This paper proposes a new algorithm for evaluating the number of chaining variable conditions (CVCs) in the selecting step of a disturbance vector (DV) for the analysis of SHA-1 collision search. The algorithm is constructed by combining four strategies, that can evaluate the number of CVCs more strictly compared with the previous approach. By using our method, we found some DVs that have 57 (or 59) essential CVCs for 1st (or 2nd) block in the case if we assume that we can modify messages up to step 25, which we have not confirmed the practicability of the assumption.

The present paper describes quality enhancement of speech corrupted by an additive background noise in a single-channel system. The proposed approach is based on the introduction of a perceptual criterion using a frequency-weighting filter in a subtractive-type enhancement process. Although this subtractive-type method is very attractive because of its simplicity, it produces an unnatural and unpleasant residual noise. Thus, it is difficult to select fixed optimized parameters for all speech and noise conditions. A new and effective algorithm is thus developed based on the masking properties of the human ear. This newly developed algorithm allows for an automatic adaptation in the time and frequency of the enhancement system and determines a suitable noise estimate according to the frequency of the noisy input speech. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can efficiently remove additive noise related to various kinds of noise corruption.

We propose a protocol for converting the encryption function of a ciphertext into another encryption function while keeping the corresponding message secret. The proposed protocol allows conversions of the El Gamal and Paillier cryptosystems and has the potential to design an efficient multiparty protocol intended for circuits consisting of arithmetic and logical operations. We clarify the condition of circuits such that the multiparty protocol based on the proposed protocol provides better performance than previous approaches. In addition, we introduce some privacy-preserving statistical computations as an effective application of the proposed protocol.

We investigate the symbol error rate (SER) of the cooperative transmission with the decode-and-forward relay protocol under Rayleigh fading channels. The technique of orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC) is applied at the links source-relay, source-destination and relay-destination. A closed-form SER expression is derived. Simulation results demonstrate the theoretical solutions.

Minimizing the residual impurity gases is a key factor for reducing temporal dark image sticking. Therefore, this paper uses a vacuum-sealing method that minimizes the residual impurity gases by enhancing the base vacuum level, and the resultant change in temporal dark image sticking is then examined in comparison to that with the conventional sealing method using 42-in. ac-PDPs with a high Xe (11%) content. As a result of monitoring the difference in the display luminance, infrared emission, and perceived luminance between the cells with and without temporal dark image sticking, the vacuum-sealing method is demonstrated to reduce temporal dark image sticking by decreasing the residual impurity gases and increasing the oxygen vacancy in the MgO layer. Furthermore, the use of a modified driving waveform along with the vacuum-sealing method is even more effective in reducing temporal dark image sticking.

A high-efficiency CMOS rectifier circuit for UHF RFID applications was developed. The rectifier utilizes a self-Vth-cancellation (SVC) scheme in which the threshold voltage of MOSFETs is cancelled by applying gate bias voltage generated from the output voltage of the rectifier itself. A very simple circuit configuration and zero power dissipation characteristics in biasing enable excellent power conversion efficiency (PCE), especially under small RF input power conditions. At higher RF input power conditions, the PCE of the rectifier automatically decreases. This is the built-in self-power-regulation function. The proposed SVC CMOS rectifier was fabricated with a 0.35-µm CMOS process and the measured performance was compared with those of conventional nMOS, pMOS, and CMOS rectifiers and other types of Vth cancellation rectifiers as well. The SVC CMOS rectifier achieves 32% of PCE at the -10 dBm RF input power condition. This PCE is larger than rectifiers reported to date under this condition.

Due to the dynamic nature and uncertainty of grid computing, system reliability can become very unpredictable. Thus, a well-defined scheduling mechanism that provides high system availability for grid applications is required. In this letter, we propose a SLA-constrained policy-based scheduling mechanism to enhance system performance in grid. Also, we implement the proposed model and show that our policy-based scheduling mechanism can guarantee high system availability as well as support load balancing on an experimental basis.

In a grid computing environment, the network characteristics such as bandwidth and latency affect the task performance. The demands for bandwidth of wide-area networks become large and it reaches more than 100 Gbps. In this article, we focus on parallel routes transmission, such as link aggregation, to realize large bandwidth network. The performance of grid computing with parallel routes transmission is evaluated on the emulated wide-area network.

The generalized Hamming weight played an important role in coding theory. In the study of the wiretap channel of type II, the generalized Hamming weight was extended to a two-code format. Two equivalent concepts of the generalized Hamming weight hierarchy and its two-code format, are the inverse dimension/length profile (IDLP) and the inverse relative dimension/length profile (IRDLP), respectively. In this paper, the Singleton upper bound on the IRDLP is improved by using a quotient subcode set and a subset with respect to a generator matrix, respectively. If these new upper bounds on the IRDLP are achieved, in the corresponding coordinated two-party wire-tap channel of type II, the adversary cannot learn more from the illegitimate party.

We propose frequency shifted optical single sideband (OSSB), a novel OSSB modulation scheme. It uses a continuous wave to up-convert the source signal, and the signal and the continuous wave then undergo suppressed carrier OSSB modulation simultaneously. This scheme inherently has no unwanted sidebands, even if the suppressed carrier OSSB modulator is defective. Experiments of 12 GHz RF signal transmission confirm that it achieves 2.4 dB relaxation in chromatic dispersion power fading under the condition of 15 dB SSR.

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for image feature extraction-the dual two-dimensional fuzzy class preserving projections ((2D)2FCPP). The main advantages of (2D)2FCPP over two-dimensional locality preserving projections (2DLPP) are: (1) utilizing the fuzzy assignation mechanisms to construct the weight matrix, which can improve the classification results; (2) incorporating 2DLPP and alternative 2DLPP to get a more efficient dimensionality reduction method-(2D)2LPP.

This paper presents a memory-efficient motion estimation (ME) technique for high-resolution video compression. The main objective is to reduce the external memory access, especially for limited local memory resource. The reduction of memory access can successfully save the notorious power consumption. The key to reduce the memory accesses is based on center-biased algorithm in that the center-biased algorithm performs the motion vector (MV) searching with the minimum search data. While considering the data reusability, the proposed dual-search-windowing (DSW) approaches use the secondary windowing as an option per searching necessity. By doing so, the loading of search windows can be alleviated and hence reduce the required external memory bandwidth. The proposed techniques can save up to 81% of external memory bandwidth and require only 135 MBytes/sec, while the quality degradation is less than 0.2 dB for 720 p HDTV clips coded at 8 Mbits/sec.

In digital speech communication over noisy high packet loss rate wireless channels, improving the overall performance of the realtime speech coding and transmission system is of great importance. A novel joint speech coding and transmission algorithm is proposed by fully exploiting the correlation between speech coding, channel coding and the transmission process. The proposed algorithm requires no algorithm delay and less bandwidth expansion while greatly enhancing the error correcting performance and the reconstructed speech quality compared with conventional algorithms. Simulations show that the residual error rate is reduced by 84.36% and the MOS (Mean Opinion Score) is improved over 38.86%.

Recently, real-time media delivery services such as video streaming and VoIP have rapidly become popular. For these applications requiring high-level QoS guarantee, our research group has proposed a transport-layer approach to provide predictable throughput for upper-layer applications. In the present paper, we propose a congestion control mechanism of TCP for achieving predictable throughput. It does not mean we can guarantee the throughput, while we can provide the throughput required by an upper-layer application at high probability when network congestion level is not so high by using the inline network measurement technique for available bandwidth of the network path. We present the evaluation results for the proposed mechanism obtained in simulation and implementation experiments, and confirm that the proposed mechanism can assure a TCP throughput if the required bandwidth is not so high compared to the physical bandwidth, even when other ordinary TCP (e.g., TCP Reno) connections occupy the link.

We did an experimental study to investigate the effect of the thermal stress due to the heater for adjusting adaptive flying height (AFH) on the readability and instability of tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors. The slider head consists of a small heater nearby the read/write elements for controlling the clearance between the read/write elements and the recording medium of the magnetic recording system. It is firstly reported that the thermal stress from the AFH heater induces instabilities and caused head degradation. The thermal stress degrades the reader performance by inducing voltage fluctuations and large noise spikes that causes the magnetic recording system having poor bit error rate (BER). The open loop of the transfer curve indicates that the flipping of a synthetic antiferromagnet (SAF) edge magnetization causes these instabilities. The thermal stress reduces the exchange bias field and the energy barrier to flop the SAF edge magnetization. The dispersion and thermal stability of the antiferromagnetic (AFM) layer are the potential root causes of these SAF instabilities because the larger AFM dispersion in these heads gives less net stabilizing field to SAF layers that lowers the energy barrier to flop the SAF edge magnetization. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of these weak heads show rough surface and scratches close to the sensor element. The mechanical stress due to these scratches may additionally impact to the stabilizing field of the SAF.

This paper presents a unified test compression technique for scan stimulus and unknown masking data with seamless integration of test generation, test compression and all unknown response masking for high quality manufacturing test cost reduction. Unlike prior test compression methods, the proposed approach considers the unknown responses during test pattern generation procedure, and then selectively encodes the less specified bits (either 1s or 0s) in each scan slice for compression while at the same time masks the unknown responses before sending them to the response compactor. The proposed test scheme could dramatically reduce test data volume as well as the number of required test channels by using only c tester channels to drive N internal scan chains, where c = 「 log 2N 」 + 2. In addition, because all the unknown responses could be exactly masked before entering into the response compactor, test loss due to unknown responses would be eliminated. Experimental results on both benchmark circuits and larger designs indicated the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

Attenuated total reflection (ATR) property utilizing surface plasmon (SP) excitation was investigated for BK-7 prism/MgF2/Ag film/fluorescent organic dye film structure. In the structure, it is expected that SPs are excited at MgF2/Ag and Ag/dye film interfaces by Otto and Kretschmann configurations, respectively. In the experimental ATR curve, reflection dips for the SP excitations at the interfaces could be detected. Furthermore, SP emission lights were observed by irradiation of Ar ion laser beam from the dye film side. The SP emission light curve with two peaks was observed and it was also considered that the peaks corresponded to the SP excitation of Otto and Kretschmann configurations. The SP emission light spectra indicated the excited fluorescent dyes induced the SP emission lights. Intense emission light of Otto configuration was observed in this sample.

This work proposes new features to improve the pathological voice quality classification performance. They are the means, the variances, and the perturbations of the higher-order statistics (HOS) such as the skewness and the kurtosis. The HOS-based features show meaningful differences among normal, grade 1, grade 2, and grade 3 voices classified in the GRBAS scale. The jitter, the shimmer, the harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR), and the variance of the short-time energy are utilized as the conventional features. The performances are measured by the classification and regression tree (CART) method. Specifically, the CART-based method by utilizing both the conventional features and the HOS-based ones shows its effectiveness in the pathological voice quality measurement, with the classification accuracy of 87.8%.

We introduce the Rank M-type L (RM L)-filter to remove impulsive and speckle noise from corrupted images by means of use of DSP TMS320C6701.

One-dimensional photonic crystal (PC) with alternating layers of TiO2 and SiO2 was fabricated with spin coating and low temperature baking, resulting in a successful tuning of the PC stop band so as to block the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) of a π-conjugate polymer film. Single PC as a substrate, not a cavity with two PC's, of the polymer film was sufficient to shift the tangential ASE to the energy at PC stop band edge, indicating that the tangential ASE propagating along the interface was modulated by its evanescent-field tail in the PC, which opens the new pathway for low-threshold coherent luminescence from an ultrathin π-conjugate polymer film with ultimate mode volume.