This paper presents a newly developed noise post-processing (NPP) algorithm and the results of several tests demonstrating its subjective performance. This NPP algorithm is designed to improve the subjective performance of low bit-rate code excited linear prediction (CELP) decoding under background noise conditions. The NPP algorithm is based on a stationary noise generator and improves the subjective quality of noisy signal input. A backward adaptive detector defines noisy input signal frames from decoded LSF, energy, and pitch parameters. The noise generator estimates and produces stationary noise signals using past line spectral frequency (LSF) and energy parameters. The stationary noise generator has a frame erasure concealment (FEC) scheme designed for stationary noise signals and therefore improves the speech decoder's robustness for frame erasure under background noise conditions. The algorithm has been applied to the following CELP decoders: 1) a candidate algorithm of the ITU-T 4-kbit/s speech coding standard and 2) existing ITU-T standards, the G.729 and G.723.1 series. In both cases, NPP improved the subjective performance of the baseline decoders. Improvements of approximately 0.25 CMOS (CCR MOS: comparison category rating mean opinion score) and around 0.2-0.8 DMOS (DCR MOS: degradation category rating mean opinion score) were demonstrated in the results of our subjective tests when applied to the 4-kbit/s decoder and G.729/G.723.1 decoders respectively. Other test results show that NPP improves the subjective performance of a G.729 decoder by around 0.45 in DMOS under both error-free and frame-erasure conditions, and a further improvement of around 0.2 DMOS is achieved by the FEC scheme in the noise generator.

We propose a new method to recover scene points from a single calibrated view using a subset of distances among the points. This paper first introduces the problem and its relationship with the perspective n point problem. Then the number of distances required to uniquely recover scene points are explored. The result is then developed into a practical vision algorithm to calculate the initial points' coordinates using distance constraints. Finally SQP (Sequential Quadratic Programming) is used to optimize the initial estimations. It can minimize a cost function defined as the sum of squared reprojection errors while keeping the specified distance constraints strictly satisfied. Both simulation data and real scene images have been used to test the proposed method, and good results have been obtained.

We propose a neural-sensing LSI with a bi-directional wireless interface, which is capable of detecting 5-channel neural signals in a living animal. The proposed sensing LSI consists of a multiplexer with 5-channels selectable from 10 channels, a chopper amplifier using a new direct-chopper-input scheme, a programmable multi-mode analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and a wireless-transmitter/receiver with BPSK modulation signals. The test-chip was implemented by mixed-signal 0.35-µm CMOS technology. We measured the test chip and confirmed basic operations of these blocks. The chopper-amplifier achieved 66-dB DC gain, bandwidth of 400 kHz, and 4-µV noise with power dissipation of 6-mW with a 3-V supply. We observed real nerve signals in a living cricket using the proposed chopper amplifier. ADC achieved 52-ksps operation with power dissipation of 0.43-mW at 3-V supply. The wireless transmitter achieved 1-Mbps data transmission at a distance of 1-m with 1.5-mW power dissipation at 3-V supply.

Uplink synchronous transmission has been proposed to improve the uplink capacity of DS-CDMA systems by means of canceling interference from the main paths of other intra-cell users. A significant capacity gain has been reported in a single cell environment. This Letter further investigates the uplink capacity in a multiple cell environment, where two crucial factors are taken into account, namely code shortage problem and soft handover. The impacts of the target Eb/Io and the other-to-own cell interference ratio, together with the number of channelisation codes, are discussed mathematically and then, confirmed through system level simulations with more realistic parameters.

Recently, Ma and Chen proposed a new authenticated encryption scheme with public verifiability. The signer can generate a signature with message recovery for a specified recipient. With a dispute, the recipient has ability to convert the signature into an ordinary one that can be verified by anyone without divulging her/his private key and the message. However, we point out that any adversary can forge a converted signature in this article.

A robust watermarking scheme based on the time-spread echo method is proposed in this letter. The embedding process is achieved by subband decomposition of a host signal and by controlling the amount of distortion, i.e., power of watermark, of each subband according to the Signal to Mask Ratio (SMR) calculated from MPEG psychoacoustic model. The decoding performance and robustness of the proposed method were evaluated.

This paper proposes a novel method of identifying the design parameters for a practical implementation of the fair queueing discipline, which is capable of class-level delay control. The notion of class weight is introduced at first, and then the session weights are determined. This two-phase approach is favorable in terms of the scalability;that is, the overall complexity is dependent upon the number of classes only. We propose a packet scheduler referred to as the DPS (Delay-centric Processor Sharing) scheme which employs those design parameters to deliver class-wise delay bound services. The associated admission policy for delay guarantee is also derived. System analysis and derivation of the parameters have their origins in the understanding of the so-called system equation, which describes the dynamics of the class-level service share. The proposed design parameters are QoS-aware in that they are consistently refined depending on the system status. Several numerical and simulation results show that the DPS scheme is advantageous over other ones in terms of both resource efficiency and the robustness. Concerning the scalability, we show that an alternative tagging process of the DPS scheme is implementable with O(1) complexity with no significant degradation in delay performance.

As the Internet proliferates, there has been a growing interest in supporting multiparty collaborative applications. It has led to the emergence of many-to-ma ny reliable multicast. Congestion control is a key task in reliable multicast along with error control. However, existing tree-based congestion control schemes such as TRAMCC and MTCP are designed for one-to-many reliable multicast and have some drawbacks when they are used for many-to-many reliable multicast. We propose an efficient congestion control mechanism, MTRMCC, for tree-based many-to-many reliable multicast protocols. The proposed scheme is based on the congestion windowing mechanism and a rate controller is used in addition. The feedback for error recovery is exploited for congestion control as well to minimize the overhead at the receivers. The ACK timer and the NACK timers are set dynamically reflecting the network traffic changes. The rate regulation algorithm in the proposed scheme is designed to help the flows sharing the same link to achieve the fair share quickly. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using network simulator ns-2. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms TRAMCC in terms of intra-session fairness and supports responsiveness, TCP-friendliness, and scalability.

There have been many researches on indexing and querying XML data. One of the important themes is how to efficiently process XML query represented by path expression. The most straightforward approach to process these queries is to traverse the hierarchy of XML document by top-down or bottom-up manner. However it may be fairly inefficient because the overhead of traversing the XML data can be high. In addition, most of the proposed indexing and retrieval schemes assume static environment where there are no updates on the parts of XML data. In this paper we propose a novel indexing and query processing scheme that can process both XML query represented by path expression efficiently and dynamic updates on XML data promptly. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme achieves better performance than that of the previous ones.

Management of diet and exercise is especially significant in preventing "lifestyle-related diseases" for patients and subclinical cases. This paper introduces a questionnaire survey on diabetic regimens that targets 38 professional users such as physicians and nurses at a diabetic clinic. Based on the results of the questionnaire survey, a design concept for a wearable healthcare support system has been developed to provide patients with timely instruction in accordance with their current context. On the basis of this design concept, we developed a prototype of a wearable healthcare support system called "LifeMinder". "LifeMinder" is composed of a wristwatch-shaped wearable sensor module and a personal digital assistant (PDA). The sensor module measures 3-axis acceleration, pulse rate, galvanic skin reflex (GSR), and skin temperature. The PDA receives this data via BluetoothTM and recognizes the patient's general behavior such as "walking" or "eating". The recognition of these behaviors reduces the patient's mental and physical burden in daily healthcare and assists in support of medical treatment.

In story-based communication, where a message is conveyed in story form, it is important to embody the story with expressive materials. However, it is quite difficult for users to create rich multimedia contents using multimedia editing tools. This paper proposes a web-based multimedia environment, SPOC (Stream-oriented Public Opinion Channel), aiming at helping non-skillful people to convert their stories into TV-like programs very easily. The system can produce a digital camera work for graphics and video clips as well as generate an agent animation automatically according to a narration text. Findings in evaluation experiments showed that SPOC is easy-to-use and easy-to-learn for novice users. Given a short instruction, the subjects not only mastered the operations of the software, but also succeeded in creating highly original programs. In subjective evaluation, the subjects answered that they enjoyed using the software without feeling difficulty. These results suggest that this system reduces user's cost in making a program, and encourages communication in a network community.

Connectedness oriented communication denotes a mode of communication in which the activities of communication are more important than the contents of communication. It is targeted at maintaining and enhancing human social relationships. As our lifestyles and societies are shifting along with the progress of Information Technology, communication media that are connectedness oriented will play an important role. In this paper we propose a media called FaintPop, which is an example of such new media that are suitable for connectedness oriented communication. It is a communication media designed for a community, with which the sense of connectedness can be shared among members. Furthermore, it provides a general overview of the communication activities occurring in the community. We discuss several principles and points in designing the media, especially about the interaction of the users. Results and findings from the experiment using the media are reported.

In this paper we give the necessary and sufficient conditions for 2-dimensional discrete-time systems described by the signum function to be stable.

In order to perform the registration of virtual objects in vision-based augmented reality systems, the estimation of the relation between the real and virtual worlds is needed. This paper presents a three-point vision-based registration method for video see-through augmented reality systems using binocular cameras. The proposed registration method is based on a combination of monocular and stereoscopic registration methods. A correction method that performs an optimization of the registration by correcting the 2D positions in the images of the marker feature points is proposed. Also, an extraction strategy based on color information is put forward to allow the system to be robust to fast user's motion. In addition, a quantification method is used in order to evaluate the stability of the produced registration. Timing and stability results are presented. The proposed registration method is proven to be more stable than the standard stereoscopic registration method and to be independent of the distance. Even when the user moves quickly, our developed system succeeds in producing stable three-point based registration. Therefore, our proposed methods can be considered as interesting alternatives to produce the registration in binocular augmented reality systems when only three points are available.

The relative window method provides quantitative crosstalk delay degradation for the post-layout timing analysis in deep sub-micron VLSI design. However, to the best of our knowledge, the relative window method has not been applied to the crosstalk minimization in gridded channel routing problem. Most conventional crosstalk optimizers only use the coupling length to estimate the crosstalk. In this paper, we present a post-layout timing driven crosstalk optimizer based on the relative window method. According to the relative signal arrival time and the coupling length, we define a delay degradation graph to describe the crosstalks between nets in a routing solution. Our optimization goal is to maximize the time slack by iteratively improving the delay degradation graph without increasing the channel height. Benchmark data consistently show that our post-layout timing driven crosstalk optimizer can further improve the routing solution obtained by a conventional crosstalk optimizer.

The unpredictable behavior of cache memory makes it difficult to statically analyze the worst-case performance of real-time systems. This problem is further exacerbated in the case of preemptive multitask systems because of inter-task cache interference, called Cache-Related Preemption Delay (CRPD). This paper proposes an approach to analyzing the tight upper bound on CRPD which a task might impose on lower-priority tasks. Our method finds the program execution path which requires the maximum number of cache blocks using an integer linear programming technique. Experimental results show that our approach provides up to 69% tighter bounds on CRPD than a conservative approach.

Application area of mixed signal technology is currently expanded to digital communication, networking, and digital storage systems from conventional digital audio and video systems. Digital consumer electronics are emerged and their markets are extremely increased. Rapid progress of integrated circuit technology has enabled a system level integration on a SoC. Thus mixed signal SoC becomes a majority in LSI industry. Almost all the analog functions should be realized by CMOS technology on SoC, yet some difficulties such as a low transconductance, a large mismatch voltage, and a large 1/f noise should be solved. CMOS device has been considered as a poor device for the analog use, however in reality, it has attained a remarkable progress for analog applications. CMOS device has a variety of circuit techniques to address its own issues and also has an analog performance that increases rapidly with technology scaling. The mixed signal SoC needs a new development strategy and design methodology that covers from system level to device level for addressing tough needs for a shorter development time, a lower cost, and a higher design quality. The optimizations over analog and digital and over system to device must be established for the development success. Difficulty of low voltage operation of further scaled CMOS in analog circuits will be the most serious issue. This results in the saturation of performance and increase of cost. The system level optimization over analog and digital, digital calibration and compensation, and the use of sigma-delta modulation method will give us the solution.

This paper presents a system for reading comics on cellular phones. It is necessary for comic images to be divided into frames and the contents such as speech text to be displayed at a comfortable reading size, since it is difficult to display high-resolution images in a low resolution cellular phone environment. We have developed a scheme how to decompose comic images into constituent elements frames, speech text and drawings. We implemented a system on the internet for a cellular phone company in our country, that provides downloadable comic data and a program for reading.

This study was conducted to examine the relationship between technostress - techno-centered tendency- and antisocial behavior on computers. Questionnaire data of computer operators were analyzed by multivariate-analysis. The results of the analysis indicated that high techno-centered tendency has a strong relationship with antisocial behavior on computers. Among the component factors of techno-centered tendency, absorption in operating computers was proven to have the strongest association with antisocial behavior on computers.

In this letter, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is combined with multiple input multiple output (MIMO) multiplexing to improve the throughput performance of AMC. In addition, a system that adopts selection transmit diversity (STD) in the AMC-MIMO multiplexing system, AMC-STD-MIMO multiplexing system, is proposed. STD in our simulation selects 2 transmission antennas from 4 antennas and AMC-MIMO multiplexing process operates with the selected antennas. The computer simulation is performed in a flat Rayleigh fading channel. The results show that the proposed AMC-STD-MIMO multiplexing system achieves the SNR gain of 4.0 dB, compared to the AMC-MIMO multiplexing system at 3 Mbps throughput.