In this paper a new snake model for image morphing with semiautomated delineation which depends on Hermite's interpolation theory, is presented. The snake model will be used to specify the correspondence between features in two given images. It allows a user to extract a contour that defines a facial feature such as the lips, mouth, and profile, by only specifying the endpoints of the contour around the feature which we wish to define. We assume that the user can specify the endpoints of a curve around the features that serve as the extremities of a contour. The proposed method automatically computes the image information around these endpoints which provides the boundary conditions. Then the contour is optimized by taking this information into account near its extremities. During the iterative optimization process, the image forces are turned on progressively from the contour extremities toward the center to define the exact position of the feature. The proposed algorithm helps the user to easily define the exact position of a feature. It may also reduce the time required to establish the features of an image.

High-speed and low-power techniques are described for megabit-class size-configurable CMOS SRAM macrocells. To shorten the design turn-around-time, the methodology of abutting nine kinds of leaf cells is employed; two-level via-hole programming and the array-address decoder embedded in each control leaf cell present a divided-memory-array structure. A new squashed-memory-cell architecture using trench isolation and stacked-via-holes is proposed to reduce access times and power dissipation. To shorten the time for writing data, per-bitline architecture is proposed, in which every bitline has a personal writing driver. Also, read-out circuitry using a current-sense-type two-stage sense amplifier is designed. The effect of the non-multiplexed bitline scheme for fast read-out is shown in a simulation result. To reduce the noise from the second- to first-stage amplifier due to a feedback loop, current paths are separated so as not to cause common impedance. To confirm the techniques described in this paper, a 1-Mb SRAM test chip was fabricated with an advanced 0.35-µm CMOS/bulk process. The SRAM has demonstrated 250-MHz operation with a 2.5-V typical power supply. Also, 100-mW power dissipation was obtained at a practical operating frequency of 150-MHz.

The presence of a new surface-wave-like mode on CPWs of infinite width produces a complex transition region at the onset of leakage, involving the unusual simultaneous combination of a coupling region and a spectral gap. An examination of this region leads to a clear physical explanation of why sharp minima occur in the leakage behavior.

Three multiplicative algorithms for the floating-point divide operation are compared: the Newton-Raphson method, Goldschmidt's algorithm, and a naive method that simply calculates a form of the Taylor series expansion of a reciprocal. The series also provides a theoretical basis for Goldschmidt's algorithm. It is well known that, of the Newton-Raphson method and Goldschmidt's algorithm, the former is the more accurate while the latter is the faster on a pipelined unit. However, little is reported about the naive method. In this report, we analyze the speed and accuracy of each method and present the results of numerical tests, which we conducted to confirm the validity of the accuracy analysis. Basically, the comparison are made in the context of software implementation (e. g. , a macro library) and compliance with the IEEE Standard 754 rounding is not considered. It is shown that the naive method is useful in a realistic setting where the number of iterations is small and the method is implemented on a pipelined floating-point unit with a multiply-accumulate configuration. In such a situation, the naive method gives a more accurate result with a slightly lower latency, as compared with Goldschmidt's algorithm, and is much faster than but slightly inferior in accuracy to the Newton-Raphson method.

Contact resistance of nickel hardened gold electroplate (NiHG) deposited on nickel-underplated phosphor bronze disk coupons (substrate) after thermal aging was measured with a hard gold-plated beryllium copper alloy pin probe by means of a four-point probe technique, compared to that of cobalt-hardened gold electroplate (CoHG). Surface of NiHG plated coupons after aging was analyzed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to investigate the influence of the oxide film formation during thermal aging on contact resistance of NiHG electroplate, compared to that of CoHG. Initial contact resistance of the NiHG coupons was less than 10 mΩ at a contact forces more than 0.05 N, increased to 10 mΩ at a contact force of 0.05 N after 100 hours aging at 200. In contrast, contact resistance of the CoHG coupons progressively increased with increase in aging time, reached 1000 mΩ even at a contact force of 0.05 N after 52 hours aging. XPS analysis for the NiHG coupons demonstrated that nickel oxide film was formed on the NiHG surface in conformity with parabolic growth kinetics, as cobalt oxide film formed on CoHG surface. However, a thickness of the latter film was approximately 4-fold larger than that of former after 100 hours aging at 200. The small increase in contact resistance of NiHG coupons after aging suggested to be due to inhibitory of nickel oxide film growth on the surface. The cause of relatively low and steady contact resistance of NiHG during thermal aging was discussed.

In a DC 50 V/3.3 A circuit, the spatial distributions of the spectral intensities of breaking arcs near the cathode for silver contacts were measured on the contact surfaces of three different shapes: flat and spherical (1 mm radius and 2 mm radius) and the arc temperature and the metal-vapor quantity were calculated from the spectral intensities. The influence of the contact shape on the arc temperature and the metal-vapor quantity were also examined, as well as the arc tracks on the contact surfaces and the gain and loss of the contacts. Findings show the distributions of spectral intensities are non-symmetrical from the beginning to the extinction of the breaking arc for the flat contact: However, they are symmetrical in the latter half of the breaking in spite of the number of breaking arcs and the shape of contact surface for the spherical contact. The relationship between the area of the arc tracks on the cathode and the shape of contact surface is the same as the relationship between the existent areas of measured spectra and the shape of the contact surface. For the spherical contacts, the arc temperature and the metal-vapor quantity are affected a little by the radius of the curved of contact surface and the number of breaking arcs. However, the longer the arc duration, the higher the metal-vapor quantity is in the latter period of the breaking arc. For the flat contacts, the metal-vapor quantity is lower than those for the spherical contacts. The gain and loss of the contacts are less and the arc duration is shorter for the flat contact than for the spherical contact.

The distributions of a spectral intensity of the breaking arc between silver contacts in DC 45-66 V/2.5-5.0 A circuits have been measured using a high-speed color video. As a result, a cathode brightening spot, which has a high spectral intensity, exists near the cathode surface. The cathode brightening spot expands with the increase of the contact gap, but its length expands until about 18µm. When the contact gap spreads over about 180 µm, a dark positive column appears and grows between the cathode brightening spot and the anode surface. The higher the interrupted current is, the larger the diameter of the cathode brightening spot will be. The maximum diameter of cathode brightening spot is 500 µm under these experiments.

This paper proposes a novel ultra high-speed file server based on a personal computer (PC) to provide the instantaneous delivery of huge files, like movie files, graphic images and computer programs, over high-speed networks. In order to improve the sustained sequential read speed from arrays of hard drives to host memory in the server, two key techniques are proposed: "multi-stage striping (MSS)" and the "sequential file system (SFS)." An experimental file server based on a general-purpose PC is constructed and its performance is measured. The results show that the server offers ultra high read speeds, up to 105Mbytes/s, with just 8 hard drives.

In mobile communications, power is a very important factor and nonlinear amplification of power amplifiers cannot be avoided due to their high power efficiency. This article presents the performance of π/2-shift BPSK modulation scheme used in DS/SS/CDMA wireless communications over multipath Rayleigh fading channel and compares the performance with the performance of conventional BPSK and offset QPSK CDMA systems. The performance parameters: Out-of-Band power, average Bit Error Rate (BER) and Spectral Efficiency have been evaluated. In order to obtain improved performance on fading channels, a RAKE receiver has been employed. Finally it is shown that π/2-shift BPSK outperforms conventional BPSK and offset QPSK in the presence of nonlinear amplification.

M-ary/SS systems are compared with DS/SS systems applied the multicarrier systems and the RAKE receiver in the presence of AWGN, frequency selective Rayleigh fading and partial-band interference. In particular, the BER performance and SSMA capability are evaluated. Consequently, the M-ary/SSMA system using the multicarrier techniques is subject to the M-ary/SSMA system with the RAKE receiver in the presence of partial-band interference. The BER performance of the M-ary/SSMA system is better than that of the DS/SSMA system when the number of users is smaller than 20. And the spectral efficiency of the multicarrier M-ary/SSMA system is best in the four systems when JSR=20 [dB] and BER=10-3.

This paper presents a variant of the "Third-Order Recursion (TOR)" method for bispectral estimation of transfer-function parameters of a non-minimum-phase all-poles system. The modification is based on the segmentation of system-output data into coupled records, instead of independent records. It consists of considering the available data at the left and the right of each record as not null and taking them as the data corresponding to the preceding and succeeding record respectively. The proposed variant can also be interpreted as a "Constrained Third-Order Mean (CTOM)" method with a new segmentation in overlap records. Simulation results show that this new segmentation procedure gives more precise system parameters than the TOR and CTOM methods, to be obtained. Finally, in order to justify the use of bispectral techniques, the influence of added white and colored Gaussian noise on the parameter estimation is also considered.

In this paper, the bit error rate (BER) performance of the Spread Spectrum communication with Constrained Spreading Code system is studied under the synchronous CDMA system. Particularly, BER considering the tracking error is derived by theoretical analysis. The synchronizing spreading sequence is employed to track the signals in the receiver. As the result, the BER performance is degraded by increasing the number of users. However, the BER performance can be improved by canceling the co-channel interference and by suppressing the cross-correlation value between the information spreading sequence and the synchronizing spreading sequence.

Differences in the behavior of dispenser cathodes and oxide cathodes in laminar-flow type and crossover type electron guns were investigated by experiments and simulations under high-current-density conditions. When an oxide cathode is operated under such conditions, the heating effect due to Joule heat in the oxide layer exceeds the cooling effect, depending on the product of the work function and the cathode current, resulting in a rise in the cathode temperature. This rise in cathode temperature aggravates deterioration of emission characteristics during the life of an oxide cathode. In the case of the dispenser cathode, however, the cathode temperature decreases under high-current-density conditions. When an oxide cathode in a crossover type electron gun is operated, equipotential surfaces are formed in the curved surface in the oxide layer. The formation of an equipotential surface leads to relaxation of the loading. It is considered that this is the reason for the longer life of an oxide cathode in a crossover type electron gun than that of an oxide cathode in a laminar-flow type electron gun.

A method to improve the reflection efficiency of holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystal (HPDLC) is proposed and its effectiveness is confirmed. Controlling the alignment of liquid crystal (LC) in tiny droplets of HPDLC can increase the refractive-index difference between the LC droplet layer and the polymer layer, causing the peak reflectance and reflective spectral width to expand. We observed experimentally that 96% of the light components excluding the scattering loss can be diffracted in a transmission HPDLC device by ordering the LC. In a reflection HPDLC, we found that reflection could be improved by ordering through an applied shear force. Our findings should lead to an improvement in the quality of reflective display devices.

In this paper, we discuss the initial acquisition of the code division multiplexed DS/SS down-link signals at a user terminal of multiple LEO mobile satellite communication systems. In LEO systems, a receiver generally receives signals from plural satellites for soft hand-off and for satellite diversity as a countermeasure to shadowing. In this situation, the signal from each satellite becomes the interference to the signals from other satellites. In addition to this inter-satellite interference, we have to consider the intra-satellite interference from user channels to a pilot channel because of the loss of orthogonality of channels at initial acquisition stage especially under frequency offsets due to Doppler effect. Thus in this paper, we analytically evaluate the performance of an initial acquisition scheme, taking the intra/inter-satellite interference under Doppler shift into account.

This paper presents the subjective speech quality evaluation in terms of the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and the relationship between BER and subjective speech quality in a GSM-based radio system. The results show that in certain environments (hilly terrain and rural areas), a SNR (or C/I) higher than 12 dB is required for acceptable speech quality. For an acceptable speech quality, a BER(c1) better than 10-2 is needed in a GSM-based system.

We have designed rapid single-flux-quantum (RSFQ) adder circuits using two different architectures: one is the conventional architecture employing globally synchronous clocking and the other is the data-driven self-timed (DDST) architecture. It has been pointed out that the timing margin of the RSFQ logic is very sensitive to the circuit parameter variations which are induced by the fabrication process and the device parameter uncertainty. Considering the physical timing in the circuits, we have shown that the DDST architecture is advantageous for realizing RSFQ circuits operating at very high frequencies. We have also calculated the theoretical circuit yield of the DDST adders and shown that a four-bit system operating at 10 GHz is feasible with sufficient operating margin, considering the present 1 kA/cm2 Nb Josephson technology.

In this paper, to obtain higher spectral efficiency than a conventional M-ary/Spread Spectrum (SS) communication system using an orthogonal code, we propose Double M-ary/SS communication systems in which transmitting sequences are produced by multiplying two sequences obtained from different M-ary/SS systems. First, we estimate the system performance of a Double M-ary/SS in which transmitting sequences are composed of two kinds of sequences which have the same chip duration and the same sequence length in AWGN environment by theoretical analysis and computer simulations using random sequences. And we show that the bit error rate (BER) of the system can be improved, compared to that of the conventional M-ary/SS. Next, we propose two concrete examples of the Double M-ary/SS systems. We investigate the performance of these systems in AWGN environment by computer simulations, and show that the BER and spectral efficiency can be improved by the two systems compared to those of the conventional M-ary/SS. Further, we consider a modified method of the demodulation for one of the examples of Double M-ary/SS systems, and show that we can reduce quantity of calculations by the method.

This paper presents the performance of FH/MFSK systems, which exploit silent gaps in speech to accommodate more users, over Rayleigh fading channels. Two kinds of receivers are considered: one uses a threshold on the received signal strength to declare whether the signals were present or not, and the other is assumed to have perfect transmitter-state information obtained from using additional bandwidth. Results show that, if the codeword dropping and codeword error are assumed to be equally costly, the former can achieve slightly better performance than the latter in the decoding error probability. This finding suggests that, for the system to exploit silent gaps in speech, it is advantageous for the receiver to use a threshold to declare whether signals were present or not instead of relying on the transmitter-state information.

The development of saturation diving in civil and defense applications has enabled man to work in the sea at great depths and for long periods of time. This advance has resulted, in part, as a consequence of the substitution of helium for nitrogen in breathing gas mixtures. However, utilization of HeO2 breathing mixture at high ambient pressures has caused problems in speech communication; in turn, helium speech enhancement systems have been developed to improve diver communication. These speech unscramblers attempt to process variously the grossly unintelligible speech resulting from the effect of breathing mixtures and ambient pressure, and to reconstruct such signals in order to provide adequate voice communication. It is known that the glottal excitation is quasi-periodic and the vocal tract filter is quasi-stationary. Hence, it is possible to use an auto regressive modelisation to restore speech intelligibility in hyperbaric conditions. Corrections are made on the vocal tract transfer function, either in the frequency domain, or directly on the autocorrelation function. A spectral subtraction or noise reduction may be added to improve speech quality. A new VAD enhanced helium speech unscrambler is proposed for use in adverse conditions or in speech recognition. This system, implementable on single chip DSP of current technology, is capable to work in real time.