High-resolution time of arrival (TOA) estimation techniques have great promise for the high range resolution required in recently developed radar systems. A widely known super-resolution TOA estimation algorithm for such applications, the multiple-signal classification (MUSIC) in the frequency domain, has been proposed, which exploits an orthogonal relationship between signal and noise eigenvectors obtained by the correlation matrix of the observed transfer function. However, this method suffers severely from a degraded resolution when a number of highly correlated interference signals are mixed in the same range gate. As a solution for this problem, this paper proposes a novel TOA estimation algorithm by introducing a maximum likelihood independent component analysis (MLICA) approach, in which multiple complex sinusoidal signals are efficiently separated by the likelihood criteria determined by the probability density function (PDF) of a complex sinusoid. This MLICA schemes can decompose highly correlated interference signals, and the proposed method then incorporates the MLICA into the MUSIC method, to enhance the range resolution in richly interfered situations. The results from numerical simulations and experimental investigation demonstrate that our proposed pre-processing method can enhance TOA estimation resolution compared with that obtained by the original MUSIC, particularly for lower signal-to-noise ratios.

In this paper, negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) reliability of pFETs is analyzed under the post-fabrication SRAM self-improvement scheme that we have developed recently, where cell stability is self-improved by simply applying high stress voltage to supply voltage terminal (VDD) of SRAM cells. It is newly found that there is no significant difference in both threshold voltage and drain current degradation by NBTI stress between fresh PFETs and PFETs after self-improvement scheme application, indicating that the self-improvement scheme has no critical reliability problem.

The nondeterminism of message-passing communication brings challenges to program debugging, testing and fault-tolerance. This paper proposes a novel deterministic message-passing implementation (DMPI) for parallel programs in the distributed environment. DMPI is compatible with the standard MPI in user interface, and it guarantees the reproducibility of message with high performance. The basic idea of DMPI is to use logical time to solve message races and control asynchronous transmissions, and thus we could eliminate the nondeterministic behaviors of the existing message-passing mechanism. We apply a buffering strategy to alleviate the performance slowdown caused by mismatch of logical time and physical time. To avoid deadlocks introduced by deterministic mechanisms, we also integrate DMPI with a lightweight deadlock checker to dynamically detect and solve these deadlocks. We have implemented DMPI and evaluated it using NPB benchmarks. The results show that DMPI could guarantee determinism with incurring modest runtime overhead (14% on average).

Identification of early aspects is the critical problem in aspect-oriented requirement engineering. But the representation of crosscutting concerns is various, which makes the identification difficult. To address the problem, this paper proposes the AspectQuery method based on goal model. We analyze four kinds of goal decomposition models, then summarize the main factors about identification of crosscutting concerns and conclude the identification rules based on a goal model. A goal is crosscutting concern when it satisfies one of the following conditions: i) the goal is contributed to realize one soft-goal; ii) parent goal of the goal is candidate crosscutting concern; iii) the goal has at least two parent goals. AspectQuery includes four steps: building the goal model, transforming the goal model, identifying the crosscutting concerns by identification rules, and composing the crosscutting concerns with the goals affected by them. We illustrate the AspectQuery method through a case study (a ticket booking management system). The results show the effectiveness of AspectQuery in identifying crosscutting concerns in the requirement phase.

In object tracking, a recent trend is using “Tracking by Detection” technique which trains a discriminative online classifier to detect objects from background. However, the incorrect updating of the online classifier and insufficient features used during the online learning often lead to the drift problems. In this work we propose an online random fern classifier with a simple but effective compressive feature in a framework integrating the online classifier, the optical-flow tracker and an update model. The compressive feature is a random projection from highly dimensional multi-scale image feature space to a low-dimensional representation by a sparse measurement matrix, which is expect to contain more information. An update model is proposed to detect tracker failure, correct tracker result and constrain the updating of online classifier, thus reducing the chance of wrong updating in online training. Our method runs at real-time and the experimental results show performance improvement compared to other state-of-the-art approaches on several challenging video clips.

This paper presents an M-channel (M=2n (n ∈ N)) integer discrete cosine transforms (IntDCTs) based on fast Hartley transform (FHT) for lossy-to-lossless image coding which has image quality scalability from lossy data to lossless data. Many IntDCTs with lifting structures have already been presented to achieve lossy-to-lossless image coding. Recently, an IntDCT based on direct-lifting of DCT/IDCT, which means direct use of DCT and inverse DCT (IDCT) to lifting blocks, has been proposed. Although the IntDCT shows more efficient coding performance than any conventional IntDCT, it entails many computational costs due to an extra information that is a key point to realize its direct-lifting structure. On the other hand, the almost conventional IntDCTs without an extra information cannot be easily expanded to a larger size than the standard size M=8, or the conventional IntDCT should be improved for efficient coding performance even if it realizes an arbitrary size. The proposed IntDCT does not need any extra information, can be applied to size M=2n for arbitrary n, and shows better coding performance than the conventional IntDCTs without any extra information by applying the direct-lifting to the pre- and post-processing block of DCT. Moreover, the proposed IntDCT is implemented with a half of the computational cost of the IntDCT based on direct-lifting of DCT/IDCT even though it shows the best coding performance.

This paper describes a low-power VLSI chip for speaker-independent 60-kWord continuous speech recognition based on a context-dependent Hidden Markov Model (HMM). It features a compression-decoding scheme to reduce the external memory bandwidth for Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) computation and multi-path Viterbi transition units. We optimize the internal SRAM size using the max-approximation GMM calculation and adjusting the number of look-ahead frames. The test chip, fabricated in 40 nm CMOS technology, occupies 1.77 mm2.18 mm containing 2.52 M transistors for logic and 4.29 Mbit on-chip memory. The measured results show that our implementation achieves 34.2% required frequency reduction (83.3 MHz), 48.5% power consumption reduction (74.14 mW) for 60 k-Word real-time continuous speech recognition compared to the previous work while 30% of the area is saved with recognition accuracy of 90.9%. This chip can maximally process 2.4faster than real-time at 200 MHz and 1.1 V with power consumption of 168 mW. By increasing the beam width, better recognition accuracy (91.45%) can be achieved. In that case, the power consumption for real-time processing is increased to 97.4 mW and the max-performance is decreased to 2.08because of the increased computation workload.

This paper describes the analysis and design of low-noise analog circuits for a new architecture readout LSI, Qpix. In contrast to conventional readout LSIs using TOT method, Qpix measures deposited charge directly as well as time information. A preamplifier with a two-stage op amp and current-copy output buffers is proposed to realize these functions. This preamplifier is configured to implement a charge sensitive amplifier (CSA) and a trans-impedance amplifier (TIA). Design issues related to CSA are analyzed, which includes gain requirement of the op amp, stability and compensation of the two-stage cascode op amp, noise performance estimation, requirement for the resolution of the ADC and time response. The offset calibration method in the TIA to improve the charge detecting sensitivity is also presented. Also, some design principles for these analog circuits are presented. In order to verify the theoretical analysis, a 400-pixel high speed readout LSI: Qpix v.1 has been designed and fabricated in 180 nm CMOS process. Calculations and SPICE simulations show that the total output noise is about 0.31 mV (rms) at the output of the CSA and the offset voltage is less than 4 mV at the output of the TIA. These are attractive performances for experimental particle detector using Qpix v.1 chip as its readout LSI.

Objective: The virtual slides are high-magnification whole digital images of histopathological tissue sections. The existing virtual slide system, which is optimized for scanning flat and smooth plane slides such as histopathological paraffin-embedded tissue sections, but is unsuitable for scanning irregular plane slides such as cytological smear slides. This study aims to develop a virtual slide system suitable for cytopathology slide scanning and to evaluate the effectiveness of multi-focus image fusion (MF) in cytopathological diagnosis. Study Design: We developed a multi-layer virtual slide scanning system with MF technology. Tumors for this study were collected from 21 patients diagnosed with primary breast cancer. After surgical extraction, smear slide for cytopathological diagnosis were manufactured by the conventional stamp method, fine needle aspiration method (FNA), and tissue washing method. The stamp slides were fixed in 95% ethanol. FNA and tissue washing samples were fixed in CytoRich RED Preservative Fluid, a liquid-based cytopathology (LBC). These slides were stained with Papanicolaou stain, and scanned by virtual slide system. To evaluate the suitability of MF technology in cytopathological diagnosis, we compared single focus (SF) virtual slide with MF virtual slide. Cytopathological evaluation was carried out by 5 pathologists and cytotechnologists. Results: The virtual slide system with MF provided better results than the conventional SF virtual slide system with regard to viewing inside cell clusters and image file size. Liquid-based cytology was more suitable than the stamp method for virtual slides with MF. Conclusion: The virtual slide system with MF is a useful technique for the digitization in cytopathology, and this technology could be applied to tele-cytology and e-learning by virtual slide system.

In this paper we establish a secure communication model where eavesdropper and intended receiver have multiple antennas. We use cooperation and jamming to achieve physical layer security. First, we study how to allocate power between the information bearing signal and the jamming signal. Second, based on this model, we also jointly optimize both the information bearing signal weights and the jamming signal weights to improve physical layer security. The optimal power allocation and the weights are obtained via an iteration algorithm to maximize the secrecy rate. Comparing with equal power allocation and some other different methods, it shows that using cooperative relaying and jamming can significantly improve the physical layer security from the simulation results.

This paper presents an adaptive cache architecture for wide-range reliable low-voltage operations. The proposed associativity-reconfigurable cache consists of pairs of cache ways so that it can exploit the recovery feature of the novel 7T/14T SRAM cell. Each pair has two operating modes that can be selected based upon the required voltage level of current operating conditions: normal mode for high performance and dependable mode for reliable low-voltage operations. We can obtain reliable low-voltage operations by application of the dependable mode to weaker pairs that cannot operate reliably at low voltages. Meanwhile leaving stronger pairs in the normal mode, we can minimize performance losses. Our chip measurement results show that the proposed cache can trade off its associativity with the minimum operating voltage. Moreover, it can decrease the minimum operating voltage by 140 mV achieving 67.48% and 26.70% reduction of the power dissipation and energy per instruction. Processor simulation results show that designing the on-chip caches using the proposed scheme results in 2.95% maximum IPC losses, but it can be chosen various performance levels. Area estimation results show that the proposed cache adds area overhead of 1.61% and 5.49% in 32-KB and 256-KB caches, respectively.

According to the process scaling, radiation-hard devices are becoming sensitive to soft errors caused by Multiple Cell Upset (MCUs). In this paper, the parasitic bipolar effects are utilized to suppress MCUs of the radiation-hard dual-modular flip-flops. Device simulations reveal that a simultaneous flip of redundant latches is suppressed by storing opposite values instead of storing the same value due to its asymmetrical structure. The state of latches becomes a specific value after a particle hit due to the bipolar effects. Spallation neutron irradiation proves that MCUs are effectively suppressed in the D-FF arrays in which adjacent two latches in different FFs store opposite values. The redundant latch structure storing the opposite values is robust to the simultaneous flip.

We propose an efficient network design algorithm that realizes shared protection. The algorithm iteratively improves the degree of wavelength resource usage and fiber utilization. To achieve this, we newly define two metrics to evaluate the degree of wavelength resource usage of a pair of working/backup paths and the fiber utilization efficiency. The proposed method iteratively redesigns groups of paths that are selected in the order determined by the metrics. A numerical analysis verifies that the proposed algorithm can substantially reduce the required wavelength resources and hence fiber cost. It is also verified that the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is small enough to terminate within practicable time.

This paper describes a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method to classify pneumoconiosis on HRCT images. In Japan, the pneumoconiosis is divided into 4 types according to the density of nodules: Type 1 (no nodules), Type 2 (few small nodules), Type 3-a (numerous small nodules) and Type 3-b (numerous small nodules and presence of large nodules). Because most pneumoconiotic nodules are small-sized and irregular-shape, only few nodules can be detected by conventional nodule extraction methods, which would affect the classification of pneumoconiosis. To improve the performance of nodule extraction, we proposed a filter based on analysis the eigenvalues of Hessian matrix. The classification of pneumoconiosis is performed in the following steps: Firstly the large-sized nodules were extracted and cases of type 3-b were recognized. Secondly, for the rest cases, the small nodules were detected and false positives were eliminated. Thirdly we adopted a bag-of-features-based method to generate input vectors for a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Finally cases of type 1,2 and 3-a were classified. The proposed method was evaluated on 175 HRCT scans of 112 subjects. The average accuracy of classification is 90.6%. Experimental result shows that our method would be helpful to classify pneumoconiosis on HRCT.

Crohn's disease commonly affects the small and large intestines. Its symptoms include ulcers and intestinal stenosis, and its diagnosis is currently performed using an endoscope. However, because the endoscope cannot pass through the stenosed parts of the intestines, diagnosis of the entire intestines is difficult. A CT image-based method is expected to become an alternative way for the diagnosis of Crohn's disease because it enables observation of the entire intestine even if stenosis exists. To achieve efficient CT image-based diagnosis, diagnostic-aid by computers is required. This paper presents an automated detection method of the surface of ulcers in the small and large intestines from fecal tagging CT images. Ulcers cause rough surfaces on the intestinal wall and consist of small convex and concave (CC) regions. We detect them by blob and inverse-blob structure enhancement filters. A roughness value is utilized to reduce the false positives of the detection results. Many CC regions are concentrated in ulcers. The roughness value evaluates the concentration ratio of the detected regions. Detected regions with low roughness values are removed by a thresholding process. The thickness of the intestinal lumen and the CT values of the surrounding tissue of the intestinal lumen are also used to reduce false positives. Experimental results using ten cases of CT images showed that our proposed method detects 70.6% of ulcers with 12.7 FPs/case. The proposed method detected most of the ulcers.

In this paper, a direct/cooperative relay switched single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) using amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol and spectrum division/adaptive subcarrier allocation (SDASA) is proposed. Using SDASA, the transmit SC signal spectrum is divided into sub-blocks, to each of which a different set of subcarriers (resource block) is adaptively allocated according to the channel conditions of mobile terminal (MT)-relay station (RS) link, RS-base station (BS) link, and MT-BS link. Cooperative relay does not always provide higher capacity than the direct communication. Switching between direct communication and cooperative relay is done depending on the channel conditions of MT-RS, RS-BS, and MT-BS links. We evaluate the achievable channel capacity by the Monte-Carlo numerical computation method. It is shown that the proposed scheme can reduce the transmit power by about 6.0 (2.0) dB compared to the direct communication (the cooperative AF relay) for a 1%-outage capacity of 3.0 bps/Hz.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) outperforms H.264 High Profile with bitrate saving of about 43%, mostly because block sizes for hybrid prediction and residual encoding are recursively chosen using a quadtree structure. Nevertheless, the exhaustive quadtree-based partition is not always necessary. This paper takes advantage of all-zero residual blocks at every quadtree depth to accelerate the prediction and residual encoding processes. First, we derive a near-sufficient condition to detect variable-sized all-zero blocks (AZBs). For these blocks, discrete cosine transform (DCT) and quantization can be skipped. Next, using the derived condition, we propose an early termination technique to reduce the complexity for motion estimation (ME). More significantly, we present a two-dimensional pruning technique based on AZBs to constrain prediction units (PU) that contribute negligibly to rate-distortion (RD) performance. Experiments on a wide range of videos with resolution ranging from 416240 to 4k2k, show that the proposed scheme can reduce computational complexity for the HEVC encoder by up to 70.46% (50.34% on average), with slight loss in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and bitrate. The proposal also outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by achieving greater complexity reduction and improved bitrate performance.

In this paper, performances of two different virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission schemes — spatial multiplexing (SM) and space-time block coding (STBC) — in a correlated wireless sensor network are analyzed. By utilizing a complex Wishart distribution, we investigate the statistical properties of a correlated virtual MIMO channel between the sensors and data collector that is used in the performance analysis of each MIMO transmission mode. Distributed sensors then transmit their data cooperatively to the data collector by choosing a proper transmission mode adaptively based on the channel conditions and spatial correlation among the sensors. Furthermore, after analyzing the energy efficiencies of SM and STBC, we propose a new energy efficient mode switching rule between SM and STBC. Finally, by analytically deriving the required transmit energy of the proposed adaptive transmission scheme, the manner in which the spatial correlation influences the energy consumption is shown. This suggests a cooperating node scheduling protocol that makes energy consumption less sensitive to the variation of the spatial correlation.

In this paper, a robust cyclic ADC architecture with β-encoder is proposed and circuit scheme using switched-capacitor (SC) circuit is introduced. Different from the conventional binary ADC, the redundancy of proposed cyclic ADC outputs β-expansion code and has an advantage of error correction. This feature makes ADC robust against the offset of comparator capacitor mismatch and finite DC gain of amplifier in multiplying-DAC (MDAC). Because the power penalty of high-gain wideband amplifier and the required accuracy of circuit elements for high resolution ADC can be relaxed, the proposed architecture is suitable for deep submicron CMOS technologies beyond 90 nm. We also propose a β-value estimation algorithm to realize high accuracy ADC based on β-expansion. The simulation results show the effectiveness of proposed architecture and robustness of β-encoder.

We propose a compact and high-range resolution 76 GHz millimeter-wave radar system for autonomous unmanned helicopters. The purpose of the radar system is to detect and avoid obstacles that may affect the flight safety. To achieve these objectives, a high range resolution and a long detection range are required for the radar systems with small volume and weight. The radar broadband RF front-end module which employs a simple direct conversion method is proposed. The radar module enables the 6 GHz RF signal transmission as well as the output power of about 8 dBm using commercially available low-cost monolithic microwave integrated circuits. The radar system comprises the broadband RF front-end module, a Ku-band local frequency-modulated continuous wave signal synthesizer, and a very light weight carbon fiber reinforced plastic parabolic reflector antenna. The 5 cm of range resolution is experimentally obtained using the 6 GHz RF signal bandwidth. The results of the power line measurement confirm an about 23 dB signal to noise ratio, which is measured from the reflection of the high-voltage power lines about 150 m ahead. In addition, the results of the radar system on-board test using an unmanned helicopter are evaluated. The real-time radar scope, which is transferred through the wireless connection, confirms the detection of the power lines and the other surrounding objects.