Automatic adjustment methods for efficient, precise positioning and release of a virtual 3D object by direct hand manipulation in an immersive virtual reality environment are described and evaluated. The proposed methods are release adjustment, position adjustment, viewpoint adjustment, and virtual hand size adjustment. Combining these methods enables users to manipulate a virtual object efficiently and precisely. An experimental evaluation showed that these methods were effective and useful in terms of the number of task completions and the subjective preference, particularly for a small virtual target.

A new ensemble of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes for correcting a solid burst erasure is proposed. This ensemble is an instance of a combined matrix ensemble obtained by concatenating some LDPC matrices. We derive a new bound on the critical minimum span ratio of stopping sets for the proposed code ensemble by modifying the bound for ordinary code ensemble. By calculating this bound, we show that the critical minimum span ratio of stopping sets for the proposed code ensemble is better than that of the conventional one with keeping the same critical exponent of stopping ratio for both ensemble. Furthermore from experimental results, we show that the average minimum span of stopping sets for a solid burst erasure of the proposed codes is larger than that of the conventional ones.

In multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems, eigenvalues of channel correlation matrices play an essential role for the performance analysis, and particularly the investigation about their behavior under time-variant environment ruled by a certain statistics is an important problem. This paper first gives the theoretical expressions for the marginal distributions of all the ordered eigenvalues of MIMO correlation matrices under i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) Rayleigh fading environment. Then, an approximation method of those marginal distributions is presented: We show that the theory of SIMO space diversity using maximal ratio combining (MRC) is applicable to the approximation of statistical distributions of all eigenvalues in MIMO systems with the same number of diversity branches. The derived approximation has a monomial form suitable for the calculation of various performance measures utilized in MIMO systems. Through computer simulations, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated.

In this paper, we proposed a new high-rate oblique deposition method using two sputtering sources to obtain SiO2 films for a liquid crystal alignment layer. One sputtering source that operates in a metal mode supplies Si atoms to a substrate, and the other source that operates in an oxide mode supplies oxygen radicals to a substrate. To reduce the gas pressure of a deposition chamber and make the two sputtering sources operate in different modes, the sputtering sources were separated from the deposition chamber with stainless meshes, and Ar and oxygen gases were introduced separately through the two sputtering sources, i.e., Ar gas was introduced through the Si supply source and oxygen gas was introduced through the oxygen radical source. When Ar gas of 30 sccm and oxygen gas of 4 sccm were introduced into the system, the gas pressure of the deposition chamber was maintained below 1.7 mTorr and the films deposited at an incidence angle of more than 70 showed an elongated inclined columnar structure. Under this condition, a deposition rate of 30 nm/min was realized even at an incidence angle above 70, where most of the Si atoms incident to the substrate were supplied by the Si supply source and the oxygen radical source supplied oxygen radicals and promoted the oxidation of the film.

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 letter, a theoretical analysis of bit error probability for 4-state convolutional code with Max-Log-maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) decoding is presented. This technique employs an iterative calculation of probability density function of the state metric per one transition, and gives the exact bit error probability for all signal-to-noise power ratio.

Luby et al. derived evolution of degree distributions in residual graphs for irregular LDPC code ensembles. Evolution of degree distributions in residual graphs is important characteristic which is used for finite-length analysis of the expected block and bit error probability over the binary erasure channel. In this paper, we derive detailed evolution of degree distributions in residual graphs for irregular LDPC code ensembles with joint degree distributions.

With the nano-scale technology, an system-on-chip (SOC) design may consist of many reusable cores from multiple sources. This causes that the complexity of SOC testing is much higher than that of conventional VLSI chip testing. One of the SOC test challenges is the test data reduction. This paper presents a multi-code compression (MCC) technique to reduce the volume of test data and the test application time. A multi-code decompressor for recovering the compressed test data is also proposed. Experimental results show that the MCC scheme can achieve higher compression ratio than single-code compression schemes. The area cost of the proposed multi-code decompressor is small--only about 3498 µm2 based on TSMC 0.18 µm standard cell technology.

Since Bellare and Ristenpart showed a multi-property preserving domain extension transform, the problem of the construction for multi-property hash functions has been reduced to that of the construction for multi-property compression functions. However, the Davies-Meyer compression function that is commonly used for standard hash functions is not a multi-property compression function. That is, in the ideal cipher model, the Davies-Meyer compression function is collision resistant, but it is not indifferentiable from a random oracle. In this paper, we show that the compression function proposed by Lai and Massey is a multi-property compression function. In addition, we show that the simplified version of the Lai-Massey compression function is also a multi-property compression function. The use of these compression functions enables us to construct multi-property hash functions by the multi-property preserving domain extension transform.

In this paper, we propose a coding method for camera raw images with high dynamic ranges. Our encoder has two layers. In the first layer, 24 bit low dynamic range image is encoded by a conventional codec, and then the residual image that represents the difference between the raw image and its approximation is encoded in the second layer. The approximation is derived by a polynomial fitting. The main advantage of this approach is that applying the polynomial model reduces the correlation between the raw and 24 bit images, which increases coding efficiency. Experiments shows compression efficiency is significantly improved by taking an inverse tone mapping into account.

This paper proposes two novel hidden node problem aware routing metrics for wireless local area network (WLAN) mesh networks. To select the path that is least affected by the serious hidden node problem, we propose two routing metrics, MNn and MPCP, that take into account the number of neighboring nodes (Nn) and the packet collision probability (PCP), respectively. The PCP is estimated from neighbor information that is periodically gathered as state announcement packets, which include the transmission time ratio and the neighbor list. Simulation results show that the first proposed MNn routing metric tends to be less effective as the number of WLAN nodes increases, i.e., the mesh network becomes denser. On the other hand, with an acceptable increased in the control overhead in the mesh network due to the neighbor information, the second proposed MPCP routing metric improves the number of allowable concurrent voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls and the user datagram protocol (UDP) data throughput compared to the MNn metric. The MPCP also provides better performance than the other conventional routing metrics, the hop count, and the Airtime proposed in IEEE 802.11s.

With the ubiquitous application of Internet and wireless networks, H.264 video communication becomes more and more common. However, due to the high-efficiently predictive coding and the variable length entropy coding, it is more sensitive to transmission errors. The current error concealment (EC) scheme, which utilizes the spatial and temporal correlations to conceal the corrupted region, produces unsatisfied boundary artifacts. In this paper, first we propose variable block size error concealment (VBSEC) scheme inspired by variable block size motion estimation (VBSME) in H.264. This scheme provides four EC modes and four sub-block partitions. The whole corrupted macro-block (MB) will be divided into variable block size adaptively according to the actual motion. More precise motion vectors (MV) will be predicted for each sub-block. Then MV refinement (MVR) scheme is proposed to refine the MV of the heterogeneous sub-block by utilizing three step search (TSS) algorithm adaptively. Both VBSEC and MVR are based on our directional spatio-temporal boundary matching algorithm (DSTBMA). By utilizing these schemes, we can reconstruct the corrupted MB in the inter frame more accurately. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme can obtain better objective and subjective EC quality, respectively compared with the boundary matching algorithm (BMA) adopted in the JM11.0 reference software, spatio-temporal boundary matching algorithm (STBMA) and other comparable EC methods.

We propose an effective voice-based gender identification method using a support vector machine (SVM). The SVM is a binary classification algorithm that classifies two groups by finding the voluntary nonlinear boundary in a feature space and is known to yield high classification performance. In the present work, we compare the identification performance of the SVM with that of a Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based method using the mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). A novel approach of incorporating a features fusion scheme based on a combination of the MFCC and the fundamental frequency is proposed with the aim of improving the performance of gender identification. Experimental results demonstrate that the gender identification performance using the SVM is significantly better than that of the GMM-based scheme. Moreover, the performance is substantially improved when the proposed features fusion technique is applied.

We propose two multiple assignment secret sharing schemes realizing general access structures. One is always more efficient than the secret sharing scheme proposed by Ito, Saito and Nishizeki [5] from the viewpoint of the number of shares distributed to each participant. The other is also always more efficient than the scheme I of [7].

In wireless ad hoc networks, providing an authentication service to verify that the broadcast packet is from the claimed sender without modification, is challenging due mainly to the inherently lossy wireless links. This paper presents a novel Secure and Reliable Broadcasting that reinforces the broadcast authentication with reliability and energy-efficiency capabilities by using the cooperative diversity to superimpose two distinct signals. The proposed protocol achieves significant savings of transmission power and fair assurance of reliability among receivers.

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.

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 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 letter presents an efficient adaptive beamformer to deal with the multipath environments created by signal source scatterings. To improve the performance possible with the fixed forgetting factor, the regular adaptive forgetting factor algorithm is derived and applied to the subarray recursive least squares (RLS) beamforming. Simulations confirm that the proposed scheme has better performance than not only the conventional RLS algorithm but also the subarray RLS and adaptive forgetting factor RLS algorithms.

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.