We obtained blue photoluminescence from tantalum oxide films deposited by radio-frequency magnetron sputtering after annealing. The maximum peak intensity of the photoluminescence was observed from a sample annealed at 600 for 20 min, and the peak wavelength was approximately 430 nm. Tantalum oxide films that emit blue light may be useful materials for novel active optical devices utilizing Ta2O5/SiO2 multilayered photonic crystals.

The design and analysis of block ciphers is an established field of study which has seen significant progress since the early 1990s. Nevertheless, what remains on an interesting direction to explore in this area is to design block ciphers with provable security against powerful known attacks such as differential and linear cryptanalysis. In this paper we introduce seven new block cipher structures, named Feistel-variant A, B, CLEFIA and MISTY-FO-variant A, B, C, D structures, and show that these structures are provably resistant against differential cryptanalysis. The main results of this paper are that the average differential probabilities over at least 2 rounds of Feistel-variant A structure and 1 round of Feistel-variant B structure are both upperbounded by p2, while the average differential probabilities over at least 5 rounds of CLEFIA, MISTY-FO-variant A, B, C and D structures are upperbounded by p4+2p5, p4, p4, 2p4 and 2p4, respectively, if the maximum differential probability of a round F function is p. We also give provable security for the Feistel-variant A, B and CLEFIA structures against linear cryptanalysis. Our results are attained under the assumption that all of components in our proposed structures are bijective. We expect that our results are useful to design block ciphers with provable security against differential and linear cryptanalysis.

A fast class-of-service oriented packet scheduling (FCOPS) has a service fairness problem since a credit pool for a service class is initialized at the beginning of a transmission cycle whose starting moment is fixed at a specific ONU. To remedy the service unfairness of FCOPS, we suggest an enhanced class-of-service oriented packet scheduling (ECOPS) that uses a new initialization cycle whose starting moment is fairly distributed to each ONU. Also, ECOPS generates a colorless grant to utilize the resource wastage, when traffic is light and the total sum of grants of an ONU is less than a minimum size. Using simulation, we validate ECOPS as superior to FCOPS in the mean delay and the service fairness.

In order to evaluate the effect of Nakagami-Rice fading on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) signal transmission when the delay profile exceeds the guard interval, a simple prediction model is developed by extending the Equivalent Transmission-Path (ETP) model for Rayleigh fading. The validity of the model is demonstrated by comparing the calculated values of BER to those obtained by computer simulation. Using the newly developed ETP-OFDM model, digital transmission characteristics of the OFDM signal in a multipath environment when the delay profile exceeds the guard interval are shown as a function of K factor, delay spread, guard interval and OFDM symbol period.

This paper proposes a DCT-based steganographic method named StegErmelc in the JPEG domain. Three strategies are proposed, namely (i) edge-like block selection, (ii) recursive matrix encoding, and (iii) largest coefficient serving, to form a novel steganographic method for achieving scalable carrier capacity, low detectability by universal blind steganalyzer, and high image quality, simultaneously. For a given message length, StegErmelc flexibly scales its carrier capacity to accommodate the message while trading off with stego detectability. At full capacity, StegErmelc has comparable carrier capacity relative to the existing methods. When embedding the same amount of information, StegErmelc remarkably reduces the stego detection rate to about 0.3-0.5 lower than that of the existing methods considered, and consequently StegErmelc can withstand blind steganalyzer when embedding up to 0.10 bpc. Under the same condition, StegErmelc produces stego image with quality higher than that of the existing methods considered. Graphical comparison with three additional evaluation metrics is also presented to show the relative performance of StegErmelc with respect to the existing methods considered.

A multi-agent object attention system is proposed, which is based on biologically inspired attractor selection model. Object attention is facilitated by using a video sequence and a depth map obtained through a compound-eye image sensor TOMBO. Robustness of the multi-agent system over environmental changes is enhanced by utilizing the biological model of adaptive response by attractor selection. To implement the proposed system, an efficient VLSI architecture is employed with reducing enormous computational costs and memory accesses required for depth map processing and multi-agent attractor selection process. According to the FPGA implementation result of the proposed object attention system, which is accomplished by using 7,063 slices, 640512 pixel input images can be processed in real-time with three agents at a rate of 9 fps in 48 MHz operation.

The polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) TFT has two insulator interfaces between the polycrystalline silicon and front and back insulators. These interfaces have trap states, which affect the characteristics of poly-Si TFT. In the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology area, using the dual-gated, fully-depleted SOI MOSFET under the depleted back-channel condition, the back-interface trap density can be calculated through the front-channel threshold voltage and film thicknesses. The front-interface trap density is also evaluated changing the roles of both gates. This evaluation method for front- and back- interface trap densities is called the threshold-voltage method. To apply this threshold-voltage method to the "medium-thickness" poly-Si TFT, of which the channel is not fully depleted in normal single gate bias operation, the biases for both front and back gates are controlled to realize full depletion. Under the fully-depleted condition, the front- or back- threshold voltage of poly-Si TFT is carefully extracted by the second-derivative method changing back- and front- gate biases. We evaluated the front- and back- interface trap densities not only for normal operation but also under stress. To evaluate the bias and temperature stress effect, we used two types of samples, which are made by different processes. The evaluated front- and back- interface trap densities for both samples in initial state are around 51011 to 1.31012 cm-2eV-1, which are almost the same as the reported values. Applying bias and temperature stress shows the variation of these interface-trap densities. Samples with large shifts of the front-channel threshold voltage show large trap density variation. On the other hand, samples with small threshold voltage shifts show small trap density variation. The variation of the back-interface trap density during the stress application showed a correlation to the front-channel threshold voltage shift.

We present the first demonstration of multiple-stage wavelength conversion using cascaded LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder SSB modulators. Wavelength is accurately shifted by 18 GHz at each stage. 72 GHz frequency shift with the relative intensity noise (RIN) value of -144.5 dB/Hz is achieved by four stages. The achieved equivalent noise figure is 7.5 dB.

In this paper, we proposed a novel entropy-based image watermarking method in wavelet domain. Unlike traditional entropy, we use the normalized energy instead of the probability which is called energy-based entropy (EBE). Based on EBE, the watermark can be embedded robustly and imperceptibly. In our proposed method, the wavelet-trees are grouped into super-trees. Then each super-tree is also divided into five sub-blocks. According to the watermark bit state, the EBE of each sub-block will be modified respectively. In an experiment, three images (Lenna, Goldhill and Peppers) are chosen for evaluating the performance. The PSNR of these watermarked images are 44.039, 43.51 and 43.67. Compared with Wang et al.[18], it greatly increases the PSNR, by about 5.8, 4.8 and 3.9 dB respectively. For the consideration of the capacity for embedding, the maximum number of watermark bits is also increased. The experimental results show that the proposed entropy-based watermarking method performs well in JPEG compression, filtering (Gaussian filter, median filter and sharpen) and geometrical attacks (pixel shift and rotation). In addition, it is also very robust to against the multiple watermark attack.

This paper gives a survey and comparison of algorithms for the detection of binary data in the presence of two-dimensional (2-D) intersymbol interference. This is a general problem of communication theory, because it can be applied to various practical problems in data storage and transmission. Major results on trellis-based detection algorithms, previously disparate are drawn together, and placed into a common framework. All algorithms have better complexity than optimal detection, and complexity is compared. On the one hand, many algorithms perform within 1.0 dB or better of optimal performance. On the other hand, none of these proposed algorithms can find the optimal solution at high SNR, which is surprising. Extensive discussion outlines further open problems.

A residual acoustic echo cancellation method that employs the masking property is proposed to enhance the speech quality of hands-free communication devices in an automobile environment. The conventional masking property is employed for speech enhancement using the masking threshold of the desired clean speech signal. In this Letter, either the near-end speech or residual noise is selected as the desired signal according to the double-talk detector. Then, the residual echo signal is masked by the desired signal (masker). Experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by deriving the echo return loss enhancement and by examining speech waveforms and spectrograms.

Data transmission via audio link on AM radio system is shown to be achievable by using Acoustic OFDM. We employ Acoustic OFDM to embed data onto audio contents that are then broadcast as AM radio signals. We tuned the parameters, and performed experiments. Text data as URL can be delivered to mobile phone through existing MF AM radio system and radios.

Video transmission over mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) can be serverly degraded due to the effect of fading and handoff. In this paper, we propose a channel adaptive error resilience scheme for video transmission over mobile WiMAX. When the channel condition begins to trigger handoff, the current frame is stored in the long-term memory for the forward error correction, and the following frames are encoded by using double motion vectors (MVs) in the sense of multi-hypothesis motion compensation. Even if a whole frame is lost, we can reconstruct the following frames using the stored frame in the long-term memory. However, the error propagation still remains in this forward error resilience method. To refresh the erroneous frames to the decoder, the encoder utilizes the channel adaptive refreshing (CAR). In the CAR, the channel rate is first predicted using channel parameter, a carrier to interference and noise ratio (CINR), and the encoder adaptively determines the number of blocks to be encoded in the intra mode based on the feedback information. Performance evaluations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Partial transmit sequence (PTS) is a well known technique used to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal. However, it has relatively high complexity due to the computation of multiple inverse fast Fourier transforms (IFFTs). To reduce this complexity, we use intermediate signals within a decimation in frequency (DIF) radix IFFT and propose a new PTS subblocking technique which requires the computation of only partial IFFTs. Performance results are presented which show a PAPR reduction similar to that with other techniques such as original PTS (O-PTS). Further, we show that complexity reduction can be achieved with either low or high radix IFFT algorithms.

In 2006, Miranda et al. proposed an anonymity scheme to achieve peers' anonymity in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) reputation systems. In this paper, we show that this scheme can not achieve peers' anonymity in two cases. We also propose an improvement which solves the problem and improves the degree of anonymity.

In this paper, we propose a method for enhancing performance of a sequential version of the belief-propagation (BP) decoding algorithm, the group shuffled BP decoding algorithm for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. An improved BP decoding algorithm, called the shuffled BP decoding algorithm, decodes each symbol node in serial at each iteration. To reduce the decoding delay of the shuffled BP decoding algorithm, the group shuffled BP decoding algorithm divides all symbol nodes into several groups. In contrast to the original group shuffled BP, which automatically generates groups according to symbol positions, in this paper we propose a method for grouping symbol nodes which generates groups according to the structure of a Tanner graph of the codes. The proposed method can accelerate the convergence of the group shuffled BP algorithm and obtain a lower error rate in a small number of iterations. We show by simulation results that the decoding performance of the proposed method is improved compared with those of the shuffled BP decoding algorithm and the group shuffled BP decoding algorithm.

A scheme of the superimposing additional data signal in the time domain for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system is proposed. The proposed scheme has a tradeoff between the degree of freedom for data transmission and inter-carrier interference (ICI), which provides the flexibility of data rate decision when the finite number of modulation and coding levels are available for the given channel condition. A performance analysis of the bit error rate (BER) confirms this tradeoff. In simulation on the practical environment which experiences multipath fading and error of channel estimation, the results show that much improvement of spectral efficiency has been achieved while keeping as nearly good bit error rate as the conventional OFDM. Moreover, the single carrier transmission of the superimposed additional data in the time domain also gives an opportunity of boosting the signal power up to the peak to average power ratio (PAPR) margin of the OFDM system.

When the number of users in a service area increases in mobile multimedia services, no individual user can obtain satisfactory radio resources such as bandwidth and signal power because the resources are limited and shared. A solution for such a problem is user-position control. In the user-position control, the operator informs users of better communication areas (or spots) and navigates them to these positions. However, because of subjective costs caused by subjects moving from their original to a new position, they do not always attempt to move. To motivate users to contribute their resources in network services that require resource contributions for users, incentive-rewarding mechanisms have been proposed. However, there are no mechanisms that distribute rewards appropriately according to various subjective factors involving users. Furthermore, since the conventional mechanisms limit how rewards are paid, they are applicable only for the network service they targeted. In this paper, we propose a novel incentive-rewarding mechanism to solve these problems, using an external evaluator and interactive learning agents. We also investigated ways of appropriately controlling rewards based on user contributions and system service quality. We applied the proposed mechanism and reward control to the user-position control, and demonstrated its validity.

The information technology revolution has transformed all aspects of our society including critical infrastructures and led a significant shift from their old and disparate business models based on proprietary and legacy environments to more open and consolidated ones. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems have been widely used not only for industrial processes but also for some experimental facilities. Due to the nature of open environments, managing SCADA systems should meet various security requirements since system administrators need to deal with a large number of entities and functions involved in critical infrastructures. In this paper, we identify necessary access control requirements in SCADA systems and articulate access control policies for the simulated SCADA systems. We also attempt to analyze and realize those requirements and policies in the context of role-based access control that is suitable for simplifying administrative tasks in large scale enterprises.

In this study, attenuated total reflection (ATR) utilizing surface plasmon (SP) excitation and SP emission lights were observed for the adsorption of polystyrene (PS) spheres and a water-soluble polymer. The PS spheres contained fluorescent dyes and exhibited red fluorescence. The ATR properties indicated film deposition with increasing number of adsorption cycles. The SP emission light induced by the fluorescent dye in the spheres was also measured, and an increase in the peak intensity, as well as an angle shift, was observed. Furthermore, the SP emission light spectra were investigated at various emission angles. The dispersion relation obtained from the SP emission light almost corresponded to that obtained from the ATR curves.