information about a sentence can be directly mapped, in a purely data-driven manner, to acoustic F0 values of the sentential intonation contour for a given target speaker.

The application of Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (O-STBC) as the encoding scheme in the presence of "non-quasi-static" fading was considered. A simple and efficient adaptive method of channel estimation based on the interpolation of estimates acquired at the pre-amble and post-amble of framed blocks of information is developed. Moreover, the proposed method is proven, both theoretically and by simulations, to outperform the alternative of channel tracking, despite its significant low complexity.

Flash bulk files downloading in style of P2P through perpendicular pattern becomes more popular recently. Many peers download different pieces of shared files from the source in parallel. They try to reconstruct complete files by exchanging needed pieces with other downloading peers. The throughput of entire downloading community, as well as the perceived downloading rate of each peer, greatly depends on uploading bandwidth contributed by every individual peer. Unfortunately, without proper built-in incentive mechanism, peers inherently tend to relentlessly download while intentionally limiting their uploading bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a both effective and efficient incentive approach--Reciprocity, which is only based on end-to-end measurement and reaction: a peer caps uploading rate to each of its peers at the rate that is proportional to its downloading rate from that one. It requires no centralized control, or electronic monetary payment, or certification. Preliminary experiments' results reveal that this approach offers favorable performance for cooperative peers, while effectively punishing defective ones.

Geometrical properties of the lifting-up technique in support vector machines (SVMs) are discussed here. In many applications, an SVM finds the optimal inhomogeneous separating hyperplane in terms of margins while some of the theoretical analyses on SVMs have treated only homogeneous hyperplanes for simplicity. Although they seem equivalent due to the so-called lifting-up technique, they differ in fact and the solution of the homogeneous SVM with lifting-up strongly depends on the parameter of lifting-up. It is also shown that the solution approaches that of the inhomogeneous SVM in the asymptotic case that the parameter goes to infinity.

In the floorplan design of System-on-Chip (SOC), Buffer Site Approach (BSA) has been used to relax the buffer congestion problem. However, for a floorplan with dominant wide bus, BSA may instead worsen the congestion. Our proposed Enhanced Buffer Site Approach (EBSA) extends existing BSA in a way that buffers of dominant wide bus can be distributed more evenly while reserving the same fast operation speed as BSA does. Experiments have been performed to integrate our model into an iterative floorplanning algorithm, and the results reveal that buffer congestion in a floorplan with dominant wide bus can be much abated.

Multi-projector technology has been under consideration in recent years. This technology allows the generation of wide field of view and high-resolution images in a cost-effective manner. It is expected to be applied extensively to training simulators where vivid immersive sensations and precision are required. However, in many systems the viewing frustums cannot be automatically assigned for distributed rendering, and the required manual setup is complicated and difficult. This is because the camera should be coincide exactly with a desired eye point to avoid perspective distortions. For the actual applications, the camera is seldom able to be set up at the desired eye point because of physical constraints, e.g., a narrow cockpit with many instruments. To resolve this issue, we have developed a "virtual camera method" that yields high-precision calibration regardless of the camera position. This method takes advantage of the quadratic nature of the display surface. We developed a practical real-time multi-projector display system for applications such as training simulators, that require high-accuracy in geometry and rapid response time.

Our group is exploring interactive multi- and hypermedia, especially applied to virtual and mixed reality multimodal groupware systems. We are researching user interfaces to control source→sink transmissions in synchronous groupware (like teleconferences, chatspaces, virtual concerts, etc.). We have developed two interfaces for privacy visualization of narrowcasting (selection) functions in collaborative virtual environments (CVES): for a workstation WIMP (windows/icon/menu/pointer) GUI (graphical user interface), and for networked mobile devices, 2.5- and 3rd-generation mobile phones. The interfaces are integrated with other CVE clients, interoperating with a heterogeneous multimodal groupware suite, including stereographic panoramic browsers and spatial audio backends & speaker arrays. The narrowcasting operations comprise an idiom for selective attention, presence, and privacy-- an infrastructure for rich conferencing capability.

Digital watermarking used for fingerprinting may receive a collusion attack; two or more users collude, compare their data, find a part of embedded watermarks, and make an unauthorized copy by masking their identities. In this paper, assuming that at most c users collude, we give a characterization of the fingerprinting codes that have the best security index in a sense of "(c,p/q)-secureness" proposed by Orihara et al. The characterization is expressed in terms of intersecting families of sets. Using a block design, we also show that a distributor of data can only find asymptotically a set of c users including at least one culprit, no matter how good fingerprinting code is used.

Conventional video compression methods generally require a large amount of computation in the encoding process because they perform motion estimations. In order to reduce the encoding complexity for video compression, this paper proposes a new video compression method based on low-density parity check codes. The proposed method is suitable for resource-constrained devices such as mobile phones and satellite cameras.

Traceability codes are used in schemes that prevent illegal redistribution of digital content. In this Letter, we use Chinese Reminder Theorem codes to construct traceability codes. Both the code parameters and the traitor identification process take into account the non-uniformity of the alphabet of Chinese Reminder Theorem codes. Moreover it is shown that the identification process can be done in polynomial time using list decoding techniques.

In this study, we propose a new acoustic model including the human ear canal and a thin tube earphone. The use of a tube earphone enables simultaneous listening of both virtual and real surrounding sound. First, we perform acoustic FDTD (finite difference time domain) simulations using an MRI head model with ear canals. The calculated external impedance viewed from the eardrum numerically shows that the influence of the inserted tube is small. A listening experiment with six subjects also confirms the effectiveness of a tube earphone. Second, we calculate HRTFs (head-related transfer functions) for eight directions in the horizontal plane to realize sound localization with a tube earphone. We also design inverse filters based on the propagation calculations including the characteristics of tube earphones. Finally we evaluate the localization system by another listening experiment with six subjects. The results reveal that the applicability of a system with tube earphones and inverse filters, particularly for the front directions.

This paper proposes a block-based video encoder employing variable frame skipping (VFS) to improve the video quality in low bit rate channel. The basic idea of VFS mechanism is to decide and skip a suitable, non-fixed number of frames in temporal domain to reduce bit usage. The saved bits can be allocated to enhance the spatial quality of video. In literature, several methods of frame skipping decision have been proposed, but most of them only consider the similarities between neighboring coded frames as the decision criteria. Our proposed method takes into account the reconstruction of the skipped frames using motion-compensated frame interpolation at decoder. The proposed VFS models the reconstructed objective quality of the skipped frame and, therefore, can provide a fast estimate to the frame skipping at encoder. The proposed VFS can determine the suitable frame skipping in real time and provide the encoded video with better spatial-temporal bit allocation.

In the VLSI layout design, a floorplan is often obtained to define rough arrangement of modules in the early design stage. In the stage, the aspect ratio of each soft module is also determined. The aspect ratio can be changed in the designated range keeping its area of each module. In this paper, in order to determine the aspect ratio, we propose a graph-based one dimensional compaction method which determines the aspect ratio quickly under the constraint that topology of a floorplan must not be changed. The proposed method is divided into two steps: (1) Selection of a minimal set of soft modules to adjust the aspect ratio. (2) Decision on the aspect ratio. (1) is formulated as the minimal cut problem in graph theory. We solve the problem by transforming it to the shortest path problem. (2) is divided into two operations. One is to determine the increment limit in height or width of each soft module and the other is to determine the aspect ratio of each soft module by Newton-Raphson method. The experimental comparisons show effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper presents an efficient VLSI architecture of biorthogonal (9,7)/(5,3) lifting based discrete wavelet transform that is used by lossy or lossless compression of JPEG2000. To improve hardware utilization of RPA (Recursive Pyramid Algorithm) implementation, we make the filter that is responsible for row operations of the first level perform both column operations and row operations of the second and following levels. As a result, the architecture has 66.7-88.9% hardware utilization. It requires 9 multipliers, 12 adders, and 12N line memories for NN image, which is smaller hardware complexity compared to that of other architectures with comparable throughput.