The surface potential built across vacuum deposited phthalocyanine (Pc) films on aluminum electrode was investigated by means of electro-modulation spectroscopy. The sandwich-type cells with thin air gap, which becomes a good insulator were used in order to avoid the influence of charge injection. The existence of the surface potential at the metal/organic-material interface induced 1f referenced electro-reflectance (ER) signals. As a result, the surface potential built across vacuum deposited Pc films on aluminum electrode was estimated to be 1.25 V.

Traditional watermarking methods based on spectrum manipulation use watermark bit as a colored noise. However, those methods show poor robustness for filtering and audio compression because of only a few spectrum coefficients being modified. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for robust audio watermarking by using spectrum warping. Our watermark-embedding scheme is not based on spectrum coefficient manipulation, but based on warping spectrum that shifts a block of spectrum coefficients nonlinearly. The host audio signal is divided appropriately into small segments and then a non-orthogonal transform, such as bi-linear transform, is used for each segment to embed as well as to extract watermarks. Because the proposed scheme uses small segment length, we can afford to embed signature information many times into audio signal without severe degradation of SNR. Our multiple embedding scheme increases robustness against abnormal distortion of watermarked signal and has no bit error rate in MPEG1 Layer-3 128 kbps and 96 kbps compression as well as low/high pass filtering.

A closed-form solution of mobile location can be obtained by minimizing the norm of the error vector of a set of linear equations in spherical interpolation (SI) method. However, it assumes that the intermediate variables are independent though they are related by a quadratic equation. To give an improved position estimate, we use this relationship to help SI method and a new location method is proposed based on the approximate linearization of spherical intersecting constraint. Simulation results for line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight situations show that the proposed method performs significantly better than SI and Chan's method, especially for the cases where large bias and large standard deviation exist in range difference measurements.

Laser induced boron doping of silicon is studied as a function of the laser pulse number and energy density, in a special configuration where the precursor gas (BCl3) is injected and chemisorbed on the Si surface prior to each laser pulse. In-situ optical diagnostics, based on the transient reflectivity at 675 nm, allow to control the evolution of the dopant concentration and of the doped layer thickness during the laser doping process. Samples are characterized by the four-point probe method, atomic force microscopy (AFM) and secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). As the laser pulse number is scanned from 10 to 200 at a constant laser pulse energy, the junction depth increases from 21 to 74 nm while its sheet resistance decreases from 220 to 17 Ω/. Moreover, boron concentrations well above the solubility limit (up to 31021 cm-3 for 200 pulses) and very abrupt box-like dopant profiles are obtained. So, laser doping, in this dopant gas injection configuration, seems to be a very attractive technique to meet the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) requirements for ultra-shallow junctions.

This paper proposed an automated segmentation algorithm for MR brain images through the complementary use of T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and PD images. The proposed segmentation algorithm is composed of 3 steps. The first step involves the extraction of cerebrum images by placing a cerebrum mask over the three input images. In the second step, outstanding clusters that represent the inner tissues of the cerebrum are chosen from among the 3-dimensional (3D) clusters. The 3D clusters are determined by intersecting densely distributed parts of a 2D histogram in 3D space formed using three optimal scale images. The optimal scale image results from applying scale-space filtering to each 2D histogram and a searching graph structure. As a result, the optimal scale image can accurately describe the shape of the densely distributed pixel parts in the 2D histogram. In the final step, the cerebrum images are segmented by the FCM (Fuzzy c-means) algorithm using the outstanding cluster center value as the initial center value. The ability of the proposed segmentation algorithm to calculate the cluster center value accurately then compensates for the current limitation of the FCM algorithm, which is unduly restricted by the initial center value used. In addition, the proposed algorithm, which includes a multi spectral analysis, can achieve better segmentation results than a single spectral analysis.

In reuse of the VLSI layout design when technology migration takes place, the information to be abstracted from the original design and the data structure to store the information shall be specified. In this paper, they are assumed as the seg-based 4-direction and the parametric BSG, respectively. The parametric BSG is a BSG whose segs are generalized to take any number of units of length. The seg-based 4-direction is the right-of, left-of, above, and below relations between two rooms in accordance with the segs between them. An elegant procedure is given to map the floorplan of the model into a parametric BSG of the minimum size, keeping the abstracted seg-based 4-direction. Merits of the PBSG are discussed and a way of reuse is suggested by illustrative instances. Finally, a superior potential of the parametric BSG as the data structure is discussed empirically.

A novel base station for microwave radio-on-fiber systems is proposed. It consists of an L-band electroabsorption modulator and a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode. We show it is applicable for bias-free operation and full-duplex transmission and demonstrate 100-Mbit/s bidirectional data transmission in the 5-GHz band.

Scaled models for an anatomical head model and a simple head model are used to investigate the effects of head size on SAR characteristics for a cellular phone exposure at 835 MHz. From the results, we can see that a larger head produces a higher localized SAR and a lower whole-head averaged SAR.

We studied the possibility of making an objective diagnosis of dementia based on radiological findings by evaluating cerebral and hippocampal atrophy and the corpus callosum shape on MRI images in patients with Alzheimer-type dementia, compared with healthy elderly individuals. There was a statistically significant difference in the hippocampus area index, the ventricle area index, and the area ratio for the second, forth, and fifth parts of corpus callosum. Discriminant analysis using these three parameters demonstrated the sensitivity of 88.5% and the specificity of 85.7%, suggesting a highly positive diagnostic rate. These results indicate that quantitative MRI measurements could be used for differentiating Alzheimer-type dementia from similar diseases.

In the literature, the optimum discrete interpolation approximation is presented. However, this approximation is the optimum for the union of the set of band-limited signals and the set of the corresponding approximation errors. In this paper, under several assumptions, we present two optimum extended discrete interpolation approximations such that the set of the corresponding approximation errors is included in the set of signals if we ignore some negligible component of error. In this paper, we assume that the decimated sampling interval T satisfies T M, where M is the number of paths of the filter bank. The maximally distinct or under sampled filter banks treated in this paper have FIR analysis filters with or without a continuous pre-filter and FIR synthesis filters with a band-limited continuous D/A filter. The first discussion is useful for designing a kind of down-converter which transforms HDTV signal with wide band-width to SDTV signal with narrow band-width, for example. In this discussion, we assume that the SDTV signal is limited in |ω|π/T and the Fourier spectrum of the HDTV signal has wider band but is approximately included in the corresponding narrow band of the SDTV signal. In the well-known scalable coding of signals, if the spectrum of a signal with higher resolution is not included approximately in the spectrum of the corresponding signal with lower resolution, the quality of the quantized output signal with lower resolution will become quite low practically. As shown in [3], however, scalable coding has received much attention recently in the fields of HDTV/SDTV compatibility. Therefore, it will be natural to consider that the spectrum of HDTV signal with higher resolution is similar to and is included approximately in the corresponding spectrum of SDTV signal with lower resolution. The analysis filters are FIR filters with a continuous pre-filter approximately band-limited in |ω|π/T. To improve the quality of the SDTV signal, the whole spectrum component of the HDTV signal is used in the presented down-converter. Another discussion is a general theory of approximation for filter banks using the prescribed analysis filters. In this discussion, although some modification for the band-width is introduced in the process of analysis, the final band-width of the receiver is limited in |ω| π. The FIR analysis filters do not have pre-filter. The condition imposing on the set of signals is more general than the corresponding condition in the first optimum approximation theory. Finally, we present the optimum transmultiplexer TR. In general, under the condition that the receiver filters are prescribed, a transmultiplexer has approximation error between the original signal and the transferred signal. However, the presented TR minimizes approximately the supreme value of arbitrary positive measures of approximation error that can be defined, totally or separately, with respect to all the channels. Note that, in the presented discussion, we can prescribe the degree of FIR filters used in TR, strictly.

Phase-inversion between neighboring pulses appearing in carrier-suppressed return-to-zero pulses is effective in reducing the signal distortion due to chromatic dispersion and nonlinear effects. A generation method of the anti-phase pulses at 40 GHz is demonstrated by using semiconductor mode-locked lasers integrated with chirped gratings. Operation principle and pulse characteristics are described. Suppression of pulse distortion due to fiber dispersion is confirmed for generated anti-phase pulses. Repeaterless 150-km dispersion-shifted-fiber L-band transmission at 42.7 Gbit/s is demonstrated by using the pulse source.

A MIPS-architecture-based embedded out-of-order superscalar microprocessor targeting broadband applications has been developed. Aggressive microarchitectures, such as superpipelining and out-of-order execution, have been applied to realize better performance scalability in order to fit with next-generation broadband applications. The chip includes a 32 K-Byte instruction cache, a 32 K-Byte data cache, 6 independent execution units, and has been designed using an ASIC-style design methodology on a 0.13-µm CMOS 5-layer aluminum technology. It can operate up to 500 MHz and achieves 1005 MIPS (Dhrystone 2.1) at 500-MHz operation.

The use of the homomorphic filter technique is described in order to enhance the contrast in the mammographic images, which is adopted to the dyadic wavelet transform. The proposed method has employed the nonlinear enhancement in homomorphic filtering as well as denoising method in the wavelet domains. Experimental results show that the homomorphic filtering method improves the contrast in breast tumor images such that the contrast improvement index is increased by two fold compared to the conventional wavelet-based enhancement technique.

Edge enhancement of noisy ultrasound images is important for medical diagnosis. Conventional edge enhancement methods are mainly directed to emphasizing the high-frequency components of the image. Because these methods emphasize also the noise of image, they are not suitable for noisy ultrasound images with speckle noise. In this paper, we propose an edge enhancement method using mathematical morphology based on a geometrical characteristics of the image, using locally variable structuring elements. We show that the proposed method enhances the edge of ultrasound images without noise emphasis.

In Chirp-Pulse Microwave Computed Tomography (CP-MCT) the images are affected by the blur which is inherent to the measurement principle and is described by a space-variant Point Spread Function (PSF). In this paper we investigate the PSF of CP-MCT including the space dependence both experimentally and computationally. The experimental evaluation is performed by measuring the projections of a target consisting of a thin low-loss dielectric rod surrounded by a saline solution and placed at various positions in the measuring region. On the other hand, the theoretical evaluation is obtained by computing the projections of the same target via a numerical solution of Maxwell's equations. Since CP-MCT uses a chirp signal, the numerical evaluation is carried out by the use of a FD-TD method. The projections of the rod could be obtained by computing the field during the sweep time of the chirp signal for each position of the receiving antenna. Since this procedure is extremely time consuming, we compute the impulse response function of the system by exciting the transmitting antenna with a wide-band Gaussian pulse. Then the signal transmitted in CP-MCT is obtained by computing the convolution product in time domain of the input chirp pulse with the impulse response function of the system. We find a good agreement between measured and computed PSF. The rationality of the computed PSF is verified by three distinct ways and the usefulness of this function is shown by a remarkable effect in the restoration of CP-MCT images. Knowledge on the space-variant PSF will be utilized for more accurate image deblurring in CP-MCT.

Bidirectional reflection distribution functions (BRDFs) of commercially pure titanium sheets with three different kinds of surface morphology were measured. Those experimental BRDFs were analyzed by using Phong's reflection model. Topographic measurements of the specimens' surfaces were performed with using a stylus-method. An explicit microfacet model based on topographic data was proposed. With using the explicit microfacet model and geometrical optics the calculated BRDFs were obtained and then compared with the experimental BRDFs. Both of them were in a good agreement. Through this comparison physical meanings of Phong's reflection model were discussed. We concluded that with using the explicit microfacet model it will be possible to calculate the BRDF of the materials' surface in arbitrary illumination conditions and that this modeling will be useful to develop new aesthetic surface appearance in material industries, computer graphics, architectural design and surface science.

Recently a high-resolution image that has more than one million pixels is available easily. However, such an image requires much processing time and memory for an image understanding system. In this paper, we propose an integrated image understanding system of multi-resolution analysis and multi-agent-based architecture for high-resolution images. The system we propose in this paper has capability to treat with a high-resolution image effectively without much extra cost. We implemented an experimental system for images of indoor scenes.

This paper proposes an Active Networks architecture for VoIP gateway. In the proposed architecture, instead of procedural language, declarative language is used to describe the up-loaded program. This allows for a reduction in size of the up-loaded program, and increases the flexibility for describing the up-loaded program. VoIP gateway can then provide highly flexible services. An experimental system was implemented for feasibility studies. Specification of the declarative language used for describing the up-loaded program, basic functionalities of an interpreter for the language, and execution control program which executes components programs stored the node beforehand were confirmed.

The smart vision chip has a large potential for application in general purpose high speed image processing systems. In order to fabricate smart vision chips including photo detector compactly, we have proposed the application of three dimensional LSI technology for smart vision chips. Three dimensional technology has great potential to realize new biologically inspired systems inspired by not only the biological function but also the biological structure. In this paper, we describe our three dimensional LSI technology for biologically inspired circuits and the design of smart vision chips.

The reflection signal in the inverse synthetic aperture radar is measured in the polar coordinate defined by the object rotation angle and the frequency. The reconstruction of fixed scene images requires the coordinate transformation of the polar format data into the rectangular spatial frequency domain, which is then processed by the inverse Fourier transform. In this paper a fast and flexible method of coordinate transformation based on the nearest neighbor interpolation utilizing the Delauney triangulation is at first presented. Then, the induced errors in the transformed rectangular spatial frequency data and the resultant fixed scene images are investigated by simulation under the uniform plane wave transmit-receive mode over the swept frequency 120-160 GHz, and the results which demonstrate the validity of the current coordinate transformation are presented.