Borrowing the notion of instantaneous frequency that was developed in the context of time-frequency signal analysis, an instantaneous frequency amplitude spectrum (IFAS) is introduced for estimating fundamental frequency of speech signal in both noiseless and adverse environments. We define harmonicity measure as a quantity that indicates degree of periodical regularity in the IFAS and that shows substantial difference between periodic signal and noise-like waveform. The harmonicity measure is applied to estimate the existence of fundamental frequency. We provide experimental examples to demonstrate the general applicability of the harmonicity measure and apply the proposed procedure to Japanese continuous speech signals. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional methods with or without the presence of noise.

We have determined the thickness and optical constants (refractive index and extinction coefficient) of each layer in the multi-layer organic light emitting diode (OLED) devices based on phosphorescent platinum octaethyl porphine (PtOEP) using a phase modulated spectroscopic ellipsometer. The thickness of each layer estimated from the ellipsometric measurement is different from the thickness measured with quartz oscillator during the evaporation of organic materials. The deviation of total multi-layer thickness is about 5%, while the deviation in each of N, N'-bis(1-naphtyl)-N, N'-diphenyl-1,1'-biphenyl-4,4'-diamine (α-NPD) and aluminum tris 8-hydroxyquinoline (Alq3) layers is about 20-25%. Additionally the spectra of refractive index and extinction coefficient of Alq3 and α-NPD layers are different from those that are measured using the single layer films. These results are understood by penetration of organic material from the neighboring layers in the multi-layer structure devices.

Photoacoustic (PA) spectra on the 3, 4, 9, 10-perylenetetracarboxylic dianhydride (PTCDA) films deposited by the vacuum evaporation were measured. The films have layered structures constructed from the perylene molecule plane structures. The crystal quality depended on the deposited substrate and the photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS) seems to be the very useful tools to evaluate these properties from the non-radiative features. The films deposited on the three different substrate had the almost same PL spectra, but the films deposited on the glass substrate had the large non-radiative peaks in the PA spectra contrary to the films deposited on the alumina or crystal Si (100) those had the non-radiative peaks only observed at the short wavelength region.

Some plants have air purification ability. This purification ability of plants is considered a promising method for indoor air purification because of the low cost and high purification performance. Therefore, several studies have been carried out to investigate the relationship between the air purification ability of plants and environmental conditions. Nevertheless, the purification mechanism and process have not been clarified yet. In this paper, we investigated the air purification process in plants by bioelectrical potential analysis using linear and nonlinear analysis methods. First, we showed that two types of plants have a high air purification ability; Schefflera and Boston fern. Next, we measured AC bioelectrical potential during the purifying process of plants for pollutant gas. Then, we evaluated the power spectra of time series data of the bioelectrical potential. We found that the power spectra shifted to a lower level after gas injection over all frequencies. Thus, the higher power spectrum came from possible higher physiological activities of the plant. Finally, we introduced a nonlinear analysis method from the dynamical system theory. We transformed the time series data of the potential to a higher dimensional state space using a delay coordinate, which is often used in the field of nonlinear time series analysis. The results show that the orbits in the reconstructed state space have a large variation in gas injection. These experimental results suggest that the measurement of bioelectrical potential could become a useful method for evaluating the air purification ability of plants.

Spectral-amplitude coding (SAC) techniques in fiber-Bragg-grating (FBG)-based optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) systems were investigated in our previous work. This paper adopts the same network architecture to investigate the simultaneous reductions of multiple-access interference (MAI) and optical beat interference (OBI). The MAI is caused by overlapping wavelengths from undesired network coder/decoders (codecs) while the OBI is induced by interaction of simultaneous chips at adjacent gratings. It is proposed that MAI and OBI reductions may be obtained by use of: 1) a source spectrum that is divided into equal chip spacing; 2) coded FBGs characterized by approximately the same number of "0" and "1" code elements; and 3) spectrally balanced photo-detectors. With quasi-orthogonal Walsh-Hadamard coded FBGs, complementary spectral chips is employed as signal pairs to be recombined and detected in balanced photo-detectors, thus achieving simultaneous suppression of both MAIs and OBIs. Simulation results showed that the proposed OCDMA spectral-amplitude coding scheme achieves significant MAI and OBI reductions.

This paper is concerned with improving noise-robustness of a multi-SNR multi-band speaker identification system by introducing automatic adjustment of subband likelihood recombination weights. The adjustment is performed on the basis of subband power calculated from the noise observed just before the speech starts in the input signal. To evaluate the noise-robustness of this system, text-independent speaker identification experiments were conducted on speech data corrupted with noises recorded in five environments: "bus," "car," "office," "lobby," and "restaurant". It was found that the present method reduces the identification error by 15.9% compared with the multi-SNR multi-band method with equal recombination weights at 0 dB SNR. The performance of the present method was compared with a clean fullband method in which a speaker model training is performed on clean speech data, and spectral subtraction is applied to the input signal in the speaker identification stage. When the clean fullband method without spectral subtraction is taken as a baseline, the multi-SNR multi-band method with automatic adjustment of recombination weights attained 56.8% error reduction on average, while the average error reduction rate of the clean fullband method with spectral subtraction was 11.4% at 0 dB SNR.

We analyze the performance of code division multiple access (CDMA) systems with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). We obtain the probability density function (pdf) of the multiple access interference (MAI) of CDMA systems and extend the results to OFDM-CDMA systems to determine the pdf of the MAI and inter-carrier interference (ICI) in terms of the number of users, the spreading length, the crosscorrelation of spreading sequences, the number of sub-carriers and the frequency offset. We consider the synchronous downlink of cellular multi-carrier CDMA systems and derive a Gaussian approximation of the MAI and ICI. The results show that the overall effect of frequency offset varies with system loading for a given crosscorrelation. The performance of OFDM-CDMA in frequency selective fading channels is analyzed in terms of the joint probability of the fading parameter in each sub-carrier.

In this paper, a novel carrier-sense multiple-access (CSMA) scheme for UWB ad-hoc network is proposed and evaluated. UWB is a kind of spread spectrum communication and it is possible to detect the distance between the nodes. With this positioning capability of the UWB systems, DS-CDMA (DS-UWB) scheme with variable spreading factor is used. In this paper, a novel CSMA scheme that employs the correlation of the spreading code is proposed.

Europe has initiated research activity to analyse and prepare the floor for mobile communication beyond 3G. Very recently, around the beginning of 2004, the European commission started together with the main partners in the relevant industry special projects to realize this plan. The key objective of the WINNER (Wireless World Initiative New Radio) project is to develop an innovative concept in radio access in order to address high flexibility and scalability with respect to data rates and radio environments. The future converged wireless world requires in the long-term perspective a ubiquitous radio system instead of disparate systems for different purposes (cellular, WLAN, short-range access etc.). This concept will be derived by a systematic investigation of advanced radio technologies with respect to predicted user requirements and challenging scenarios. The project will contribute to the global research, regulatory and standardisation communities and processes.

A low-band spectrum envelope reconstruction method was tested to see if it could improve the sound quality of F0 modified speech with the PSOLA (Pitch Synchronous OverLap Add) method. In the conventional PSOLA method, the extracted spectrum envelope using a Hanning window with two-pitch-period length had no reliable information in the band of frequencies lower than the original F0. This problem causes sound degradation of the F0 modified speech when the F0 is shifted downward. In the proposed method, the low-band spectrum envelope was properly modified according to the F0 modification rate. The amplitude of the F0 harmonic components in the low-band were reproduced based on the spectral tilt of the spectrum envelope. Subjective listening tests suggest the proposed method yields improved sound quality than the conventional TD-PSOLA method when the downward modification rate exceeds 0.4 octave.

Visual defects, called mura in the field, sometimes occur during the manufacturing of the flat panel liquid crystal displays. In this paper we propose an automatic inspection method that reliably detects and quantifies TFT-LCD region-mura defects. The method consists of two phases. In the first phase we segment candidate region-muras from TFT-LCD panel images using the modified regression diagnostics and Niblack's thresholding. In the second phase, based on the human eye's sensitivity to mura, we quantify mura level for each candidate, which is used to identify real muras by grading them as pass or fail. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated on real TFT-LCD panel samples.

This paper proposes a new SSB-QPSK modulation/demodulation method. The present method multiplexes the USB (Upper Side Band) and LSB (Lower Side Band) of a QPSK-modulated SSB (Single Side Band) on the same SSB complex frequency band. The present method thus achieves 2 bit/s/Hz. This method is an orthogonal SSB-QPSK method, because the multiplex signals are orthogonal to each other. The demodulator consists of two SSB demodulators. A simulation result in AWGN conditions, shows that the proposed method has better BER (Bit Error Rate) performance than 16 QAM. The degradation of BER in comparison with QPSK is less than 0.2 dB on Eb/No (bit-energy-to-noise-power ratio). In a fading/Doppler environment, the BER performance of the orthogonal SSB-QPSK is the same as that of QPSK.

Optimistic coding is a coding in which we require the existence of reliable codes for infinitely many block length. In this letter we consider the optimistic source coding theorems for a general source Z from the information-spectrum approach. We first formulate the problem to be considered clearly. We obtain the optimistic infimum achievable source coding rate Tε (Z) for the case where decoding error probability εn is asymptotically less than or equal to an arbitrarily given ε [0,1). In fact, Tε (Z) turns out to be expressed in a form similar to the ordinary infimum achievable source coding rate. A new expression for Tε (Z) is also given. In addition, we investigate the case where εn = 0 for infinitely many n and obtain the infimum achievable coding rate.

The scattering problem by metallic gratings has become one of fundamental problems in electromagnetics. In this paper, a thin metallic grating placed in conical mounting is treated as a lossy dielectric grating expressed by complex permittivity and thickness. The solution of the metallic grating by using the matrix eigenvalue calculations is compared with that of the plane grating by using the resistive boundary condition and the spectral Galerkin procedure, and the availability of the resistive boundary condition for thin metallic gratings in conical mounting is investigated. In order to improve the convergence of the solutions of thin metallic gratings, the spatial harmonics of flux densities which are continuous function instead of electromagnetic fields are used.

This paper deals with CE-SS (Constant-Envelope Spread Spectrum) signals, focusing on a novel generation technique based upon using digital processing blocks to drive a frequency modulator with a random sequence. The system described herein allows for flexibility in achieving a variety of user defined goal spectra. The foundation upon which this work is built was laid by Callegari et al. who introduced a novel synthesis procedure for 'non-stationary' modulations. This novel synthesis technique uses an iterative algorithm to arrive at an output spectrum which is a good approximation to a user-defined goal spectrum. The architecture which this paper details uses programmable logic to tune the system parameters in striving towards user defined goal spectra. The architecture can generate CE-SS waveforms whose spectra match those which the aforementioned algorithm deems achievable.

This paper describes a real-time blind source separation (BSS) method for moving speech signals in a room. Our method employs frequency domain independent component analysis (ICA) using a blockwise batch algorithm in the first stage, and the separated signals are refined by postprocessing using crosstalk component estimation and non-stationary spectral subtraction in the second stage. The blockwise batch algorithm achieves better performance than an online algorithm when sources are fixed, and the postprocessing compensates for performance degradation caused by source movement. Experimental results using speech signals recorded in a real room show that the proposed method realizes robust real-time separation for moving sources. Our method is implemented on a standard PC and works in realtime.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the opening speed on a breaking arc. The opening speeds are 10, 20 and 30 mm/s. The breaking arc is generated in a D.C. 42 V/10.5 A circuit, and the arc voltage, the arc current, the gap length and the arc spectrum intensity are measured. Arc temperature is calculated by using a Boltzmann plot. Even if the opening speed is changed, the arc temperature starts from a high temperature, and falls gradually to 4650-4750 K with time. Namely, the opening speed has no influence on the arc temperature.

All power electronic circuits with state feedback controlled switching can be described as nonlinear time-varying dynamical systems. The occurrence of chaos--where the ripple waveforms become aperiodic--is common in such systems. It is shown here that this natural phenomenon may be effectively used in minimizing electromagnetic interference problems in power electronic circuits. This is because converters operating chaotically tend to spread the spectrum, thereby reducing the interference power at any target frequency. We also present the ways of calculating the average values of state variables and the power spectrum under chaotic operation.

In this paper the correlation spectrum of antenna array is introduced. Based on the relationship between the correlation spectrum and space spectrum of MUSIC, we proposed a novel approach to improve the DOA estimation by arranging the linear antenna array elements using genetic algorithm (GA) in optimizing the correlation spectrum. The DOA estimation performance of the optimized array is validated by Monte Carlo simulation and Cramer-Rao bound (CRB), which are improved compared with that of the traditional uniform linear array and the Minimum-Redundancy array (MRA).

We demonstrate the wide-band (> 25-nm) long-distance (> 1000-km) chromatic dispersion compensation by midway spectral inversion (MSI) using a periodically-polled LiNbO3 device. In order to achieve a flat zero net dispersion, the fourth order dispersion of the single-mode fibers is canceled by MSI, while the third order dispersion is compensated for by the negative slope dispersion compensation fiber (NS-DCF). The second order dispersion is canceled out by both. The long distance propagation is realized by a double recirculation-loop system. A very flat zero dispersion is measured for the first time for over 1000-km single-mode fiber propagation with MSI dispersion compensation.