To investigate the feasibility of a compact FEA image sensor with a large number of pixels, a 128 96 pixel FEA image sensor with a 4-µm-thick HARP target was fabricated and tested for the first time. The experimental results showed that the prototype could stably operate as a highly sensitive image sensor having both sufficient resolution corresponding to the number of pixels and a wide dynamic range, which demonstrated its potential as a next-generation image sensor.

Electroluminescence (EL) under alternating-current (ac) operation is first reported for n+-polysilicon/SiO2/p-Si MOS capacitors with 50 nm Si-implanted SiO2. Visible EL can be observed with the naked eye in the dark. The ac operation by pulse-wave distinctly enhances the EL intensity and its lifetime. The pulse frequency affects the EL spectrum and thus the EL color. A model of EL mechanism is proposed for the Si-implanted MOS EL device, which has a possibility of visible light emitting device.

A blue-light-emitting Eu2+ doped CaMgSi2O6 phosphor with a long lifetime for a plasma display panel (PDP) was developed. The CaMgSi2O6:Eu2+(CMS:Eu2+) phosphors synthesized using SiO2-rich source materials show no luminance degradation during the baking process for binder burn-off, and the photoluminescence peak intensity of the Eu2+ emission band is higher than that of conventional blue phosphor BaMgAl10O17:Eu2+ (BAM) after the baking process. The test PDP using synthesized CMS:Eu2+ phosphor shows a comparable emission peak intensity to that of BAM, while the luminance of the CMS:Eu2+ panel is approximately 55% that of the BAM panel due to the narrower spectral bandwidth and shorter peak wavelength. The CMS:Eu2+ panel shows less luminance degradation than BAM under the aging test, and the CMS:Eu2+ panel retains 85% of its luminance after 300 hours driving. It is found that CMS:Eu2+ appears to be a promising blue phosphor material for PDP.

The two-sample locally optimum rank detector test statistics for composite signals in additive, multiplicative, and signal-dependent noise are obtained in this letter. Compared with the structure of the one-sample locally optimum rank detector, that of the two-sample locally optimum rank detector is shown to be simpler, although it needs more computations. It is known that there is a trade-off of computational complexity and structural simplicity between the one- and two-sample detectors.

To design a high-speed m-bit parallel inversion circuit over GF(2m), we study two variations for the repetition-operation of the numerical formula, AB2, in employing square-first and multiply-first type operations. From the proposed two variations, we propose four inversion architectures, adopting the multiplier and square in [10], as follows: simple duplication semi-systolic architecture for multiply-first inversion circuit (MFIC), m-bit parallel semi-systolic architecture for MFIC, simple duplication semi-systolic architecture for square-first inversion circuit (SFIC), and simplified m-bit parallel semi-systolic architecture for SFIC. Among them, performance of the simplified m-bit parallel semi-systolic architecture for SFIC is recommended for a high-speed applications to get a maximum throughput in the sense of small hardware-complexity, and low latency. When we implement the simplified 8-bit parallel semi-systolic architecture for SFIC over GF(28) by using 0.25 µm CMOS library, necessary are 2495 logic-gates and 1848 latches, and the latency is 56 and the estimated clock-rate is 580 MHz at 100% throughput.

Short range communication between roadside equipment and on-board equipment is very important for ITS (Intelligent Transport System). In this paper, for reliable roadside communication, the radio multi-path propagation at 2.4 GHz at roadside was measured and analyzed.

DS/CDMA systems employing long-period PN sequences are becoming a widespread standard of wireless communication systems. However, fast acquisition of long-period PN sequences at a low hardware cost is conventionally a difficult problem. This paper proposes a new fast acquisition algorithm for a class of PN sequences, which includes m- and GMW sequences as special cases, and shows that the mean (correct) acquisition time can be considerably reduced under input SNR values well below those used in modern DS/CDMA systems. Its fast acquisition capability is based on a decomposition of long PN sequences into a number of short ones and achieves a significantly reduced code phase uncertainty of acquisition at relatively small hardware cost. It can be applied as a (part of) acquisition system of a DS/CDMA system instead of a slow sliding correlator or a costly matched filter.

We report, in this paper, on a combined process of photo-oxidation and PECVD using TEOS and O2 gases to produce an SiO2 gate insulator for poly-Si TFTs. Light of 172 nm-wavelength from a Xe excimer lamp generates active oxygen radicals efficiently and selectively without producing ozone. These oxygen radicals efficiently oxidize silicon. In contrast to plasma oxidation, photo-oxidation offers the ability to produce gate oxides without ion bombardment. Oxide-silicon interfaces with interface trap densities of 2-3 1010 cm-2 eV-1 were obtained by photo-oxidation at 200-300. A stack structure was produced using 4.3-nm-thick photo-oxide topped with a 40-nm-thick PECVD oxide film deposited at 300. This stack structure without annealing exhibited excellent interface behavior and the same J-E characteristics as a 100-nm-thick PECVD film annealed at 600.

We have successfully produced laterally-grown grains on large (300 350 mm) glass substrates by means of a newly developed excimer laser crystallization system that features a high-precision mask stage and an auto-focusing system. The original grains were produced with a steep beam edge and their lateral growth was extended by repeated irradiation and translation. TFTs fabricated with these extended grains were found to have mobilities that remained almost constant at 270 cm2/Vs (n-ch. TFTs) and 230 cm2/Vs (p-ch. TFTs) over a wide range of laser fluence (400-600 mJ/cm2).

Using eigenstructure approach to form interference canceler is very sensitive to pointing error, especially when the interference number is overestimated. This Letter presents an effective technique to correct the pointing error by the projection matrix of noise subspace. Based on the corrected steering angle, a proper blocking matrix of the eigenstructure interference canceler can be obtained to suppress the leakage of desired signal. Therefore, signal cancellation does not occur, even the interference number is overestimated in constructing the interference subspace.

This letter presents a new approximation algorithm suitable for Taylor series expansion. The algorithm can effectively reduce the approximation error by using only a small number of terms in series expansion. The proposed algorithm can be more easily implemented and has better performance than the conventional Euler approximation algorithm. Also, the approximation performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with direct approaches, such as least-squares and Chebyshev approximation algorithm to show the relative advantages of the proposed algorithm. This letter also presents an application example of the proposed approximation algorithm in carrier recovery of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modem.

In this letter, our proposed approach exploits the use of original and simplest Cellular Neural Network (CNN) for 2D Doubly Complementary (DC) Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filter banks design. The properties of feedback and feedforward templates are studied for this purpose. Through some examples it is shown how generalizations of these templates can be used for DC IIR filter banks design. We modify Lagrangian function which is used for optimizing a low-pass filter design considering the constraint for stability of CNN. The brief conclusions with design examples that illustrate the proposed method and an image enhancement and restoration applications of designed filter banks are presented.

A siphon-trap of a Petri net N is defined as a place set S with S = S, where S = { u| N has an edge from u to a vertex of S} and S = { v| N has an edge from a vertex of S to v}. A minimal siphon-trap is a siphon-trap such that any proper subset is not a siphon-trap. The following polynomial-time algorithms are proposed: (1) FDST for finding, if any, a minimal siphon-trap or even a maximal class of mutually disjoint minimal siphon-traps of a given Petri net; (2) FDSTi that repeats FDST i times in order to extract more minimal siphon-traps than FDST. (3) STFM_T (STFM_Ti, respectively) which is a combination of the Fourier-Motzkin method and FDST (FDSTi) and which has high possibility of finding, if any, at least one minimal-support nonnegative integer invariant.

This paper presents an active vision system for on-line traffic sign recognition. The system is composed of two cameras, one is equipped with a wide-angle lens and the other with a telephoto lens, and a PC with an image processing board. The system first detects candidates for traffic signs in the wide-angle image using color, intensity, and shape information. For each candidate, the telephoto-camera is directed to its predicted position to capture the candidate in a larger size in the image. The recognition algorithm is designed by intensively using built-in functions of an off-the-shelf image processing board to realize both easy implementation and fast recognition. The results of on-road experiments show the feasibility of the system.

This paper presents a method of extracting car license plates captured from the arbitrary directions by using symmetry features. The generalized symmetry transform (GST) produces continuous features of symmetry between two points by combining locality constraint and reflectional symmetry, but its time complexity of GST is increased by the second power of the radius of a searching window. To achieve considerable reduction of this time complexity, we propose a scan line based GST (SLGST) which calculates the symmetry between a pair of edge pixels along the scan lines. Instead of calculating the global symmetry of a license plate, we assign the symmetry contribution acquired from SLGST to the corner point estimated from two edge points and their gradient orientations. The right angle tuned SLGST (RATSLGST) is newly proposed to detect the right angle corners more effectively. Image normalization by image warping is adopted to make such segmentation of license plate and later identification much easier. We also adopt the verifier that evaluates a candidate license plate to enhance extraction rate. Our experiments show that the proposed method for extracting perspectively distorted license plates is fairly reliable.

This paper discusses encoding of vehicular position information using predictive algorithms in inter-vehicle communications (IVC) from the viewpoints of source coding and noisy channels. Two vehicular driving models are assumed; one is the 15-mode as a suburban rapid transit driving pattern, the other is called calming mode as a street-driving pattern. Three types of schemes are compared; a pulse code modulation (PCM) scheme, a predictive coding (PC) scheme, and the variable interval prediction (VIP) scheme that is proposed here. This paper assumes that precise position information is got from a positioning system, and that all the transmitters and receivers have common predictors. Performance comparisons of the three types of schemes are carried out both of noiseless and noisy channels. Results show that the VIP scheme is superior to any other scheme.

A number of mobile hosts might be densely staying in an area caused by traffic congestions. The greater part of the mobile hosts will require commonly useful data, such as traffic information, parking information and other driving related information in such environment. Simultaneous data transmission broadcasts using a common link are regarded as a suitable means to distribute this location-dependent information. However, there is no guarantee that mobile hosts can finish receiving the information completely within a limited time. In this paper, we propose a data retransmission method for communications between a base station and mobile hosts and a data recovery processing method for use between base stations. The data retransmission method called "TOA" (The Order of Arrival) schedules retransmission data specified in the first NACK request received after retransmission processing. We have proposed "Advanced" Join system in which a base station makes consolidated join requests to a multicast group on behalf of mobile hosts. Applying the TOA method to resending in the Advanced Join system, data-receiving efficiency is higher than with the simple Advanced Join system and the absolute number of completed mobile host data reception is higher. Using the TOA method, even with the base station disposition rate of 50% the number of completed reception is higher than with the Advanced Join system at 80%. The proposed reliable multicasting system to the DSRC-based ITS network can realize an efficient base station arrangement in the ITS network infrastructure and contribute to the deployment of a superior ITS.

Among ITS applications, it is very important to acquire detailed statistics of traffic flows. For that purpose, vision sensors have an advantage because of their rich information compared to such spot sensors such as loop detectors or supersonic wave sensors. However, for many years, vehicle tracking in traffic images has suffered from the problems of occlusion effect and illumination effect. In order to resolve occlusion problems, we have been proposing the Spatio-Temporal Markov Random Field model(S-T MRF) for segmentation of Spatio-Temporal images. This S-T MRF model optimizes the segmentation boundaries of occluded vehicles and their motion vectors simultaneously by referring to textures and segment labeling correlations along the temporal axis as well as the spatial axis. Consequently, S-T MRF has been proven to be successful for vehicle tracking even against severe occlusions found in low-angle traffic images with complicated motions, such at highway junctions. In addition, in this paper, we define a method for obtaining illumination-invariant images by estimating MRF energy among neighbor pixel intensities. These illumination-invariant images are very stable even when sudden variations in illumination or shading effect are occurred in the original images. We then succeeded in seamlessly integrating the method for MRF energy images into our S-T MRF model. Thus, vehicle tracking was performed successfully by S-T MRF, even against sudden variations in illumination and against shading effects . Finally, in order to verify the effectiveness of our tracking algorithm based on the S-T MRF for practical uses, we developed an automated system for acquiring traffic statistics out of a flow of traffic images. This system has been operating continuously for ten months, and thus effectiveness of the tracking algorithm based on S-T MRF model was proven.

In this paper, we consider a flexible method for designing n-entities communication protocols and services. The proposed technique considers alternative and parallel composition of n service specifications and n protocol specifications, where n 2. The specifications are specified in Basic LOTOS which is a Formal Description Technique (FDT). We use the weak bisimulation equivalence () to represent the correctness properties between the service specification and the protocol specification.

We propose a novel three-dimensional (3-D) display using only two 2-D images displayed at different depths. It is based on a new perceptual phenomenon induced by the human binocular visual system and enables an observer using no extra equipment to perceive an apparent 3-D image of continuous depth when the luminance is divided between the 2-D images according to the 3-D image depth. Our prototype direct-vision 3-D display using this mechanism can easily produce moving 3-D color images by using conventional 2-D color displays.