In reconstruction-based super resolution, a high-resolution image is estimated using multiple low-resolution images with sub-pixel misalignments. Therefore, when only one low-resolution image is available, it is generally difficult to obtain a favorable image. This letter proposes a method for overcoming this difficulty for single- image super resolution. In our method, after interpolating pixel values at sub-pixel locations on a patch-by-patch basis by support vector regression, in which learning samples are collected within the given image based on local similarities, we solve the regularized reconstruction problem with a sufficient number of constraints. Evaluation experiments were performed for artificial and natural images, and the obtained high-resolution images indicate the high-frequency components favorably along with improved PSNRs.

In this letter, we consider a diversity precoding scheme for signal detection in ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple input single output (MISO) systems, which consists of linear diversity prefilters in the transmitter. For a UWB MISO system, the BER performance of a linear transmit diversity precoding system with imperfect channel estimation is presented in IEEE 802.15.3a UWB multipath channels and also compared with that of a linear receive diversity postcoding approach. It is shown that the diversity precoding UWB MISO system offers the performance equivalent to the diversity postcoding scheme for single input multiple output (SIMO) systems while making the mobiles low-cost and low-power.

In this article, a simple structure of the Wilkinson power divider which can suppress the nth harmonics of the Wilkinson power divider is proposed. By replacing the quarter wavelength transmission lines of the conventional Wilkinson power divider with the equivalent P-type transmission lines, a compact power divider which can suppress the nth harmonic is achieved. Design equations of proposed P-type line are achieved by ABCD matrices. To verify the design approach, the proposed power divider is designed, simulated (by ADS, CST Studio, and Sonnet simulators), and fabricated at 1 GHz to suppress the fifth harmonic. The proposed structure is 46% of the conventional Wilkinson power divider, while maintaining the characteristics of the conventional Wilkinson power divider at the fundamental frequency. The insertion losses at the fifth harmonic are larger than 35 dB. Furthermore, the second to seventh harmonic are suppressed by least 10 dB. Here is an excellent agreement between simulated results and measured results.

The active shape model (ASM) has been widely adopted by automated bone segmentation approaches for radiographic images. In radiographic images of the distal radius, multiple edges are often observed in the near vicinity of the bone, typically caused by the presence of thin soft tissue. The presence of multiple edges decreases the segmentation accuracy when segmenting the distal radius using ASM. In this paper, we propose an enhanced distal radius segmentation method that makes use of a modified version of ASM, reducing the number of segmentation errors. To mitigate segmentation errors, the proposed method emphasizes the presence of the bone edge and downplays the presence of a soft tissue edge by making use of Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). To verify the effectiveness of the proposed segmentation method, experiments were performed with 30 distal radius patient images. For the images used, compared to ASM-based segmentation, the proposed method improves the segmentation accuracy with 47.4% (from 0.974 mm to 0.512 mm).

We examined the characteristics of fiber fuse propagation in hole-assisted fibers (HAF). The fiber fuse propagated in the same way as in conventional single-mode fiber (SMF) when the diameter of an inscribed circle linking the air holes (c) was much larger than the diameter of the melted area (Dmelted). The melted area is caused by fiber fuse propagation and Dmelted is assumed to be almost the same size as the plasma. However, when c was much smaller than Dmelted, the fiber fuse did not propagate in HAF with input powers above 15 W at 1480 and 1550 nm. This result indicates that the threshold power of fiber fuse propagation in HAF can be at least 10 times larger than that in conventional SMF in the optical communication band. We also observed the dynamics of fiber fuse termination at a splice point between HAF and a conventional fiber by using a high-speed camera, when c was much smaller than Dmelted. We consider that the reduction in gas density caused by the air holes results in fiber fuse termination. When c was almost the same as Dmelted, we observed a new propagation mode and its dynamics for a fiber fuse with a damage track whose period was approximately 30 times longer than that in conventional SMF. We also made the first observation of a new threshold power (upper threshold) for a fiber fuse.

To meet the increasing demand to expand wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission capacity, ultrahigh spectral density coherent optical transmission employing multi-level modulation formats has attracted a lot of attention. In particular, ultrahigh multi-level quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) has an enormous advantage as regards expanding the spectral efficiency to 10 bit/s/Hz and even approaching the Shannon limit. We describe fundamental technologies for ultrahigh spectral density coherent QAM transmission and present experimental results on polarization-multiplexed 256 QAM coherent optical transmission using heterodyne and homodyne detection with a frequency-stabilized laser and an optical phase-locked loop technique. In this experiment, Raman amplifiers are newly adopted to decrease the signal power, which can reduce the fiber nonlinearity. As a result, the power penalty was reduced from 5.3 to 2.0 dB. A 64 Gbit/s data signal is successfully transmitted over 160 km with an optical bandwidth of 5.4 GHz.

Ad Hoc Routing (AHR) was proposed to replace optimal routing in cluster-based multihop networks since it offers lower implementation complexity. However, this complexity reduction comes at the cost of an increase in the required transmission power. In addition, when the conventional distributed relay selection is applied to implement AHR, another increase in the required transmission power occurs due to the receiver selection error. In this paper, Ad Hoc Cooperative Routing (AHCR) that integrates the cooperative transmission with AHR is presented to reduce the difference between the required transmission power of AHR and that of optimal routing. Besides, Distributed Ad Hoc Cooperative Routing (DAHCR) scheme 1 that combines the cooperative transmission with AHR is proposed to reduce the difference between the required transmission power of DAHR and that of AHR. We then address the problem of DAHCR scheme 1 and propose DAHCR scheme 2. Simulation results show that the required transmission power of AHCR and DAHCR scheme 1 is less than that of AHR and DAHR, respectively. In addition, DAHCR scheme 2 further reduces the required transmission power of DAHCR scheme 1. On the other hand, DAHCR scheme 1 increases the complexity by 43% compared to DAHR. Besides, DAHCR scheme 2 increases the complexity by 1.97% compared to DAHCR scheme 1.

A differential cross-correlation cell ID identification algorithm is proposed for IEEE 802.16e OFDMA cellular system. The cell ID represents the number of the preamble selected by the base station in downlink mode. First, we construct the downlink (DL) preamble structure and signal model with carrier frequency offset (CFO) and channel effects. Next, in order to achieve the initial synchronization, a differential receiver with cross correlation for all preamble patterns is proposed to search for cell ID. Simulation results confirm that the proposed structure is suitable for ITU fading channels and outperforms the conventional cell search system.

In this paper, we analyze the impact of channel estimation errors for both decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative communication systems over Nakagami-m fading channels. Firstly, we derive the exact one-integral and the approximate expressions of the symbol error rate (SER) for DF and AF relay systems with different modulations. We also present expressions showing the limitations of SER under channel estimation errors. Secondly, in order to quantify the impact of channel estimation errors, the average signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) gap ratio is investigated for the two types of cooperative communication systems. Numerical results confirm that our theoretical analysis for SER is very efficient and accurate. Comparison of the average SNR gap ratio shows that DF model is less susceptible to channel estimation errors than AF model.

In this paper, closed-form analytical equations for the time-domain amplitude of the MOS cross-coupled oscillators are derived. The procedure of the paper is based on estimating an accurate equation for describing the behavior of the cross-coupled MOS configurations and finding a reasonable solution for the nonlinear differential equation governing the circuit. The solution method is presented for a general equation and is valid for all possible second-order oscillators. Both of the long channel and short channel transistor topologies have been investigated. The resulted equations are in a good agreement with simulation results for a wide range of the circuit parameters and enable us to analyze and synthesize the oscillators with the desired transient behavior.

Color percept is a subjective experience and, in general, it is impossible for other people to tell someone's color percept. The present study demonstrated that the simple image-classification analysis of brain activity obtained by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique enables to tell which of four colors the subject is looking at. Our results also imply that color information is coded by the responses of hue-selective neurons in human brain, not by the combinations of red-green and blue-yellow hue components.

Frequency estimation of a complex single-tone in additive white Gaussian noise from irregularly-spaced samples is addressed. In this Letter, we study the periodogram and weighted phase averager, which are standard solutions in the uniform sampling scenarios, for tackling the problem. It is shown that the estimation performance of both approaches can attain the optimum benchmark of the Cramér-Rao lower bound, although the former technique has a smaller threshold signal-to-noise ratio.

Background subtraction is widely used in detecting moving objects; however, changing illumination conditions, color similarity, and real-time performance remain important problems. In this paper, we introduce a sequential method for adaptively estimating background components using Kalman filters, and a novel method for detecting objects using margined sign correlation (MSC). By applying MSC to our adaptive background model, the proposed system can perform object detection robustly and accurately. The proposed method is suitable for implementation on a graphics processing unit (GPU) and as such, the system realizes real-time performance efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed system.

Precise estimation of data distribution with a small number of sample patterns is an important and challenging problem in the field of statistical pattern recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel method for estimating multimodal data distribution based on the Gaussian mixture model. In the proposed method, multiple random vectors are generated after classifying the elements of the feature vector into subsets so that there is no correlation between any pair of subsets. The Gaussian mixture model for each subset is then constructed independently. As a result, the constructed model is represented as the product of the Gaussian mixture models of marginal distributions. To make the classification of the elements effective, a graph cut technique is used for rearranging the elements of the feature vectors to gather elements with a high correlation into the same subset. The proposed method is applied to a character recognition problem that requires high-dimensional feature vectors. Experiments with a public handwritten digit database show that the proposed method improves the accuracy of classification. In addition, the effect of classifying the elements of the feature vectors is shown by visualizing the distribution.

We demonstrate a single-channel 1.28 Tbit/s-525 km transmission using OTDM of subpicosecond DQPSK signals. In order to cope with transmission impairments due to time-varying higher-order PMD, which is one of the major limiting factors in such a long-haul ultrahigh-speed transmission, we newly developed an ultrafast time-domain optical Fourier transformation technique in a round-trip configuration. By applying this technique to subpicosecond pulses, transmission impairments were greatly reduced, and BER performance below FEC limit was obtained with increased system margin.

A half-cylindrical BK-7 prism/dielectric film with a grating/Ag film/fluorescent polymer film structure was prepared, and its surface plasmon (SP) excitation property was investigated. It was confirmed experimentally that SP excitations are possible in this structure by using prism and grating couplings. The SP excitation property depended on the direction of the grating vector. Furthermore, intense photoluminescence was observed when the SPs were simultaneously excited at the Ag/polymer interface by prism coupling and at the Cytop/Ag interface by grating coupling.

This paper presents a step-up/step-down DC-DC converter with three operation modes to achieve high efficiency and small output ripple voltage. A constant time buck-boost mode, which is inserted between buck mode and boost mode, is proposed to achieve smooth transition. With the proposed mode, the output ripple voltage is significantly reduced when the input voltage is approximate to the output voltage. Besides, the novel control scheme minimizes the conduction loss by reducing the average inductor current and the switching loss by making the converter operate like a buck or boost converter. The small signal model of the step-up/step-down DC-DC converter is also derived to guide the compensation network design. The step-up/step-down converter is designed with a 0.5 µm CMOS n-well process, and can regulate an output voltage within the input voltage ranged from 2.5 V to 5.5 V with a maximum power efficiency of 96%. The simulation results show that the proposed converter exhibits an output ripple voltage of 28 mV in the transition mode.

We have demonstrated the inverter operation of stacked-structure CMOS devices using pentacene and ZnO as active layers. The fabrication process of the device is as follows: A top-gate-type ZnO thin-film transistor (TFT), working as an n-channel transistor, was formed on a glass substrate. Then, a bottom-gate-type pentacene TFT, as a p-channel transistor, was fabricated on top of the ZnO TFT while sharing a common gate electrode. For both TFTs, solution-processed silicone-resin layers were used as gate dielectrics. The stacked-structure CMOS has several advantages, for example, easy patterning of active material, compact device area per stage and short interconnection length, as compared with the planar configuration in a conventional CMOS circuit.

The nanoporosity installed in conjugated polymer films prepared by electrophoretic deposition makes it difficult to measure the amount of polymer deposited on a substrate. Here, an alternative approach, the estimation of material efficiency of the electrophoretic deposition from the optical absorption spectra of the residual suspensions has been studied. The ultimate recovery rate, which becomes smaller in suspensions with lower acetonitrile content, does not depend on the deposition voltage. The light scattering by the colloidal particles seems to be absent in residual suspensions after a deposition long enough to reach the ultimate recovery rate, indicating the exhaustion of the colloidal particles. Although the deposition rate of the polymer markedly lowers upon coating of the deposition electrode with PEDOT, the ultimate recovery rate remains unchanged. These results suggest that the material efficiency in this deposition method is limited by the generation rate of the colloidal particles in the suspension.

The diffraction by a composite wedge composed of a perfect conductor and a lossy dielectric is investigated using the hidden rays of diffraction (HRD) method. The usual principle of geometrical optics is employed to trace not only ordinary rays incident on the lit boundary but also hidden rays incident on the shadow boundary. The modified propagation constants are adopted to represent the non-uniform plane wave transmission through the lossy dielectric. The HRD diffraction coefficients are constructed routinely by the sum of the cotangent functions, which have one-to-one correspondence with both ordinary and hidden rays. The angular period of the cotangent functions is adjusted to satisfy the edge condition at the tip of the composite wedge. The accuracy of the HRD diffraction coefficients in the physical region is checked by showing how closely the diffraction coefficients in the complementary region satisfy the null-field condition.