Phase-nonreciprocal ε-negative and CRLH metamaterials are analyzed using a new approach in which field analysis and transmission line model are combined. The examined one-dimensional nonreciprocal metamaterials are composed of a ferrite-embedded microstrip line periodically loaded with shunt stubs. In the present approach, the phase constant nonreciprocity is analytically estimated and formulated under the assumption of operating frequency far above the ferromagnetic resonant frequency. The present approach gives a good explanation to the phenomenon in terms of ferromagnetic properties of the ferrite and asymmetric geometry of the metamaterial structure, showing a good agreement with numerical simulations and experiment.

This paper presents a voice conversion (VC) technique for noisy environments, where parallel exemplars are introduced to encode the source speech signal and synthesize the target speech signal. The parallel exemplars (dictionary) consist of the source exemplars and target exemplars, having the same texts uttered by the source and target speakers. The input source signal is decomposed into the source exemplars, noise exemplars and their weights (activities). Then, by using the weights of the source exemplars, the converted signal is constructed from the target exemplars. We carried out speaker conversion tasks using clean speech data and noise-added speech data. The effectiveness of this method was confirmed by comparing its effectiveness with that of a conventional Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based method.

In this paper, we propose a speech-presence uncertainty estimation to improve the global soft decision-based speech enhancement technique by using the spectral gradient scheme. The conventional soft decision-based speech enhancement technique uses a fixed ratio (Q) of the a priori speech-presence and speech-absence probabilities to derive the speech-absence probability (SAP). However, we attempt to adaptively change Q according to the spectral gradient between the current and past frames as well as the status of the voice activity in the previous two frames. As a result, the distinct values of Q to each frequency in each frame are assigned in order to improve the performance of the SAP by tracking the robust a priori information of the speech-presence in time.

In this paper, an efficient multi-modal medical image fusion approach is proposed based on local features contrast and bilateral sharpness criterion in nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain. Compared with other multiscale decomposition analysis tools, the nonsubsampled contourlet transform not only can eliminate the “block-effect” and the “pseudo-effect”, but also can represent the source image in multiple direction and capture the geometric structure of source image in transform domain. These advantages of NSCT can, when used in fusion algorithm, help to attain more visual information in fused image and improve the fusion quality. At the same time, in order to improve the robustness of fusion algorithm and to improve the quality of the fused image, two selection rules should be considered. Firstly, a new bilateral sharpness criterion is proposed to select the lowpass coefficient, which exploits both strength and phase coherence. Secondly, a modified SML (sum modified Laplacian) is introduced into the local contrast measurements, which is suitable for human vision system and can extract more useful detailed information from source images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than the conventional fusion algorithm in terms of both visual quality and objective evaluation criteria.

On-chip transmission lines are widely used in ultrahigh-frequency integrated circuits. One of the issues in modeling such transmission lines is that no reference impedance can be established on a chip. Conventionally, the parallel admittance Yp has been adopted as a reference parameter for on-chip transmission lines instead of a reference characteristic impedance of 50Ω. In the case of CMOS processes, however, Yp can have complicated characteristics in the short-millimeter-wave band owing to the frequency characteristics of the electric permittivity of low-k materials, which cannot be expressed using a simple circuit. To solve this problem, we propose the use of the series impedance Zs as a reference parameter for transmission-line modeling since it basically can be determined from the geometrical dimensions and the frequency-stable permeability and resistivity. The parameters of transmission lines obtained by the proposed method were compared with those obtained by conventional methods using a 40nm CMOS process. By using the equivalent circuit model of Yp along with RLC resonators, it is shown that the peaks of the frequency characteristics of Yp can be used to explain the absorption spectrum of the dielectric. This suggests that the proposed method is suitable for CMOS short-millimeter-wave transmission lines.

A novel spatially modulated communication method, appropriate for wireless power transmission applications at 5.8GHz, is proposed using dual scatterers embedded with lumped elements. Analytical expression for the received wave in the spatial modulation is derived, and the characteristics are verified with simulation and measurement by varying the embedded capacitor. The maximum measured variation of the received voltage is more than 15dB and that of the phase is more than 270 degrees at 5.8GHz. The estimated amplitude modulation factor is more than 70%. Using the data obtained, we estimate the practical received waveforms modulated by the applied voltage to a varactor for the amplitude modulation scheme.

This paper reviews two simple numerical algorithms particularly useful in Computational ElectroMagnetics (CEM): the Weighted Averages (WA) algorithm and the Double Exponential (DE) quadrature. After a short historical introduction and an elementary description of the mathematical procedures underlying both techniques, they are applied to the evaluation of Sommerfeld integrals, where WA and DE combine together to provide a numerical tool of unprecedented quality. It is also shown that both algorithms have a much wider range of applications. A generalization of the WA algorithm, able to cope with integrands including products of Bessel and similar oscillatory functions, is described. Similarly, the original DE algorithm is adapted with exceptional results to the evaluation of the multidimensional singular integrals arising in the discretization of Integral-Equation based CEM formulations. The new possibilities of WA and DE algorithms are demonstrated through several practical numerical examples.

This paper reports an advanced millimeter-wave radar system to enable detection of vehicles and pedestrians in wide areas around the radar site such as an intersection. We focus on a pulse coding scheme using complementary codes to reduce range sidelobe for discriminating vehicles from pedestrians with high accuracy. In order to suppress sidelobe increase created by RF circuit imperfections, a π/2 shift pulse modulation method with a complementary code pair cycle is presented. Moreover, in order to improve the angular resolution, a high-resolution direction of arrival estimation involving Tx beam scanning is presented. Experiments on a prototype confirm its range sidelobe suppression exceeds 40dB and its angular resolution is 5° for two human's separation at the distance of about 10m in an anechoic chamber. In a trial intersection experiment, a pedestrian detection rate of 95% was achieved at the false alarm rate of 10% in the range from 5m to 40m. The results prove the system's feasibility for future automotive safety application.

This letter proposes a new delivery format in order to realize unified transmissions of stereoscopic video contents over a dynamic adaptive streaming scheme. With the proposed delivery format, various forms of stereoscopic video contents regardless of their encoding and composition types can be delivered over the current dynamic adaptive streaming scheme. In addition, the proposed delivery format supports dynamic and efficient switching between 2D and 3D sequences in an interoperable manner for both 2D and 3D digital devices, regardless of their capabilities. This letter describes the designed delivery format and shows dynamic interoperable applications for 2D and 3D mixed contents with the implemented system in order to verify its features and efficiency.

We present an acoustic model adaptation method where the transformation matrix for a new speaker is given by the product of bases and a weight matrix. The bases are built from the parallel factor analysis 2 (PARAFAC2) of training speakers' transformation matrices. We perform continuous speech recognition experiments using the WSJ0 corpus.

NROM is one of the emerging non-volatile-memory technologies, which is promising for replacing current floating-gate-based non-volatile memory such as flash memory. In order to raise the fabrication yield and enhance its reliability, a novel test and repair flow is proposed in this paper. Instead of the conventional fault replacement techniques, a novel fault masking technique is also exploited by considering the logical effects of physical defects when the customer's code is to be programmed. In order to maximize the possibilities of fault masking, a novel data inversion technique is proposed. The corresponding BIST architectures are also presented. According to experimental results, the repair rate and fabrication yield can be improved significantly. Moreover, the incurred hardware overhead is almost negligible.

This paper presents a novel data compression method for testing integrated circuits within the framework of pattern run-length coding. The test set is firstly divided into 2n-length patterns where n is a natural number. Then the compatibility of each pattern, which can be an external type, or an internal type, is analyzed. At last, the codeword of each pattern is generated according to its analysis result. Experimental results for large ISCAS89 benchmarks show that the proposed method can obtain a higher compression ratio than existing ones.

To enhance the throughput while satisfying the quality of service (QoS) requirements of wireless local area networks (WLANs), this paper proposes a distributed coordination function-based (DCF-based) medium access control (MAC) protocol that realizes centralized radio resource management (RRM) for a basic service set. In the proposed protocol, an access point (AP) acts as a master to organize the associated stations and attempts to reserve the radio resource in a conventional DCF-manner. Once the radio resource is successfully reserved, the AP controls the access of each station by an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) scheme. Because the AP assigns radio resources to the stations through the opportunistic two-dimensional scheduling based on the QoS requirements and the channel condition of each station, the transmission opportunities can be granted to the appropriate stations. In order to reduce the signaling overhead caused by centralized RRM, the proposed protocol introduces a station-grouping scheme which groups the associated stations into clusters. Moreover, this paper proposes a heuristic resource allocation algorithm designed for the DCF-based MAC protocol. Numerical results confirm that the proposed protocol enhances the throughput of WLANs while satisfying the QoS requirements with high probability.

Break arcs are generated in a DC48V resistive circuit. The circuit current is varied from 1A to 6A. The contact resistance distribution on the anode surfaces eroded by break arcs is investigated. The following results are shown. When the current is 2A, 3A and 6A, the contact resistance at the center region of the anode surface is higher than that around the center region. The contact resistance around the center region decreases with the decrease of the circuit current. When the current is 1A, the contact resistance is very low at all positions on the contact surface. The lower contact resistance may be caused by the occurrence of the short arc that is extinguished in the metallic phase arc.

A plane coupler has been developed for a two-dimensional (2D) wireless power transmission. This coupler can construct a continuous wireless power transmission system for mobile devices due to its small, light characteristics. This coupler has two elements connected with a 2D waveguide sheet, and coupling capacitances between the elements and the sheet decrease the coupler size by reducing their resonance frequencies. A propagation loss of -10.0 dB is obtained using the small 0.025-λ2 coupler. Continuous operation of the mobile device is demonstrated by applying wireless power transmission to the 2D waveguide sheet with the small plane coupler.

To provide robust wireless data transmission over fading channels, various schemes which involve the use of relays have been proposed. In some of those schemes, the relay chooses not to forward the received message if its reliability is deemed as too low. Some researchers refer to such schemes as selective decode-and-forward. Our work in this paper falls into such a category. More specifically speaking, the relay in our system is a censorial relay (a relay that performs censorial task). It evaluates the reliability, in terms of log likelihood ratio (LLR), of a received data bit (from the source). If its LLR magnitude is below some preset threshold, then it is censored (i.e. not sent to the destination). When the channel is Rayleigh faded, closed-form bit error rate (BER) expressions for the proposed system are derived for several scenarios. Those scenarios are differentiated by the availability of an energy detector (ED) and the various degrees of knowledge regarding the channel state information (CSI). Aided by those closed-form BER expressions, the system parameters can be efficiently optimized to achieve the minimum BER. Simulation results are observed to closely match theoretical values, as computed by the afore-mentioned closed-form BER expressions. As compared to some existing relay-assisted systems in which censoring is incorporated, the performance of our system is better in terms of BER when the same amount of CSI is exploited.

In this paper, we propose a new class of two dimensional (2D) M-channel (M-ch) non-separable filter banks (FBs) based on cosine modulated filter banks (CMFBs) via a new diagonally modulation scheme. Until now, many researchers have proposed 2D non-separable CMFBs. Nevertheless, efficient direction-selective CMFBs have not been yet. Thanks to our new modulations with diagonal shifts, proposed CMFBs have several frequency supports including direction-selective ones which cannot be realized by conventional ones. In a simulation, we show design examples of proposed CMFBs and their various directional frequency supports.

Apriori-based mining algorithms enumerate frequent patterns efficiently, but the resulting large number of patterns makes it difficult to directly apply subsequent learning tasks. Recently, efficient iterative methods are proposed for mining discriminative patterns for classification and regression. These methods iteratively execute discriminative pattern mining algorithm and update example weights to emphasize on examples which received large errors in the previous iteration. In this paper, we study a family of loss functions that induces sparsity on example weights. Most of the resulting example weights become zeros, so we can eliminate those examples from discriminative pattern mining, leading to a significant decrease in search space and time. In computational experiments we compare and evaluate various loss functions in terms of the amount of sparsity induced and resulting speed-up obtained.

We design and fabricate a double-layer hollow-waveguide slot array antenna with wide bandwidth and high antenna efficiency for the 120 GHz band. The antenna is fabricated by diffusion bonding of laminated thin metal plates for high precision and perfect electrical contact. The 1616-element antenna shows more than 70% antenna efficiency over a 13 GHz bandwidth. Furthermore, it realizes error-free data transmission in 2.5 m distance at up to 10 Gbit/s. To our knowledge, this is the first report of the design and fabrication of a high-efficiency wideband planar antenna for the 120 GHz band.

Many High-Dynamic-Range (HDR) rendering techniques have been developed. Of these, the image color appearance model, iCAM, is a typical HDR image rendering algorithm. HDR rendering methods normally require a tone compression process and include many color space transformations from the RGB signal of an input image to the RGB signal of output devices for the realistic depiction of a captured image. The iCAM06, which is a refined iCAM, also contains a tone compression step and several color space conversions for HDR image reproduction. On the other hand, the tone compression and frequent color space changes in the iCAM06 cause color distortion, such as a hue shift and saturation reduction of the output image. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a separate color correction method that has no effect on the output luminance values by controlling only the saturation and hue of the color attributes. The color saturation of the output image was compensated for using the compensation gain and the hue shift was corrected using the rotation matrix. The separate color correction method reduces the existing color changes in iCAM06. The compensation gain and rotation matrix for the color correction were formulated based on the relationship between the input and output tristimulus values through the tone compression. The experimental results show that the revised iCAM06 with the proposed method has better performance than the default iCAM06.