One of the key technologies to realize future broadband mobile communications is orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission. However, the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) in OFDM transmission is so much larger than that in single carrier transmission that its adoption in mobile communication systems is uncertain. This paper evaluates the transmission performance possible with iterative peak reduction to design more efficient OFDM transmitters. The PAPR reduction effect and bit error rate (BER) performance are clarified by computer simulations. We calculate the set PAPR value that achieves a target PAPR in the iterative peak reduction method. The required Eb/N0 performance is evaluated under the calculated PAPR condition. The results are effective in designing the back-off value of a transmission power amplifier given fixed transmission quality and computational complexity.

This paper discusses a cyclic prefixed single carrier frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) scheme with two types of transmit diversity. Firstly, we propose a SC-FDE system with space-frequency block coding (SFBC). The transmit sequence of the proposed system is designed to have spatial and frequency diversities, which is equivalent to the SFBC. The corresponding combining receiver is derived under a minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion. It is shown that the proposed system significantly outperforms the SC-FDE system with space-time block coding (STBC) over fast fading channels, while providing lower computational complexity than orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) combined with SFBC. We verify the performance of two-branch transmit diversity systems including the proposed one through bit error rate (BER) analysis. Secondly, as a scheme that combines STBC and SFBC, a space-time-frequency block code (STFBC) SC-FDE system is presented. Computer simulation results show that the proposed STFBC SC-FDE system has better immunity to the distortion caused by both fast fading and severe frequency selective fading, compared to the SC-FDE system with the STBC or the SFBC scheme. Complexity analysis is also conducted to compare their computational loads of the transceiver. It is shown that the proposed STFBC SC-FDE system has lower computational complexity than the STFBC OFDM system.

Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology offers the capability of building wide-area networks with high speed. Reconfigurability is a key feature of a WDM network that enables the network logical topology to change dynamically in response to the changing traffic patterns. There are two important issues involved in the reconfiguration of a network logical topology. One is how to determine the new logical topology corresponding to the current topology. It needs to consider a trade-off between the performance of the new target topology and the cost of the topology transition from the current topology to the new one. The other is how to determine the transition sequence from the current topology to the new one. It needs to control the disruption to the network as less as possible during the reconfiguration process. In this paper, we focus on the latter problem and propose several heuristic algorithms that reconfigure logical topologies in wide-area wavelength-routed optical networks. Our reconfiguration algorithms attempt to control the disruption to the network as less as possible during the reconfiguration process. For this purpose, a lightpath is taken as the minimum reconfiguration unit. The proposed algorithms are evaluated by using an NFSNET-like network model with 16 nodes and 25 links. The results show that very simple algorithms provide very small computational complexity but poor performance, i.e., large network disruption, and that an efficient algorithm provides reasonable computational complexity and very good performance. More complex algorithms may improve performance somewhat further but have unrealistically large computational complexity.

An atmospheric visibility measurement system capable of quantifying the most common operating range of onboard exteroceptive sensors is a key parameter in the creation of driving assistance systems. This information is then utilized to adapt sensor operations and processing or to alert the driver that the onboard assistance system is momentarily inoperative. Moreover, a system capable of either detecting the presence of fog or estimating visibility distances constitutes in itself a driving aid. In this paper, we first present a review of different optical sensors likely to measure the visibility distance. We then present our stereovision based technique to estimate what we call the "mobilized visibility distance". This is the distance to the most distant object on the road surface having a contrast above 5%. In fact, this definition is very close to the definition of the meteorological visibility distance proposed by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE). The method combines the computation of both a depth map of the vehicle environment using the "v-disparity" approach and of local contrasts above 5%. Both methods are described separately. Then, their combination is detailed. A qualitative evaluation is done using different video sequences. Finally, a static quantitative evaluation is also performed thanks to reference targets installed on a dedicated test site.

Kernel-based learning algorithms have been successfully applied in various problem domains, given appropriate kernel functions. In this paper, we discuss the problem of designing kernel functions for binary regression and show that using a bell-shaped cosine function as a kernel function is optimal in some sense. The rationale of this result is based on the Karhunen-Loeve expansion, i.e., the optimal approximation to a set of functions is given by the principal component of the correlation operator of the functions.

In this paper, a new stereo line segment matching algorithm is presented. The main purpose of this algorithm is to increase efficiency, i.e. increasing the number of correctly matched lines while avoiding the increase of mismatches. In this regard, the reasons for the elimination of correct matches as well as the existence of the erroneous ones in some existing algorithms have been investigated. An attempt was also made to make efficient uses of the photometric, geometric and structural information through the introduction of new constraints, criteria, and procedures. Hence, in the candidate determination stage of the designed algorithm two new constraints, in addition to the reliable epipolar, maximum and minimum disparity and orientation similarity constraints were employed. In the process of disambiguation and final matches selection, being the main problem of the matching issue, regarding the employed constraints, criterion function and its optimization, it is a completely new development. The algorithm was applied to the images of several indoor scenes and its high efficiency illustrated by correct matching of 96% of the line segments with no mismatches.

We propose a novel strategy to obtain a high spatio-temporal resolution video. To this end, we introduce a dual sensor camera that can capture two video sequences with the same field of view simultaneously. These sequences record high resolution with low frame rate and low resolution with high frame rate. This paper presents an algorithm to synthesize a high spatio-temporal resolution video from these two video sequences by using motion compensation and spectral fusion. We confirm that the proposed method improves the resolution and frame rate of the synthesized video.

One of the challenging issues in affective computing is to give a machine the ability to recognize the affective states with intensity of a person. Few studies are directed toward this goal by categorizing affective behavior of the person into a set of discrete categories. But still two problems exist: gesture is not yet a concern as a channel of affective communication in interactive technology, and existing systems only model discrete categories but not affective dimensions, e.g., intensity. Modeling the intensity of emotion has been well addressed in synthetic autonomous agent and virtual environment literature, but there is an evident lack of attention in other important research areas such as affective computing, machine vision, and robotic. In this work, we propose an affective gesture recognition system that can recognize the emotion of a child and the intensity of the emotion states in a scenario of game playing. We used levels of cognitive and non-cognitive appraisal factors to estimate intensity of emotion. System has an intelligent agent (called Mix) that takes these factors into consideration and adapt the game state to create a more positive interactive environment for the child.

We have fabricated and investigated InGaAs Esaki tunnel diodes, grown on GaAs or InP substrates, of varied defect densities. The tunnel diodes exhibit the same I-V characteristics in spite of the variation of defect density. Under the simple thermal annealing and forward current stress tests, the change in the valley current was not observed, indicating that defects were not increased. On the other hand, the reduction in the peak current due to the carbon diffusion was observed under both tests. The diffusion was enhanced by the stress current owing to the energy dissipation associated with the nonradiative electron-hole recombination. From the reduction rates of the peak current, we obtained the thermal and current-enhanced carbon diffusion constants in InGaAs, which are independent of defect density. Although thermal diffusion of carbon in InGaAs is comparable with that in GaAs, the current-induced enhancement of diffusion in InGaAs is extremely weaker than that in GaAs. The difference between activation energy of thermal and current-enhanced diffusion is 0.8 eV, which is independent of stress current density and close to InGaAs bandgap energy. This indicates that the current-enhanced diffusion is dominated by the energy dissipation associated with nonradiative band-to-band recombination. This enhancement mechanism well explains that the current-induced enhancement is independent of defect density and extremely weak. We also have found that the current-enhanced diffusion constant is approximately proportional to the square of current density, suggesting that the recombination in the depletion layer dominates the current-enhanced diffusion.

This paper presents a robust object tracking method under pose variation and partial occlusion. In practical environment, the appearance of objects is changed dynamically by pose variation or partial occlusion. Therefore, the robustness to them is required for practical applications. However, it is difficult to be robust to various changes by only one tracking model. Therefore, slight robustness to variations and the easiness of model update are required. For this purpose, Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) of local parts is used. KPCA of local parts is proposed originally for the purpose of pose independent object recognition. Training of this method is performed by using local parts cropped from only one or two object images. This is good property for tracking because only one target image is given in practical applications. In addition, the model (subspace) of this method can be updated easily by solving a eigen value problem. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated by using the test face sequence captured under pose, partial occlusion, scaling and illumination variations. Effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method are demonstrated by the comparison with template matching based tracker. In addition, adaptive update rule using similarity with current subspace is also proposed. Effectiveness of adaptive update rule is shown by experiment.

Various mixed-signal very-high-speed integrated circuits have been developed using InP DHBTs. These circuits have been designed for fiber-optic 43 Gbit/s transmissions applications. They include: on the transmitting side, a clocked driver and an EAM driver, as well as a PSBT/DQPSK precoder; on the receiving side, a sensitive decision circuit, a limiting amplifier and an eye monitor. System experiments made possible by these circuits include a 6 Tbit/s transmission on >6000 km distance.

The EDD connection admission control scheme has been proposed for supporting real-time communication in packet-switched networks. In the scheme, when a connection establishment request occurs, the worst-case link delay in each link along the connection is calculated to determine whether the request can be accepted or not. In order to calculate the worst-case link delay, we must perform a check called the point schedulability check for each of some discrete time instants (checkpoints). Therefore when there are many checkpoints, the worst-case link delay calculation is time-consuming. We have proposed a high-speed calculation method. The method finds some checkpoints for which the point schedulability check need not be performed and removes such unnecessary checkpoints in advance before a connection establishment request occurs, and the check is performed for each of the remaining checkpoints after the request occurs. However, the method is not so effective under the situation that the maximum packet length in networks is large, because the method can find few unnecessary checkpoints under the situation. This paper proposes a new high-speed calculation method. We relax the condition which determines whether or not the point schedulability check need not be performed for each checkpoint in our previous method and derive a new condition for finding unnecessary checkpoints. Using the proposed method based on the new condition, we can increase the number of unnecessary checkpoints compared to our previous method. Numerical examples which are obtained by extensive simulation show that the proposed method can attain as much as about 50 times speedup.

In the present paper, we propose a method for reconstructing the surfaces of objects from stereo data. Both the fitness of stereo data to surfaces and interrelation between the surfaces are defined in the framework of a three-dimensional (3-D) Markov Random Field (MRF) model. The surface reconstruction is accomplished by searching for the most likely state of the MRF model. Three experimental results are shown for synthetic and real stereo data.

Plasma oscillations in nanometer field effect transistors are used for detection and generation of electromagnetic radiation of THz frequency. Following first observations of resonant detection in 150 nm gate length GaAs HEMT, we describe recent observations of room temperature detection in nanometer Si MOSFETs, resonant detection in GaN/AlGaN HEMTs and improvement of room temperature detection in GaAs HEMTs due to the drain current. Experiments on spectrally resolved THz emission are described that involve room and liquid helium temperature emission from nanometer GaInAs and GaN HEMTs.

We fabricate a 763-nm laser module based on second-harmonic generation using a direct-bonded quasi-phase-matched LiNbO3 ridge waveguide. We obtained a 0.84-mW output of 763 nm light using a 1526-nm distributed-feedback laser diode. We also demonstrate O2 gas detection using the module output.

Accumulation of non-equilibrium longitudinal optical (LO) phonons (termed hot phonons) is considered as a possible cause for limitation of frequency of operation of GaN-based high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs). The experimental data on noise temperature of hot electrons at a microwave frequency as a function of supplied electric power is used to extract information on hot phonons: the hot-phonon lifetime, the equivalent hot-phonon temperature, the effective occupancy of hot-phonon states involved into electron-LO-phonon interaction. The possible ways for controlling the hot-phonon effect on electron drift velocity through variation of electron density, channel composition, and hot-phonon lifetime are discussed. The expected dependence of hot-electron drift velocity on hot-phonon lifetime is confirmed experimentally. A self-consistent explanation of different frequency behaviour of InP-based and GaN-based HEMTs is obtained from a comparative study of hot-phonon effects.

In this letter, we study the problem of designing an efficient power and bit allocation scheme in the context of a hierarchical image transmission system based on an embedded multi-carrier modulation (EMCM) scheme over digital subscriber line. Authors describe a novel algorithm that performs power minimization under bit rate constraint and QoS requirement. It is based on the Hughes-Hartogs algorithm, and successively allocates the bits of the high, then low priority data streams. Simulations that assess the performance of the proposed algorithm are also provided and discussed; they demonstrate the interest of the proposed scheme.

This paper studies bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) systems that employ multi-dimensional mappings of M-ary constellations to improve the error performance over Rayleigh fading channels. Based on the analytical evaluations of the asymptotic bit error probability (BEP), the distance criteria for the mapping designs can be obtained. A binary switching algorithm (BSA) is then applied to find the optimal mappings with respect to the asymptotic performance. Simulation and analytical results show that the use of multi-dimensional mappings of M-ary constellations can significantly improve the error performance.

This paper analytically studies performance improvement achieved by packet dispersion. Contrary to the previous work on packet dispersion, we consider the tail distribution of queue length and that of packet delay as performance measures, and we model a packet network as multiple parallel queues where the arrival processes from sources are not renewal but highly bursty. To appropriately evaluate the performance improvement achieved by packet dispersion, we develop approximate formulas to estimate the tail distributions. Our approximate formulas yield more accurate estimations than the standard approximate formulas. In the numerical results, we observe that packet dispersion can greatly improve the delay performance of packets. We also see that packet-level load balancing is superior to flow-level load balancing for any distribution ratio.

In order to efficiently mitigate emissions radiated from electrical equipment, emission source visualization methods need to be studied. In this paper, we propose a new macroscopic visualization method based on an optimization process which uses only cylindrically-scanned electric field amplitude data from an EMI test facility as specified by CISPR, and so does not need a special measurement system. The presented method divides the visualization space into three-dimensional rectangular cells, and estimated current values through the optimization process are sorted into each corresponding cell. By displaying the summed value of every cell, the emission source can be visualized. For this study, the spatial resolution was evaluated by computer simulation, with a result of around 0.2 m using a cell size of 0.1 m. With subsequent experimental verification using a comb generator in a semi-anechoic chamber, the visualization deviation was found to be less than 0.1 m in a frequency range of 100 MHz to 800 MHz. When two spherical dipole antennas were used, the deviation was less than 0.15 m. Finally, visualization results from a facsimile unit and a PC as real EUTs were shown and basic applicability of this method demonstrated.