High-quality Fe3O4 thin films have been fabricated onto metallic underlayers of Cr/Cu and Al by rf-magnetron sputtering at low substrate temperatures (<573 K). The measured saturation magnetizations Ms are 462 emu/cm3 for Al (50 nm)/Fe3O4 (200 nm) and 422 emu/cm3 for Cr (45 nm)/Cu (300 nm)/Fe3O4 (200 nm), which are markedly enhanced compared with that for the reference sample deposited directly on a glass substrate, and practically comparable to the bulk value of 477 emu/cm3. Highly conductive transport with an order-disorder change of the Verwey transition was observed in the current-perpendicular-to-plane geometry. The order of decrease in coercive field was achieved by exchange coupling with an overlaid NiFe layer.

Discrete wavelet transform has been successfully used in many image processing applications. In this paper, we present an efficient VLSI architecture for 2-D 3-level lifting-based discrete wavelet transform using the (5, 3) filter. All three-level coefficients are computed interlacingly and periodically to achieve higher hardware utilization and better throughput. In comparison with other VLSI architectures, our architecture requires less size of storage and faster computation speed.

Synchronous Gaussian code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems employing group-orthogonal signature waveforms are proposed and analyzed. All users in the system are divided into groups of users. The signature waveforms are constructed such that all the signature waveforms in one group are orthogonal to all the signature waveforms used in all other groups. This construction of signature waveforms ensures that there is no inter-group interference (i.e., among users in different groups), but at the expense of having intra-group interference (i.e., among users in the same group). However, by choosing a small size for each group, the intra-group interference can be effectively handled by a low-complexity, optimal (or suboptimal) multiuser detector. It is shown that a significant improvement in the system capacity can be achieved by the proposed technique over the conventional one that uses signature waveforms constructed from Welch-bound-equality (WBE) sequences. In particular, it is demonstrated that, while the conventional system's error performance is very sensitive to even small amount of overload, the proposed system with an appropriate design of signature waveforms can achieve a much higher overload (up to 300% as shown in the paper) with an excellent error performance.

Faces of a person performing freely in front of the camera can be captured in a sufficient resolution for facial parts recognition by the proposed camera system enhanced with a special PTZ camera. Head region, facial parts regions such as eyes and mouth and the borders of facial parts are extracted hierarchically by being guided by the irises and nostrils preliminarily extracted from the images of PTZ camera. In order to show the effectivity of this system, we proposed a possibility to generate the borders of facial parts of the face for the facial caricaturing and to introduce eye-contacting facial images which can eye-contact bilaterally with each other on the TV conference environment.

Thermal stability of stacked high-κ dielectrics, especially ZrO2, HfO2 and ZrSiO4 /SiO2 layered structures, on silicon has been investigated in terms of ultrahigh vacuum (UHV), 1 Torr N2 and helium (He) gas annealing with controlled oxygen partial pressure (PO2) at 920. Comparison of 2 nm and 20 nm ZrO2 films under UHV annealing revealed that the trigger of silicidation is the contact of ZrO2, SiO and Si accompanying disappearance of interfacial SiO2 layer due to SiO desorption. In the contact position, a small amount of SiO gas can easily change ZrO2 to ZrSi2. This reaction model is also applicable to the silicidation of HfO2 and ZrSiO4, at not only stacked high-κ film/Si substrate interface, but also at gate poly-Si/high-κ film interface. Moreover, comparison of UHV, N2 and He annealing with controlled PO2 revealed that the optimal PO2 ranges in He at which the thermal stability of layered structure can be achieved are wider than those in UHV and N2. This result suggests that He gas physically may obstruct SiO creation due to the quenching of atomic vibration at degradation-prone sites in the SiO2 /Si interface, thus reducing probability of bond breaking process, which is the first step of silicidation.

The authors have performed a simple computer simulation for a topography that models change in propagation characteristics due to change in traffic volume. The results of this simulation revealed that path loss for a traffic volume of about 2000 vehicles every 30 minutes in a typical urban environment exhibits a Rayleigh distribution. This result agrees well with that of actual measurements demonstrating that even a simple simulation can be a useful tool in system design.

During the period from dusk to dark, when it is difficult for drivers to see other vehicles, or when visibility is poor due to rain, snow, etc., the contrast between nearby vehicles and the background is lower. Under such conditions, conventional surveillance systems have difficulty detecting the outline of nearby vehicles and may thus fail to recognize them. To solve this problem, we have developed a rear and side surveillance system for vehicles that uses image processing. The system uses two stereo cameras to monitor the areas to the rear and sides of a vehicle, i.e., a driver's blind spots, and to detect the positions and relative speeds of other vehicles. The proposed system can estimate the shape of a vehicle from a partial outline of it, thus identifying the vehicle by filling in the missing parts of the vehicle outline. Testing of the system under various environmental conditions showed that the rate of errors (false and missed detection) in detecting approaching vehicles was reduced to less than 10%, even under conditions that are problematic for conventional processing.

This paper describes a sparse realization of passive reduced-order interconnect models via PRIMA to provide the SPICE compatible models. It is demonstrated that, if the SPICE models are directly realized so that the reduced-order equations obtained via PRIMA are stamped into the MNA matrix, the simulations of networks containing the macromodels become computationally inefficient when size of the reduced-order equations is relatively large. This is due to dense coefficient matrices of the reduced-order equations resulting from congruent transformations in PRIMA. To overcome this disadvantage, we propose a sparse realization of the reduced-order models. Since the expression is equivalent to the reduced-order equations, the passivity of the SPICE models generated is also guaranteed. Computational efficiency on SPICE is demonstrated in performing the transient analysis of circuits containing the proposed macromodels.

Davidson's scheme utilizes the order of basic blocks to embed a digital signature in a computer program. To preserve the function of the original program, additional jump instructions are inserted. This involves some overhead in both size and performance. In our implementation, the increase in size was between 9% and 24%. The performance of benchmark programs was 86-102% of the original.

In this paper, we propose OOK-CDMA system with optical hard-limiters (OHLs) using schemes of transmitting optical pulses with two-level intensities. The proposed system can be applied to both cases with single OHL and double OHLs. In the proposed system, a frame corresponding to a bit time is divided into two frames, where the low intensity pulses are transmitted in the weighted positions at the former frame, and the high ones are transmitted in the weighted positions at the latter frame. At the receiver side, in each weighted position of low intensity level, the ability of Multiple Access Interferences (MAIs) cancellation by OHL is equal to that of the conventional systems. However, in each weighted position of high intensity level, the OHL with the higher-level threshold value can easily eliminate MAIs with low intensity, while the MAIs are not eliminated in the conventional system. As a result, the ability of interference cancellation by OHL is significantly increased. When using single OHL in the proposed system, the optimum combinations of the values of low-level weights and low-level intensity ratio depend on the received laser power. This means that deploying dynamic control of the values of low-level weights and low-level intensity ratio is an imperative requirement in the proposed system with single OHL. On the other hand, when using double OHLs, the optimum combinations of the values of low-level weights and low-level intensity ratio are always constant. We analyze the performance of the proposed system and show its advantage in terms of bit error probability compared to the conventional system in both cases with single OHL and double OHLs. We also show that the proposed system with double OHLs is more effective and practical than the one with single OHL depending on the received laser power.

We analytically investigate combinatorial effects of timer control and backoff algorithms on performance of bulk data transfer over two-state Markovian packet error channels. Numerical results for throughput, energy efficiency, and the probabilities of packet loss and loss of bulk data indicate that linear backoff algorithms outperform binary exponential ones as a whole when they are employed at the logical link sublayer with timer control.

We propose using SQP (Sequential Quadratic Programming) to directly recover 3D quadratic surface parameters from multiple views. A surface equation is used as a constraint. In addition to the sum of squared reprojection errors defined in the traditional bundle adjustment, a Lagrangian term is added to force recovered points to satisfy the constraint. The minimization is realized by SQP. Our algorithm has three advantages. First, given corresponding features in multiple views, the SQP implementation can directly recover the quadratic surface parameters optimally instead of a collection of isolated 3D points coordinates. Second, the specified constraints are strictly satisfied and the camera parameters and 3D coordinates of points can be determined more accurately than that by unconstrained methods. Third, the recovered quadratic surface model can be represented by a much smaller number of parameters instead of point clouds and triangular patches. Experiments with both synthetic and real images show the power of this approach.

The present paper reports a robust projection onto eigenspace that is based on iterative projection. The fundamental method proposed in Shakunaga and Sakaue and involves iterative analysis of relative residual and projection. The present paper refines the projection method by solving linear equations while taking noise ratio into account. The refinement improves both the efficiency and robustness of the projection. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method works well for various kinds of noise, including shadows, reflections and occlusions. The proposed method can be applied to a wide variety of computer vision problems, which include object/face recognition and image-based rendering.

This paper describes a 51.2 GOPS video recognition processor that provides a cost effective device solution for vision-based intelligent cruise control (ICC) applications. By integrating 128 4-way VLIW (Very Low Instruction Word) processing elements and operating at 100 MHz, the processor achieves to provide a computation power enough for a weather robust lane mark and vehicle detection function written in a high level programming language, to run in video rate, while at the same time it satisfies power efficiency requirements of an in-vehicle LSI. Basing on four basic parallel methods and a software environment including an optimizing compiler of an extended C language and video-based GUI tools, efficient development of real-time video recognition applications that effectively utilize the 128 processing elements are facilitated. Benchmark results show that, this processor can provide a four times better performance compared with a 2.4 GHz general purpose micro-processor.

This paper proposes the design of a physically accurate spine model and its application to estimate three dimensional spine posture from the frontal and lateral views of a human body taken by two conventional video cameras. The accurate spine model proposed here is composed of rigid body parts approximating vertebral bodies and elastic body parts representing intervertebral disks. In the estimation process, we obtain neck and waist positions by fitting the Connected Vertebra Spheres Model to frontal and lateral silhouette images. Then the virtual forces acting on the top and the bottom vertebrae of the accurate spine model are computed based on the obtained neck and waist positions. The accurate model is deformed by the virtual forces, the gravitational force, and the forces of repulsion. The model thus deformed is regarded as the current posture. According to the preliminary experiments based on one real MR image data set of only one subject person, we confirmed that our proposed deformation method estimates the positions of the vertebrae within positional shifts of 3.2 6.8 mm. 3D posture of the spine could be estimated reasonably by applying the estimation method to actual human images taken by video cameras.

Concurrency in the computing systems using a deadlock avoidance strategy varies largely according to the way that resource usage plan of process is used in testing the possibility of deadlocks. If a detailed resource usage plan of process is to be taken into account, the deadlock avoidance problem is known to be NP-complete. A decomposition model to manage resources is proposed, where process is logically partitioned into a number of segments each of which uses at least one resource. It is shown that one of our deadlock avoidance algorithms achieves the best concurrency among the polynomial-bounded algorithms. We also present a heuristic algorithm that achieves concurrency close to the optimal one. Finally, we analyze concurrency of various algorithms.

Distributed database systems require a commit process to preserve the ACID property of transactions executed on a number of system sites. With the appearance of main memory database system, the database processing time has been reduced in the order of magnitude, since the database access does not incur any disk access at all. However, when it comes to distributed main memory database systems, the distributed commit process is still very slow since the disk logging at several sites has to precede the transaction commit. In this paper, we re-evaluate various distributed commit protocols and come up with a causal commit protocol suitable for distributed main memory database systems. To evaluate the performance of the proposed commit protocol, extensive simulation study has been performed. The simulation results confirm that the new protocol greatly reduces the time to commit the distributed transactions without any consistency problem.

This paper presents a new method for embedding digital watermarks into Bezier polynomial patches. An object surface is supposed to be represented by multiple piecewise Bezier polynomial patches. A Bezier patch passes through its four-corner control points, which are called data points, and does not pass through the other control points. To embed a watermark, a Bezier patch is divided into two patches. Since each subdivided patch shares two data points of the original patch, the subdivision apparently generates two additional data points on the boundaries of the original patch. We can generate the new data points in any position on the boundaries by changing the subdivision parameters. The additional data points can not be removed without knowing some parameters for subdividing and deforming the patch, hence the patch subdivision enables us to embed a watermark into the surface.

This paper presents a novel wavelet compression technique to increase compression of images. Based on zerotree entropy coding method, this technique initially uses only two symbols (significant and zerotree) to compress image data for each level. Additionally, sign bit is used for newly significant coefficients to indicate them being positive or negative. Contrary to isolated zero symbols used in conventional zerotree algorithms, the proposed algorithm changes them to significant coefficients and saves its location, they are then treated just like other significant coefficients. This is done to decrease number of symbols and hence, decrease number of bits to represent the symbols used. In the end, algorithm indicates isolated zero coordinates that are used to change the value back to original during reconstruction. Noticeably high compression ratio is achieved for most of the images, without changing image quality.

Kernel methods such as the support vector machines map input vectors into a high-dimensional feature space and linearly separate them there. The dimensionality of the feature space depends on a kernel function and is sometimes of an infinite dimension. The Gauss kernel is such an example. We discuss the effective dimension of the feature space with the Gauss kernel and show that it can be approximated to a sum of polynomial kernels and that its dimensionality is determined by the boundedness of the input space by considering the Taylor expansion of the kernel Gram matrix.