Digital watermarking is a technique that aims at hiding a message signal in a multimedia signal for copyright claim, authentication, device control, or broadcast monitoring, etc. In this paper, we focus on embedding watermarks into still images, where the watermarks themselves can be binary sequences or grayscale images. We propose to scramble the watermark bits with pseudo-noise (PN) or orthogonal codes before they are embedded into an image. We also try to incorporate error correction coding (ECC) into the watermarking scheme, anticipating reduction of the watermark bit error rate (WBER). Due to the similarity between the PN/orthogonal-coded watermarking and the spread spectrum communication, it is natural that, following similar derivations regarding data BER in digital communications, we derive certain explicit quantitative relationships regarding the tradeoff between the WBER, the watermark capacity (i.e. the number of watermark bits) and the distortion suffered by the original image, which is measured in terms of the embedded image's signal-to-noise ratio (abbreviated as ISNR). These quantitative relationships are compactly summarized into a so-called tradeoff triangle, which constitutes the major contribution of this paper. For the embedding of grayscale watermarks, an unequal error protection (UEP) scheme is proposed to provide different degrees of robustness for watermark bits of different degrees of significance. In this UEP scheme, optimal strength factors for embedding different watermark bits are sought so that the mean squared error suffered by the extracted watermark, which is by itself a grayscale image, is minimized while a specified ISNR is maintained.

This study proposes a novel structure of index-guiding square photonic crystal fibers (SPCF) having simultaneously ultra-flattened chromatic dispersion characteristics and low confinement losses in a wide wavelength range. The finite difference method (FDM) with anisotropic perfectly matched layers (PMLs) is used to analyze the various properties of square PCF. The findings reveal that it is possible to design five-ring PCFs with a flattened negative chromatic dispersion of 0-1.5 ps/(nm.km) in a wavelength range of 1.27 µm to 1.7 µm and a flattened chromatic dispersion of 01.15 ps/(nm.km) in a wavelength range of 1.25 µm to 1.61 µm. Simultaneously it also exhibited that the confinement losses are less than 10-9 dB/m and 10-10 dB/m in the wavelength range of 1.25 µm to 1.7 µm.

We report the generation of time- and wavelength-interleaved optical pulses using the principle of sub-harmonic pulse gating in a dispersion-managed fiber cavity. The pulsed source has been applied to the processing of electrical and optical signals including analog-to-digital conversion, wavelength multicast, and serial-to-parallel optical data conversion.

A highly accurate measurement method of parameters of MZ-type LN optical intensity modulators is presented. In this method, a CW optical signal is input to an optical terminal and small CW RF signal is applied to an electrode of the modulator. Then sideband levels of an output optical signal at different bias points are measured by using optical spectrum analyzer. By using 1st order sideband levels which are measured at two different bias conditions, and using a compensation method to measured levels, we can obtain accurate chirp parameter even when very small power of RF signal is applied to the modulator. In this method, the chirp parameter can be obtained in good accuracy when the input RF voltage is only 3% of the halfwave voltage.

In real-time speech recognition applications, there is a need to implement a fast and reliable adaptation algorithm. We propose a method to reduce adaptation time of the rapid unsupervised speaker adaptation based on HMM-Sufficient Statistics. We use only a single arbitrary utterance without transcriptions in selecting the N-best speakers' Sufficient Statistics created offline to provide data for adaptation to a target speaker. Further reduction of N-best implies a reduction in adaptation time. However, it degrades recognition performance due to insufficiency of data needed to robustly adapt the model. Linear interpolation of the global HMM-Sufficient Statistics offsets this negative effect and achieves a 50% reduction in adaptation time without compromising the recognition performance. Furthermore, we compared our method with Vocal Tract Length Normalization (VTLN), Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) and Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR). Moreover, we tested in office, car, crowd and booth noise environments in 10 dB, 15 dB, 20 dB and 25 dB SNRs.

In road-vehicle communication systems, the transmission rate between user terminals in the vehicle and the access points degrades due to changing path-loss and time-varying fading. In this paper, we used an inter-vehicle packet relay technique to improve channel quality in road-vehicle communication systems. We evaluated this method using numerical analysis to validate our method.

We have previously developed a concatenative speech synthesizer based on the plural speech unit selection and fusion method that can synthesize stable and human-like speech. In this method, plural speech units for each speech segment are selected using a cost function and fused by averaging pitch-cycle waveforms. This method has a large computational cost, but some platforms require a speech synthesis system that can work within limited hardware resources. In this paper, we propose an offline unit fusion method that reduces the computational cost. In the proposed method, speech units are fused in advance to make a pre-fused speech unit database. At synthesis time, a speech unit for each segment is selected from the pre-fused speech unit database and the speech waveform is synthesized by applying prosodic modification and concatenation without the computationally expensive unit fusion process. We compared several algorithms for constructing the pre-fused speech unit database. From the subjective and objective evaluations, the effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by the results that the quality of synthetic speech of the offline unit fusion method with 100 MB database is close to that of the online unit fusion method with 93 MB JP database and is slightly lower to that of the 390 MB US database, while the computational time is reduced by 80%. We also show that the frequency-weighted VQ-based method is effective for construction of the pre-fused speech unit database.

This paper presents a fast transient simulation method for power distribution networks (PDNs) of the PCB/Package. Because these PDNs are modeled as large-scale linear circuits consisting of a large number of RLC elements, it takes large costs to solve by conventional circuit simulators, such as SPICE. Our simulation method is based on the leapfrog algorithm, and can solve RLC circuits of PDNs faster than SPICE. Actual PDNs have frequency-dependent dispersions such as the skin-effect of conductors and the dielectric loss. To model these dispersions, more number of RLC elements are required, and circuit structures of these dispersion models are hard to solve by using the leapfrog algorithm. This paper shows that the circuit structures of dispersion models can be converted to suitable structures for the leapfrog algorithm. Further, in order to reduce the simulation time, our proposed method exploits parallel computation techniques. Numerical results show that our proposed method using single processing element (PE) enables a speedup of 20-100 times and 10 times compared to HSPICE and INDUCTWISE with the same level of accuracy, respectively. In a large-scale example with frequency-dependent dispersions, our method achieves over 94% parallel efficiency with 5PEs.

In this letter, we propose a new approach to estimate the degree of noise masking based on a sophisticated model for clean speech distribution. This measure, named as noise masking probability (NMP), is incorporated into the feature compensation technique to achieve robust speech recognition in noisy environments. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves the performance of the baseline recognition system in the presence of various background noises.

A major step in the numerical solution of electromagnetic scattering problems involves the computation of the convolution based reaction integrals. In this paper a procedure based on the analytical Fourier transform is introduced which allows us to calculate the convolution-based reaction integrals in the spectral domain without evaluating any convolution products directly. A numerical evaluation of the computational cost is presented to show the efficiency of the method when handling electrically large problems.

In speaker adaptation for speech synthesis, it is desirable to convert both voice characteristics and prosodic features such as F0 and phone duration. For simultaneous adaptation of spectrum, F0 and phone duration within the HMM framework, we need to transform not only the state output distributions corresponding to spectrum and F0 but also the duration distributions corresponding to phone duration. However, it is not straightforward to adapt the state duration because the original HMM does not have explicit duration distributions. Therefore, we utilize the framework of the hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM), which is an HMM having explicit state duration distributions, and we apply an HSMM-based model adaptation algorithm to simultaneously transform both the state output and state duration distributions. Furthermore, we propose an HSMM-based adaptive training algorithm to simultaneously normalize the state output and state duration distributions of the average voice model. We incorporate these techniques into our HSMM-based speech synthesis system, and show their effectiveness from the results of subjective and objective evaluation tests.

A novel configuration method called Row Multicast Configuration (RoMultiC) is proposed for high speed configuration of coarse grain reconfigurable systems. The same configuration data can be transferred in multicast fashion to configure many Processing Elements (PEs) by using a multicast bit-map provided in row and column directions of PE array. Evaluation results using practical applications show that a model reconfigurable system that incorporates this scheme can reduce configuration clock cycles by up to 73.1% compared with traditional configuration delivery scheme. Amount of required memory to store the configuration data at external memory is also reduced by omitting the duplicated configuration data.

We consider a problem for constructing a minimum cost r-edge-connected multigraph in which degree d(v) of each vertex v ∈ V is specified. In this paper, we propose a 3-approximation algorithm for this problem under the assumption that edge cost is metric, r(u,v) ∈ {1,2} for each u,v ∈ V, and d(v) ≥ 2 for each v ∈ V. This problem is a generalization of metric TSP. We also propose an approximation algorithm for the digraph version of the problem.

Diseases of the gastro-intestinal tract are becoming more prevalent. New techniques and devices, such as the wireless capsule endoscope and the telemetry capsule, that are able to measure the various signals of the digestive organs (temperature, pH, and pressure), have been developed for the observation of the digestive organs. In these capsule devices, there are no methods of moving and grasping them. In order to make a swift diagnosis and to give proper medication, it is necessary to control the moving speed of the capsule. This paper presents a wireless system for the control of movements of an electrical stimulus capsule. This includes an electrical stimulus capsule which can be swallowed and an external transmitting control system. A receiver, a receiving antenna (small multi-loop), a transmitter, and a transmitting antenna (monopole) were designed and fabricated taking into consideration the MPE, power consumption, system size, signal-to-noise ratio and the modulation method. The wireless system, which was designed and implemented for the control of movements of the electrical stimulus capsule, was verified by in-vitro experiments which were performed on the small intestines of a pig. As a result, we found that when the small intestines are contracted by electrical stimuli, the capsule can move to the opposite direction, which means that the capsule can go up or down in the small intestines.

We have developed a near-field mapping system with a fiber-based electro-optic (EO) probe for microwave antenna characterization. In this probe, an EO crystal is mounted on the tip of an optical fiber through a collimating lens. Since the lens allows the crystal thickness to be lengthened by reducing the loss of an optical beam coupling back to the optical fiber, sensitivity is improved. Because the tip of the EO probe consists of a 1-mm-cubic EO crystal and contains no metallic components, there is very little disturbance of the mapped electric field. Fixing the optical fiber in a thin glass tube provides stable sensitivity during long-term mapping over a large area. The fabricated EO probe has a dynamic range larger than 45 dB, flat sensitivity from 1.95 to 20 GHz, and directivity with cross-axis sensitivity isolation greater than 30 dB. A comparison of the measured and calculated near fields of a dipole antenna showed negligible static or inductive coupling between the EO probe and the dipole antenna. Using a tissue-equivalent phantom to assess the specific absorption rate (SAR), we demonstrated the potential of the EO probe for mapping the electric field with information of amplitude and phase. The EO probe can detect an electric field of less than 0.6 V/m, which corresponds to a SAR of 0.5 mW/kg. This value satisfies the minimum detection limit defined in the regulations for determining SAR. This result shows the potential of the near-field mapping system with the fiber-based EO probe in practical applications.

In this paper, we address the task of incremental language modeling for automatic transcription of broadcast news speech. Daily broadcast news naturally contains new words that are not in the lexicon of the speech recognition system but are important for downstream applications such as information retrieval or machine translation. To recognize those new words, the lexicon and the language model of the speech recognition system need to be updated periodically. We propose a method of estimating a list of words to be added to the lexicon based on some time-series text data. The experimental results on the RT04 Broadcast News data and other TV audio data showed that this method provided an impressive and stable reduction in both out-of-vocabulary rates and speech recognition word error rates.

When a cylindrically curved concave conducting surface is terminated abruptly at the edge, the whispering gallery (WG) mode propagating toward the edge direction is radiated into the free space from the aperture plane at the edge. In this paper, by applying the new analysis method, we shall derive a uniform geometrical theory of diffraction solution (UTD) for the electric-type WG mode radiation field applicable in the transition region near the geometrical boundaries produced by the incident modal ray on the edge of the curved surface. The UTD is represented by the summation of the solution for the geometrical ray converted from the modal ray of the WG mode and the solution for the uniform edge diffracted ray scattered at the cylindrically curved edge. By comparing with the reference solution obtained numerically from the integral representation of the radiation field, we will confirm the validity and the utility of the UTD proposed in this paper.

A novel procedure for an efficient and rigorous solution of electromagnetic scattering problems is presented. It is based on the use of universal bases that are obtained by applying the SVD procedure to PO-derived basis functions. These bases, constructed by totally bypassing any matrix-type approach, can be used for all angles of incidence and their use leads to a matrix with relatively small dimensions. The method enables us to solve 2D scattering problems in a computationally efficient and numerically rigorous manner.

The uni-traveling-carrier photodiode (UTC-PD) is an innovative PD that has a unique operation mode in which only electrons act as the active carriers, resulting in ultrafast response and high electrical output power at the same time. This paper describes the features of the UTC-PD and its excellent performance. In addition, UTC-PD-based optoelectronic devices integrated with various elements, such as passive and active devices, are presented. These devices are promising for various applications, such as millimeter- and submillimeter-wave generation up to the terahertz range and ultrafast optical signal processing at data rates of up to 320 Gbit/s.

The extended version of spectral domain approach (ESDA) is applied to evaluate the scattering characteristics of discontinuities in coaxial line. Discontinuities may be in inner and/or outer conductor of coaxial line. This method secures the high accuracy by considering the singularities of fields near the conductor edge properly. The computational labor of the new method is far lighter than that of FEM, so that novel method is suitable for the time consuming iterative computation such as fitting procedure in material evaluation or optimization of antenna design.