We propose a new swept-frequency measurement method for the electromagnetic characterization of materials. The material is a multilayer cylinder that pierces a rectangular waveguide through two holes in the narrow waveguide walls. The complex permittivity and permeability of the material are calculated from measured S-parameters as an inverse problem. To this aim, the paper develops a complete electromagnetic formulation of the problem, where the effects of material insertion holes are taken into consideration. The formulation is validated through the measurement of ferrite and water samples in the S-band.

We propose an algorithm for the scattering analyses of gratings with various local defects based on the difference-field boundary-element method (DFBEM). In the algorithm, the defect in the grating is partitioned, and the DFBEM is sequentially applied for each defect section. We validate the proposed algorithm by demonstrating its flexibility for various defect topologies for a locally deformed grating.

This paper presents new Binary Converters (or current-mode compressors) by the usage of carbon nanotube field effect transistors. The new designs are made of three parts: 1) the input currents which are converted to voltage; 2) threshold detectors; and 3) the output current flow paths. In addition, an 8×8-bit multiplier is considered as a bench mark to estimate their efficiency degrees. The first approach is based on high-order Binary Converters, and the second one is only composed of 4BCs and Half Adders.

The Lyapunov stability theory-based adaptive filter (LST-AF) is a robust filtering algorithm which the tracking error quickly converges to zero asymptotically. Recently, the software module of the LST-AF algorithm is effectively used in engineering applications such as tracking, prediction, noise cancellation and system identification problems. Therefore, hardware implementation becomes necessary in many cases where real time procedure is needed. In this paper, an implementation of the LST-AF algorithm on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) is realized for the first time to our knowledge. The proposed hardware implementation on FPGA is performed for two main benchmark problems; i) tracking of an artificial signal and a Henon chaotic signal, ii) estimation of filter parameters using a system identification model. Experimental results are comparatively presented to test accuracy, performance and logic occupation. The results show that our proposed hardware implementation not only conserves the capabilities of software versions of the LST-AF algorithm but also achieves a better performance than them.

Ultra-wideband radar exhibits high range resolution, and excellent capability for penetrating dielectric media, especially when using lower frequency microwaves. Thus, it has a great potential for innovative non-destructive testing of aging roads or bridges or for non-invasive medical imaging applications. In this context, we have already proposed an accurate dielectric constant estimation method for a homogeneous dielectric medium, based on a geometrical optics (GO) approximation, where the dielectric boundary points and their normal vectors are directly reproduced using the range point migration (RPM) method. In addition, to compensate for the estimation error incurred by the GO approximation, a waveform compensation scheme employing the finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method was incorporated. This paper shows the experimental validation of this method, where a new approach for suppressing the creeping wave along the dielectric boundary is also introduced. The results from real observation data validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of highly accurate dielectric constant estimation and embedded object boundary reconstruction.

A regulated charge pump (CP) with an extended range of load current is presented. A power-efficient adaptive feedback controller is adopted. Verified by a 0.18µm CMOS technology with a power supply of 3.3V, the measured output voltage of the CP is regulated above 5V when the load current is varied from 2.5mA to 50mA. The measured power efficiency spans from 81.7% at lighter load to 75.2% when load current is 50mA. The measured output ripples are small and below 24mV.

EPCglobal architecture framework is divided into identify, capture, and share layers and defines a collection of standards. It is not fully adequate to build IoT applications because the transducer capability is lacking. IEEE 1451 is a set of standards that defines data exchange format, communication protocols, and various connection interfaces between sensors/actuators and transducer interface modules. By appending IEEE 1451 transducer capability to EPCglobal architecture framework, a consistent EPC scheme expression for heterogeneous things can be achieved at identify layer. It is benefit to extend the upper layers of EPCglobal architecture framework seamlessly. In this paper, we put our emphasis on how to leverage the transducer capability at the capture layer. A device cycle, transducer cycle specification, and transducer cycle report are introduced to collect and process sensor/actuator data. The design and implementation of GS1 EPCglobal Application Level Events (ALE) modules extension are proposed for explaining the design philosophy and verifying the feasibility. It will interact with the capture and query services of EPC Information Services (EPCIS) for IoT applications at the share layer. By cooperating and interacting with these layers of EPCglobal architecture framework, the IoT architecture EPCglobal+ based on international standards is built.

Absorption, scattering, and color distortion are three major issues in underwater optical imaging. Light rays traveling through water are scattered and absorbed according to their wavelength. Scattering is caused by large suspended particles that degrade underwater optical images. Color distortion occurs because different wavelengths are attenuated to different degrees in water; consequently, images of ambient underwater environments are dominated by a bluish tone. In the present paper, we propose a novel underwater imaging model that compensates for the attenuation discrepancy along the propagation path. In addition, we develop a fast weighted guided normalized convolution domain filtering algorithm for enhancing underwater optical images. The enhanced images are characterized by a reduced noise level, better exposure in dark regions, and improved global contrast, by which the finest details and edges are enhanced significantly.

The sense of presence, that is, the sense of the website being psychologically transported to the consumer, has been identified as an important factor for bringing back the feeling of sociability and physicality that is lost in online shopping. Previous research has investigated how visual content in the design can influence the sense of presence in a website, but the focus has been limited to the domestic electronic commerce context. In this paper, we conduct an experimental study in a cross-border electronic commerce context to evaluate the effect of country-related pictures on the perception of country presence, visual appeal and trust in a foreign online store. Two experimental conditions were considered: country-related pictures and generic pictures, each one evaluated for Thai and Singaporean websites. It was hypothesized that country-related content in pictures included in the design of the foreign online store would result in a higher level of country presence, and that this would in turn result in higher visual appeal and trust in the website. We conducted a survey among Japanese online consumers, with a total of 1991 participants obtained. The subjects were randomly assigned into four groups corresponding to the combination of country-of-origin of the website and picture condition. We used structural equation modeling in order to analyze the proposed hypotheses. The results showed that for both the Thai and Singaporean websites, country-related pictures resulted in higher country presence, and visual appeal was positively influenced by this increase in country presence. However, country presence did not have a direct effect on trust; this effect was completely mediated by visual appeal. We discuss these results and their implications for cross-border electronic commerce.

We deal with the scattering of a plane wave by the end-face of a waveguide system by the numerical method based on the sinc function and calculate the electric field on the end-face. It is shown that the results obtained analytically by the perturbation method are in relatively good agreement with the numerical results.

A major challenge in wideband spectrum sensing, in cognitive radio system for example, is the requirement of a high sampling rate which may exceed today's best analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) front-end bandwidths. Compressive sampling is an attractive way to reduce the sampling rate. The modulated wideband converter (MWC) proposed recently is one of the most successful compressive sampling hardware architectures, but it has high hardware complexity owing to its parallel channels structure. In this paper, we design a single channel sub-Nyquist sampling scheme to bring substantial savings in terms of not only sampling rate but also hardware complexity, and we also present a wideband power spectrum sensing and reconstruction method for bandlimited wide-sense stationary (WSS) signals. The total sampling rate is only one channel rate of the MWC's. We evaluate the performance of the sensing model by computing the probability of detecting signal occupancy in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and other practical parameters. Simulation results underline the promising performance of proposed approach.

Since digital hearing aids are sensitive to time delay and power consumption, the computational complexity of noise reduction must be reduced as much as possible. Therefore, some complicated algorithms based on the analysis of the time-frequency domain are very difficult to implement in digital hearing aids. This paper presents a new approach that yields an improved noise reduction algorithm with greatly reduce computational complexity for multi-channel digital hearing aids. First, the sub-band sound pressure level (SPL) is calculated in real time. Then, based on the calculated sub-band SPL, the noise in the sub-band is estimated and the possibility of speech is computed. Finally, a posteriori and a priori signal-to-noise ratios are estimated and the gain function is acquired to reduce the noise adaptively. By replacing the FFT and IFFT transforms by the known SPL, the proposed algorithm greatly reduces the computation loads. Experiments on a prototype digital hearing aid show that the time delay is decreased to nearly half that of the traditional adaptive Wiener filtering and spectral subtraction algorithms, but the SNR improvement and PESQ score are rather satisfied. Compared with modulation frequency-based noise reduction algorithm, which is used in many commercial digital hearing aids, the proposed algorithm achieves not only more than 5dB SNR improvement but also less time delay and power consumption.

In this letter, an effective acoustic feedback cancellation algorithm is proposed based on the normalized sub-band adaptive filter (NSAF). To improve the confliction between fast convergence rate and low misalignment in the NSAF algorithm, a variable step size is designed to automatically vary according to the update state of the filter. The update state of the filter is adaptively detected via the normalized distance between the long term average and the short term average of the tap-weight vector. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has superior performance in terms of convergence rate and misalignment.

In PQCrypto 2013, Yasuda, Takagi and Sakurai proposed a new signature scheme as one of multivariate public key cryptosystems (MPKCs). This scheme (called YTS) is based on the fact that there are two isometry classes of non-degenerate quadratic forms on a vector space with a prescribed dimension. The advantage of YTS is its efficiency. In fact, its signature generation is eight or nine times faster than Rainbow of similar size. For the security, it is known that the direct attack, the IP attack and the min-rank attack are applicable on YTS, and the running times are exponential time for the first and the second attacks and sub-exponential time for the third attack. In the present paper, we give a new attack on YTS whose approach is to use the diagonalization of matrices. Our attack works in polynomial time and it actually recovers equivalent secret keys of YTS having 140-bits security against min-rank attack in around fifteen seconds.

We present two practical attacks on the CAESAR candidate PAES. The first attack is a universal forgery for any plaintext with at least 240 bytes. It works for the nonce-repeating variant of PAES and in a nutshell it is a state recovery based on solving differential equations for the S-Box leaked through the ciphertext that arise when the plaintext has a certain difference. We show that to produce the forgery based on this method the attacker needs only 211 time and data. The second attack is a distinguisher for 264 out of 2128 keys that requires negligible complexity and only one pair of known plaintext-ciphertext. The attack is based on the lack of constants in the initialization of the PAES which allows to exploit the symmetric properties of the keyless AES round. Both of our attacks contradict the security goals of PAES.

Facial paralysis is a popular clinical condition occurring in 30 to 40 patients per 100,000 people per year. A quantitative tool to support medical diagnostics is necessary. This paper proposes a simple, visual and robust method that can objectively measure the degree of the facial paralysis by the use of spatiotemporal features. The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of an effective spatiotemporal feature extraction method based on a tracking of landmarks. Our method overcomes the drawbacks of the other techniques such as the influence of irrelevant regions, noise, illumination change and time-consuming process. In addition, the method is simple and visual. The simplification helps to reduce the time-consuming process. Also, the movements of landmarks, which relate to muscle movement ability, are visual. Therefore, the visualization helps reveal regions of serious facial paralysis. For recognition rate, experimental results show that our proposed method outperformed the other techniques tested on a dynamic facial expression image database.

Personal e-healthcare service is growing significantly. A large number of personal e-health measuring and monitoring devices are now in the market. However, to achieve better health outcome, various devices or services need to work together. This coordination among services remains challenge, due to their variations and complexities. To address this issue, we have proposed an ontology-based framework for interactive self-assessment of RESTful e-health services. Unlike existing e-health service frameworks where they had tightly coupling between services, as well as their data schemas were difficult to change and extend in the future. In our work, the loosely coupling among services and flexibility of each service are achieved through the design and implementation based on HYDRA vocabulary and REST principles. We have implemented clinical knowledge through the combination of OWL-DL and SPARQL rules. All of these services evolve independently; their interfaces are based on REST principles, especially HATEOAS constraints. We have demonstrated how to apply our framework for interactive self-assessment in e-health applications. We have shown that it allows the medical knowledge to drive the system workflow according to the event-driven principles. New data schema can be maintained during run-time. This is the essential feature to support arriving of IoT (Internet of Things) based medical devices, which have their own data schema and evolve overtime.

We focus on the feature transform approach as one methodology for biometric template protection, where the template consists of the features extracted from the biometric trait. This study considers some properties of the unitary (including orthogonal) transform-based template protection in particular. It is known that the Euclidean distance between the templates protected by a unitary transform is the same as that between original (non-protected) ones as a property. In this study, moreover, it is shown that it provides the same results in l2-norm minimization problems as those of original templates. This means that there is no degradation of recognition performance in authentication systems using l2-norm minimization. Therefore, the protected templates can be reissued multiple times without original templates. In addition, a DFT-based template protection scheme is proposed as an unitary transform-based one. The proposed scheme enables to efficiently generate protected templates by the FFT, in addition to the useful properties. It is also applied to face recognition experiments to evaluate the effectiveness.

For the realization of a high-efficiency antenna for 60GHz-band wireless personal area network, we propose placing a CMOS RF circuit and an antenna on opposing sides of a silicon chip. They are connected with low loss by a coaxial-line structure using a hole opening in the chip. Since the CMOS circuit is driven differentially, a differential-feed antenna is used. In this paper, we design and measure a differential-feed square patch antenna on a silicon chip. To enhance the radiation efficiency, it is placed on a 200µm thick resin layer. The calculated radiation efficiency of 79% includes the connection loss. A prototype antenna is measured in a reverberation chamber, and its radiation efficiency is estimated to be about 81±3%.

The ordered successive interference cancellation (OSIC) detector based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion has been proved to be a low-complexity detector with efficient bit error rate (BER) performance. As the well-known MMSE-Based OSIC detector, the MMSE-Based vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (VBLAST) detector, whose computational complexity is cubic, can not attain the minimum BER performance. Some approaches to reducing the BER of the MMSE-Based VBLAST detector have been contributed, however these improvements have large computational complexity. In this paper, a low complexity MMSE-Based OSIC detector called MMSE-OBEP (ordering based on error probability) is proposed to improve the BER performance of the previous MMSE-Based OSIC detectors, and it has cubic complexity. The proposed detector derives the near-exact error probability of the symbols in the MMSE-Based OSIC detector, thus giving priority to detect the symbol with the smallest error probability can minimize the error propagation in the MMSE-Based OSIC detector and enhance the BER performance. We show that, although the computational complexity of the proposed detector is cubic, it can provide better BER performance than the previous MMSE-Based OSIC detector.