This paper studies the electromagnetic field radiated by a return stroke, considering even the case of a direct lightning on an aircraft, in the Fraunhofer region. The work here presented is an analysis of a complete discharge case, considering the electric field due to some charged clouds, the presence of a conductive airplane immersed in this external electric field, the channels related to the lightning paths, and the interactions of the field due to the lightning return stroke with a far field located victim system. It could be divided in several steps. Firstly, the cloud-generated electric field has been calculated, and a particular model of the clouds has been introduced. For what concerns the geometrical considerations, a Koch's snowflake shaped cloud has been chosen, in order to achieve a complex geometrical model. To better fit this model with the reality a non-symmetric cloud has been created. Then, a simple aircraft model, according to those reported in literature, has been introduced. The conductive structure of the aircraft interacts with the atmospheric electric field and modifies its distribution. Furthermore, applying a boundary panel method, frequently used in subsonic incompressible aerodynamics, Laplace's equation for the electrostatic potential in the considered domain has been computed, taking into account the presence of the metallic structure. Finally, the inception points on the outer surface of the aircraft are calculated and highlighted. Beginning from those points, in which the probability of discharge is higher, a suitable lightning channel has been created, and the shape of the jagged field signal has been correlated to the tortuous path discharge, even considering the presence of branches. The total electric field given by the first discharge from the cloud to the airplane, by the second discharge from the aircraft to the ground and by the current flowing along the fuselage has been computed and calculated in a far field located observation point.

A technique for improving the input power dynamic range and extinction ratio of wavelength converters based on cross-gain modulation in a semiconductor optical amplifier is presented.

We present a model of quantization noise in block-coded videos with some assumptions in wavelet domain and propose a postprocessing method to reduce the quantization noise based on the model. A frame of video sequences is considered as a set of one-dimensional (1-D) horizontal and vertical signals. The quantization noise is considered as the sum of the blocking noise and the remainder noise. We model the blocking noise as an impulse or that along with a dispersed impulse at each block boundary in the wavelet domain. The validity of the blocking noise model is investigated. We also model the remainder noise as white Gaussian noise at non-edge pixels in the wavelet domain. Whether the model accommodates well to the remainder noise or not is also examined. The blocking noise is reduced by subtracting a profile, whose strength is adaptively estimated, at each block boundary from the coded signal. The remainder noise then is reduced by a soft-thresholding. We also propose a fast algorithm for the proposed method by approximating coefficients of shape profiles used in blocking noise reduction and inverse wavelet transform (WT) filters used in remainder noise reduction. The performance is evaluated for QCIF video sequences coded by H.263 TMN5 with quantization parameter (QP) in the range of 5-25 and is compared to that of the MPEG-4 verification model (VM) post-filter. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields not only PSNR improvement of maximum 0.5 dB over the VM post-filter but also subjective quality nearly free of the blocking artifact and edge blur.

In this letter, we propose an efficient closed-loop transmit (Tx) diversity scheme that works well for high mobility as well as low mobility. The proposed scheme exploits a quantized weight vector codebook designed by separating it into gain and phase codebooks. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme can provide a significant advantage in both complexity and flexibility over conventional methods.

The exact calculation of the ergodic and outage capacity for Rayleigh fading single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channels in the presence of unequal-power Rayleigh fading interferers is mathematically quite challenging due to the complicated distribution of the capacity. In this paper, a SIMO system with M receive antennas and N interferers is considered. Based on some statistical results, the closed-form upper and lower bound for the ergodic and outage capacity are derived respectively. These bounds are shown to be simple to compute and appear to be quite tight.

Recently, DOAS (differential optical absorption spectroscopy) has been used for nondestructive air monitoring, in which the LS (least squares) method is used to calculate trace gas concentrations due to its computational simplicity. This paper applies the ICA (independent component analysis) method to the DOAS system of air monitoring, since the LS method is insufficient to recover the desired spectra perfectly due to sparsity characteristic. If the sparsity of reference spectra in the DOAS system imposes the assumption of independence, the ICA algorithm can be used. The proposed method is used to regress the observed spectrum on the estimates of the reference spectra. The ICA algorithm can be seen as a preprocessing method where the ICs of the references are used as the input in the regression. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in simulation studies using synthetic data.

The effect of intermediate frequency magnetic fields or, very-low-frequency magnetic fields (VLFMF) on living biological cells was investigated using a highly sensitive mutagenesis assay method. A bacterial gene expression system for mutation repair (umu system) was used for the sensitive evaluation of damage in DNA molecules. Salmonella typhimurium TA1535 (pSK1002) were exposed to VLFMF (20 kHz and 600 µT) in a specially designed magnetic field loading chamber. The experiment results showed the possibility of applying the umu assay for sensitive and effective evaluation of damage in DNA molecules. No effects from exposure to 20 kHz and 600 µT magnetic fields in terms of damage in DNA molecules were observed.

This paper presents two novel blind set-theoretic adaptive filtering algorithms for suppressing "Multiple Access Interference (MAI)," which is one of the central burdens in DS/CDMA systems. We naturally formulate the problem of MAI suppression as an asymptotic minimization of a sequence of cost functions under some linear constraint defined by the desired user's signature. The proposed algorithms embed the constraint into the direction of update, and thus the adaptive filter moves toward the optimal filter without stepping away from the constraint set. In addition, using parallel processors, the proposed algorithms attain excellent performance with linear computational complexity. Geometric interpretation clarifies an advantage of the proposed methods over existing methods. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve (i) much higher speed of convergence with rather better bit error rate performance than other blind methods and (ii) much higher speed of convergence than the non-blind NLMS algorithm (indeed, the speed of convergence of the proposed algorithms is comparable to the non-blind RLS algorithm).

This paper proposes near-field sound-source localization based on crosscorrelation of a signed binary code. The signed binary code eliminates multibit signal processing for simpler implementation. Explicit formulae with near-field assumption are derived for a two microphone scenario and extended to a three microphone case with front-rear discrimination. Adaptive threshold for enabling and disabling source localization is developed for robustness in noisy environment. The proposed sound-source localization algorithm is implemented on a fixed-point DSP. Evaluation results in a robot scenario demonstrate that near-field assumption and front-rear discrimination provides almost 40% improvement in DOA estimation. A correct detection rate of 85% is obtained by a robot in a home environment.

This paper presents a 2-D model for calculating the current density distribution and the flux-flow resistivity of a Melt Cast Process BSCCO 2212 rod during the quenching process in self field with large current density. Based on the forces analysis of the flux-line lattice, the equilibrium equation for the 2-D viscous flux motion is derived from the model. With this equation, the current density distribution and the flux density distribution are obtained in not only the critical state but also the flux-flow state. Subsequently, the average flux-flow resistivity is calculated with the knowledge of the 2-D field distribution. The calculation results are in accordance with the experimental results. Finally, the applications of the 2-D model are extended to the superconducting tube and the low-Tc superconductor.

A method for constructing low-density convolutional (LDC) codes with the degree distribution optimized for block low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is presented. If the degree distribution is irregular, the constructed LDC codes are also irregular. In this letter we give the encoding and decoding method for LDC codes, and study how to avoid the short cycles of LDC codes. Some simulation results are also presented.

The emergence of intelligent and sophisticated attack techniques makes web services more vulnerable than ever which are becoming an important business tool in e-commerce. Many techniques have been proposed to remove the security vulnerabilities, yet have limitations. This paper proposes an adaptive mechanism for a web-server intrusion-tolerant system (WITS) to prevent unknown patterns of attacks by adapting known attack patterns. SYN flooding attacks and their adaptive defense mechanisms are simulated as a case study to evaluate the performance of the proposed adaptation mechanism.

Radiation characteristics of various microstrip MIC passive elements are investigated in detail on the basis of accurate numerical analysis. For this purpose, the FD-TD method combined with the radiation mode theory is used. Summarized results are presented mainly from the viewpoint of making clear how radiation characteristics differ depending upon typical features of element structures and operating frequencies. Particularly important features of this paper are that not only radiation into the space region but also that in the substrate region is studied in detail for the first time. Suggestive remarks are given on positioning of active devices in MIC for avoiding interference from nearby elements.

A new method for logical structure analysis of document images is proposed in this paper as the basis for a document reader which can extract logical information from various printed documents. The proposed system consists of five basic modules: text line classification, object recognition, object segmentation, object grouping, and object modification. Emergent computation, which is a key concept of artificial life, is adopted for the cooperative interaction among modules in the system in order to achieve effective and flexible behavior of the whole system. It has three principal advantages over other methods: adaptive system configuration for various and complex logical structures, robust document analysis tolerant of erroneous feature detection, and feedback of high-level logical information to the low-level physical process for accurate analysis. Experimental results obtained for 150 documents show that the method is adaptable, robust, and effective for various document structures.

In this paper, a cell-driven multiplier generator is developed that can produce high-performance gate-level netlists for multiplier-related arithmetic functional units, including multipliers, multiplier and accumulators (MAC) and dot product calculator. The generator optimizes the speed/area performance both in the partial product compression and in the final addition stage for the specified process technology. In addition to the conventional CMOS full adder cells, we have also designed fast compression elements based on pass-transistor logic for further performance improvement of the generated multipliers. Simulation results show that our proposed generator could produce better multiplier-related functional units compared to those generated using Synopsys Designware library or other previously proposed approaches.

With reference to video motion estimation in the framework of the new H.264/AVC video coding standard, this paper presents algorithmic and architectural solutions for the implementation of context-aware coprocessors in real-time, low-power embedded systems. A low-complexity context-aware controller is added to a conventional Full Search (FS) motion estimation engine. While the FS coprocessor is working, the context-aware controller extracts from the intermediate processing results information related to the input signal statistics in order to automatically configure the coprocessor itself in terms of search area size and number of reference frames; thus unnecessary computations and memory accesses can be avoided. The achieved complexity saving factor ranges from 2.2 to 25 depending on the input signal while keeping unaltered performance in terms of motion estimation accuracy. The increased efficiency is exploited both for (i) processing time reduction in case of software implementation on a programmable platform; (ii) power consumption reduction in case of dedicated hardware implementation in CMOS technology.

The direct optical switching CDMA radio-on-fiber network is proposed as multiplexing method for radio base stations in microcell/picocell technologies. In this system, aliasing distortions degrade the received signal quality and decreases the number of connectable radio base stations (RBSs) when the encoding rate becomes lower than the twice of bandwidth of RF signal. This paper proposes the optical switching speed reduction method and clarifies that the chaotic spreading sequences can suppress the aliasing distortion without additional processing at the receiver even if the encoding rate becomes lower than the RF signal bandwidth. The effect in switching speed reduction is theoretically investigated and the effect in aliasing distortions suppression is experimentally investigated by using the proposed method.

In an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems, the Peak to Average power Ratio (PAR) is high. The clipping signal scheme is a useful and simple method to reduce the PAR. However, it introduces additional noise that degrades the systems performance. We propose an oversampling scheme to deal with the received signal in order to reduce the clipping noise by using finite impulse response (FIR) filter. Coefficients of the filter are obtained by correlation function of the received signal and the oversampling information at receiver. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated for frequency selective channel. Results show that the proposed scheme can mitigate the clipping noise significantly for OFDM systems and in order to maintain the system's capacity, the clipping ratio should be larger than 2.5.

This paper proposes a new family of space-time block codes whose transmission rate is 1 symbol per channel use. The proposed space-time codes can achieve full transmit diversity with larger coding gain for the constellation carved from the scaled complex integer ring κZ[i]. It is confirmed that the performances of the proposed space-time codes are superior to the existing space-time block codes by our simulation results.

In this paper, a low-voltage low-power sigma-delta modulator dedicated to implantable sensing devices is presented. This second-order single-loop sigma-delta modulator is implemented with half-delay integrators. These integrators are based on new fully-differential CMOS class AB switched-Operational Transconductance Amplifier (switched-OTA). An on-chip voltage doubler is introduced to locally boost a supply voltage at the input stage of a conventional OTA in order to allow rail-to-rail signal swing. Experimental results of the modulator fabricated in CMOS 0.18 µm technology confirm its expected features of a peak signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 72 dB, a signal-to-noise distortion ratio (SNDR) of 62 dB in a 5 kHz signal bandwidth, and a power consumption lower than 66 µW with a 900 mV voltage supply.