This paper introduces the water ring scan method especially designed for the scalable video coding schemes such as fine granularity scalabilities (FGS) on the basis of MPEG-4 part-2 and the H.264. The proposed scanning method can improve the subjective quality of the decoded video by most-preferentially encoding, transmitting and decoding the image information of the region of interest. From the various simulation results of FGS coding schemes with MPEG-4 part 2 and H.264, the proposed scanning method can improve the subjective picture quality about 0.5 dB 3.5 dB better than the widely used raster scan order, especially on the region of interest, without significant loss of the quality in the left-over region.

This paper proposes Variable Spreading and Chip Repetition Factors (VSCRF)-Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) broadband packet wireless access in the reverse link, which flexibly supports employing the same air interface in various radio environments such as a cellular system with a multi-cell configuration and local areas such as very-small cell, indoor, and isolated-cell environments. In VSCRF-CDMA, we propose two schemes: the first is a combination of time-domain spreading with an orthogonal code and chip repetition that achieves orthogonal multiple access in the frequency domain by utilizing a comb-shaped frequency spectrum, and the other is adaptive control of the spreading factor and chip repetition factor according to the cell configurations, number of simultaneously accessing users, propagation channel conditions, and major radio link parameters. Simulation results show that the proposed VSCRF-CDMA associated with the combination of the spreading factor, SFD, of four and the chip repetition factor, CRF, of four improves the required average received signal energy per bit-to-noise power spectrum density ratio (Eb/N0) for the average packet error rate of 10-2 by approximately 2.0 dB compared to DS-CDMA only employing SFD = 16 assuming four simultaneously accessing users in an exponentially decaying six-path Rayleigh fading channel with two-branch diversity reception.

The purpose of this paper is to present the novel technique to solve the recognition errors in invariant range image multi-pose face recognition. The scale, center and pose error problems were solved by using the geometric transform. Range image face data (RIFD) was obtained from a laser range finder and was used in the model to generate multi-poses. Each pose data size was reduced by linear reduction. The reduced RIFD was transformed to the gradient face model for facial feature image extraction and also for matching using the Membership Matching Score model. Using this method, the results from the experiment are acceptable although the size of gradient face image data is quite small (659 elements). Three-Layer Matching Search was the algorithm designed to reduce the access timing to the most accurate and similar pose position. The proposed algorithm was tested using facial range images from 130 people with normal facial expressions and without eyeglasses. The results achieved the mean success rate of 95.67 percent of 12 degrees up/down and left/right (UDLR) and 88.35 percent of 24 degrees UDLR.

In this letter, we propose a low-complexity estimation method of cyclic-prefix (CP) length for a discrete multitone (DMT) very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) system. Using the sign bits of the received DMT VDSL signals, the proposed method provides a good estimate of CP length, which is suitable for various channel characteristics. This simple estimation method is consistent with the initialization procedure of T1E1.4 multi-carrier modulation (MCM)-based VDSL Standard. Finally, simulation results with VDSL test loops are presented.

The Weil descent attack, suggested by Frey, has been implemented by Gaudry, Hess and Smart (the so-called GHS attack) on elliptic curves over finite fields of characteristic two and with composite extension degrees. Recently, Diem presented a general treatment of the GHS attack to hyperelliptic curves over finite fields of arbitrary odd characteristics. This paper shows that Diem's approach can be extended to curves of which the function fields are cyclic Galois extensions. In particular, we show the existence of GHS Weil restriction, triviality of the kernel of GHS conorm-norm homomorphism, and lower/upper bounds of genera of the resulting curves.

This paper proposes fast elliptic curve multiplication algorithms resistant against side channel attacks, based on the Montgomery-type scalar multiplication. The proposed scalar multiplications can be applied to all curves over prime fields, e.g., any standardized curves over finite fields with characteristic larger than 3. The method utilizes the addition formulas xECDBL and xECADD assembled by only x-coordinates of points, and is applicable for any types of curves over finite fields. Then, we encapsulate two addition formulas into one formula xECADDDBL, which accomplishes a faster computation because several auxiliary variables of two formulas can be shared. We also develop a novel addition chain for the new formula, with which we can compute scalar multiplications. The improvement of our scalar multiplications over previous Coron's dummy operation method is about 18% for a 160-bit scalar multiplication. Our method requires no table-up of precomputed points and it is suitable for the implementation on memory constraint computing architectures, e.g., smart cards. Moreover, we optimize the proposed algorithms for parallelized implementations with SIMD operations. Compared with the similar scheme proposed by Fischer et al., our scheme is about 16% faster.

We consider delivering interactive dramas. A viewer interacts with a contents provider by answering multiple-choice questions and the answers to these questions influence the plot of delivered story. All possible plots can be represented by a directed graph such that every plot corresponds to some path of the graph. A delivery should be controlled according to the directed graph such that each viewer's history of answered choices forms a path of the graph. On the other hand, because some character of a viewer is known to a contents provider from his history of choices, a viewer tries to prevent even a contents provider from linking choices made by him. In this paper, we introduce unlinkable delivery for an interactive drama and propose such a delivery system for interactive dramas that viewer's choices are unlinkable and delivery is controlled according to the directed graph.

As a highly efficient radio link technology, the opportunistic scheduling policy has been widely investigated and implemented. Therefore, new challenges come up in the case of TCP over opportunistic scheduling systems. In this paper we investigate the impact of wireless opportunistic scheduling on TCP throughput. It shows that the optimization of the wireless link mechanisms needs to be maintained at the transport layer by cooperation of the adjacent layers. We propose a new ACK Reservoir Method to smooth the TCP behavior combating against the spurious timeout caused by scheduling. Based on performance analysis and simulation results, the proposed method is shown to enhance the TCP throughput by up to 100% in the presence of opportunistic scheduling. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated in a practical simulation scenario of CDMA/HDR system.

Many computer systems are designed to make it easy for end-users to install and update software. An undesirable side effect, from the perspective of many software producers, is that hostile end-users may analyze or tamper with the software being installed or updated. This paper proposes a way to avoid the side effect without affecting the ease of installation and updating. We construct a computer system M with the following properties: 1) the end-user may install a program P in any conveniently accessible area of M; 2) the program P contains encoded instructions whose semantics are obscure and difficult to understand; and 3) an internal interpreter W, embedded in a non-accessible area of M, interprets the obfuscated instructions without revealing their semantics. Our W is a finite state machine (FSM) which gives context-dependent semantics and operand syntax to the encoded instructions in P; thus, attempts to statically analyze the relation between instructions and their semantics will not succeed. We present a systematic method for constructing a P whose instruction stream is always interpreted correctly regardless of its input, even though changes in input will (in general) affect the execution sequence of instructions in P. Our framework is easily applied to conventional computer systems by adding a FSM unit to a virtual machine or a reconfigurable processor.

To the authors' knowledge, there are not many cryptosystems proven to be as difficult as or more difficult than the discrete logarithm problem. Concerning problems related to the discrete logarithm problem, there are problems called the double discrete logarithm problem and the e-th root of the discrete logarithm problem. These two problems are likely to be difficult and they have been utilized in cryptographic protocols such as verifiable secret sharing scheme and group signature scheme. However, their exact complexity has not been clarified, yet. Related to the e-th root of the discrete logarithm problem, we can consider a square root of the discrete logarithm problem. Again, the exact complexity of this problem has not been clarified, yet. The security of cryptosystems using these underlying problems deeply depends on the difficulty of these underlying problems. Hence it is important to clarify their difficulty. In this paper we prove reductions among these fundamental problems and show that under certain conditions, these problems are as difficult as or more difficult than the discrete logarithm problem modulo a prime.

In this paper, we propose a transformation function for a user's raw iris data, an "iris code" in iris scanning verification on the server, since the iris code requires to be hidden from even a server administrator. We then show that the user can be properly authenticated on the server, even though the iris code is transformed by the proposed function. The reason is that the function has a characteristic, "The (normalized) Hamming distances between the enrolled iris codes and the verified iris codes are conserved before and after the computation of the function," that is, the normalized Hamming distance in this scheme is equal to that in the existing scheme. We also show that the transformed iris code is sufficiently secure to hide the original iris code, even if a stronger attack model is supposed than the previously described model. That can be explained from the following two reasons. One reason is that nonlinear function, which consists of the three-dimensional rotation about the x-axis and the y-axis with the iris code lengthened bit by bit, and the cyclic shift, does not enable an attacker to conjecture the iris code. The other reason is that the success probabilities for the exhaustive search attack concerning the iris code in the supposed attack models are lower than those of the previously proposed methods and are negligible.

Analysis of speech acts and discourse structures is essential to a dialogue understanding system because speech acts and discourse structures are closely tied with the speaker's intention. However, it has been difficult to infer a speech act and a discourse structure from a surface utterance because they highly depend on the context of the utterance. We propose a statistical dialogue analysis model to determine discourse structures as well as speech acts using a maximum entropy model. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from an annotated dialogue corpus. Moreover, the model can analyze speech acts and discourse structures in one framework. In the experiment, the model showed better performance than other previous works.

Transient scattering from parallel plate waveguide cavities is studied by using the combination of a point matching technique and numerical inversion of Laplace transform. We thoroughly investigate the scattering mechanism for a half-sine pulse and modulated-sine pulse incidence. The advantages and disadvantages on the target recognition are clarified in terms of the internal objects, incident waveforms, and polarizations.

This paper proposes a scattered-pilot-OFDM reception scheme employing turbo inter-carrier interference (ICI) cancellation in the fast varying fading environments of mobile communications. In the OFDM transmission, the orthogonality among the subcarriers cannot hold due to large Doppler shift, and the OFDM signal suffers from severe degradation due to ICI. The proposed receiver carries out two modes: (i) a coherent detection (CD) mode, and (ii) a turbo ICI cancellation (TC) mode. Initially, the receiver performs the CD mode. When any decision errors are detected, it shifts from the CD mode to the TC one that carries out both the ICI cancellation and the channel estimation by using the decoder output (the log likelihood ratio). In addition, the iteration of the TC mode can improve the accuracy of the channel estimation and ICI cancellation ability. Computer simulations following specifications for the mobile reception mode in the digital terrestrial television broadcasting demonstrate that the receiver can effectively cancel ICI due to the fast varying fading, and that its average BER performance is much better than that of CD.

This paper considers an efficient scheduling policy for Bluetooth Medium Access Control (MAC) and its parameter optimization method. The proposed algorithm improves performance as well as supports Quality of Service (QoS) simultaneously. Since Bluetooth is basically operated with a Round Robin (RR) scheduling policy, many slots may be wasted by POLL or NULL packets when there is no data waiting for transmission in the queues of the polled pair. To overcome this link wastage problem, several algorithms have been proposed. However, they have some limitations such as a heavy signaling overhead or no consideration of QoS. Therefore, we have proposed an efficient Bluetooth MAC scheduling algorithm, Differentiated K-Fairness Policy (Diff-KFP), which guarantees improved throughput and delay performance, and it can also lead to differentiated services. That is, if the parameter of the proposed algorithm is optimized, we can satisfy the QoS requirement of each master-slave pair and thereby keep communications in progress from interruption, which is a source of throughput degradation. Simulation results show that our algorithm has remarkably improved the performance and gratifies the QoS requirements of various applications.

A digital signature does not allow any alteration of the document to which it is attached. Appropriate alteration of some signed documents, however, should be allowed because there are security requirements other than that for the integrity of the document. In the disclosure of official information, for example, sensitive information such as personal information or national secrets is masked when an official document is sanitized so that its nonsensitive information can be disclosed when it is demanded by a citizen. If this disclosure is done digitally by using the current digital signature schemes, the citizen cannot verify the disclosed information correctly because the information has been altered to prevent the leakage of sensitive information. That is, with current digital signature schemes, the confidentiality of official information is incompatible with the integrity of that information. This is called the digital document sanitizing problem, and some solutions such as digital document sanitizing schemes and content extraction signatures have been proposed. In this paper, we point out that the conventional digital signature schemes are vulnerable to additional sanitizing attack and show how this vulnerability can be eliminated by using a new digitally signed document sanitizing scheme with disclosure condition control.

This paper proposes a unified packet scheduling method that considers the delay requirement of each traffic data packet whether real time (RT) or non-real time (NRT), the channel conditions of each accessing user, and the packet type in hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ), i.e., either initially transmitted packet or retransmitted packet, in the forward link for Orthogonal Frequency and Code Division Multiplexing (OFCDM) wireless access. In the proposed packet scheduling method, the overall priority function is decided based on PTotal = αDelayPDelay + αTypePType + αSINRPSINR (PDelay, PType, and PSINR are the priority functions derived from the delay requirement, type of packet, and the received signal-to-interference plus noise power ratio (SINR), respectively, and αDelay, αType, and αSINR are the corresponding weighting factors). The computer simulation results show that the weighting factor of each priority function as αType/αDelay = 0.6, αSINR/αDelay = 0.4 assuming the linear-type function in PDelay and a constant-type function in PType is optimized. Furthermore, we show that the outage probability for achieving the packet loss rate (PLR) of less than 10-3 for non-real time (NRT) traffic users employing the proposed packet scheduling method is reduced by approximately two orders of magnitude compared to that using the Priority Queuing (PQ) method while maintaining the PLR of real-time (RT) traffic users at the same level as that using the PQ method.

In this study, we propose an object-based multimedia model for specifying the QoS (quality of service) requirements, such as the maximum data-dropping rate or the maximum data-delay rate. We also present a resource allocation model, called the net-profit model, in which the satisfaction of user's QoS requirements is measured by the benefit earned by the system. Based on the net-profit model, the system is rewarded if it can allocate enough resources to a multimedia delivery request and fulfill the QoS requirements specified by the user. At the same time, the system is penalized if it cannot allocate enough resources to a multimedia delivery request. We first investigate the problem of how to allocate resources efficiently, so that the QoS satisfaction is maximized. However, the net-profit may be distributed unevenly among the multimedia delivery requests. Thus, the second problem discusses how to allocate the resource efficiently so that the net-profit difference is minimized between any two multimedia requests. A dynamic programming based algorithm is proposed to find such an optimal solution with the minimum net-profit differences.

The PayWord Scheme, invented by Rivest and Shamir, is an efficient micropayment scheme utilizing a hash function. We point out that the scheme has the following problem: a malicious customer can damage the bank by purchasing in excess of the customer's credit which the bank has guaranteed by issuing a certificate. Generally, there are two positions of the bank with regard to the certificate. Position 1: the bank takes full responsibility for the certificate and compensates all payments created by the customer's purchases; and Position 2: the bank does not redeem payments exceeding a limit set for the customer and shares the loss with the shop if trouble occurs. In the PayWord Scheme, the bank can reduce its risk by adopting Position 2 rather than Position 1. However, this paper points out that the bank can damage the shop in Position 2 by impersonating an imaginary customer and making the shop share the loss with the bank. We propose a micropayment scheme (countermeasure) that overcomes these problems.

In this work we give an extension of Kauffman's NK-Landscapes to multiobjective MNK-Landscapes in order to study the effects of epistasis on the performance of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). This paper focuses on the development of multiobjective random one-bit climbers (moRBCs). We incrementally build several moRBCs and analyze basic working principles of state of the art MOEAs on landscapes of increased epistatic complexity and number of objectives. We specially study the effects of Pareto dominance, non-dominance, and the use of memory and a population to influence the search. We choose an elitist non-dominated sorting multiobjective genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) as a representative of the latest generation of MOEAs and include its results for comparison. We detail the behavior of the climbers and show that population based moRBCs outperform NSGA-II for all values of M and K.