This paper presents Probabilistic Bi-polar Radial Reach Correlation (PrBPRRC), a change detection method that is robust against illumination changes and background movements. Most of the traditional change detection methods are robust against either illumination changes or background movements; BPRRC is one of the illumination-robust change detection methods. We introduce a probabilistic background texture model into BPRRC and add the robustness against background movements including foreground invasions such as moving cars, walking people, swaying trees, and falling snow. We show the superiority of PrBPRRC in the environment with illumination changes and background movements by using three public datasets and one private dataset: ATON Highway data, Karlsruhe traffic sequence data, PETS 2007 data, and Walking-in-a-room data.

Generalized selection combining (GSC) was recently proposed as a low-complexity diversity combining technique for diversity-rich environments. This letter proposes a multi-hop Decode-and-Forward Relaying (MDFR) scheme in conjunction with GSC and describes its performance in terms of average bit error probability. We have shown that the proposed protocol offers a remarkable diversity advantage over direct transmission as well as the conventional decode-and-forward relaying (CDFR) scheme. Simulation results are also given to verify the analytical results.

Basic left hand mode transmission line (LH mode TL) characteristics made on PCB is an important future issue for the application of the EMC field. In this paper, possibility of a LH mode TL characteristic made by a folded-stepped impedance resonator (F-SIR) type is investigated experimentally and numerically. The experimental and calculated from FEM and equivalent circuit results indicate that some backward propagation characteristic and negative group delay can be established by F-SIR structure.

H.264/AVC encoder employs rate control to adaptively adjust quantization parameter (QP) to enable coded video to be transmitted over a constant bit-rate (CBR) channel. In this topic, bit allocation is crucial since it is directly related with actual bit generation and the coding quality. Meanwhile, the rate-distortion-optimization (RDO) based mode-decision technique also affects performance a lot for the strong relation among mode, bits, and quality. This paper presents a multi-stage rate control scheme for R-D optimized H.264/AVC encoders under CBR video transmission. To enhance the precision of the complexity estimation and bit allocation, a frequency-domain parameter named mean-absolute-transform-difference (MATD) is adopted to represent frame and macroblock (MB) residual complexity. Second, the MATD ratio is utilized to enhance the accuracy of frame layer bit prediction. Then, by considering the bit usage status of whole sequence, a measurement combining forward and backward bit analysis is proposed to adjust the Lagrange multiplier λMODE on frame layer to optimize the mode decision for all MBs within the current frame. On the next stage, bits are allocated on MB layer by proposed remaining complexity analysis. Computed QP is further adjusted according to predicted MB texture bits. Simulation results show the PSNR improvement is up to 1.13 dB by using our algorithm, and the stress of output buffer control is also largely released compared with the recommended rate control in H.264/AVC reference software JM13.2.

This research addresses a high-speed computation method for the Kleene star of the weighted adjacency matrix in a max-plus algebraic system. We focus on systems whose precedence constraints are represented by a directed acyclic graph and implement it on a Cell Broadband EngineTM (CBE) processor. Since the resulting matrix gives the longest travel times between two adjacent nodes, it is often utilized in scheduling problem solvers for a class of discrete event systems. This research, in particular, attempts to achieve a speedup by using two approaches: parallelization and SIMDization (Single Instruction, Multiple Data), both of which can be accomplished by a CBE processor. The former refers to a parallel computation using multiple cores, while the latter is a method whereby multiple elements are computed by a single instruction. Using the implementation on a Sony PlayStation 3TM equipped with a CBE processor, we found that the SIMDization is effective regardless of the system's size and the number of processor cores used. We also found that the scalability of using multiple cores is remarkable especially for systems with a large number of nodes. In a numerical experiment where the number of nodes is 2000, we achieved a speedup of 20 times compared with the method without the above techniques.

This paper introduces a new technique for electromagnetic immunity modeling of integrated circuits (ICs), compliant with industrial requirements and valid up to 3 GHz. A specific modeling flow is introduced, which makes it possible to predict the conducted immunity of an IC according to a given criterion, whatever its external environment. This methodology was validated through measurements performed on several devices.

This paper presents a novel parallel boost converter using switched capacitors The switches are controlled not only by periodic clock but also by voltage-mode threshold that is a key to realize strong stability, fast transient and variable output. The dynamics is described by a piecewise linear equation, the mapping procedure is applicable and the system operation can be analyzed precisely.

Enclosures of electronic equipment are an important item to suppress the unwanted emissions from digital processing circuits. However, the shielding effect at high frequencies is decreased by slits and apertures of the enclosures. The method for evaluating shielding effect of enclosures above 1 GHz was investigated in this paper. A disc-cone antenna operated by an O/E converter was developed and the radiation property was calculated by the method of moment. The results indicated that the deviation between the calculation and the measurement value was within 3 dB in the case of that the antenna is operated in the frequency range from 1 GHz to 10 GHz. The antenna was placed in the enclosure model constructed with wire meshes and the shielding effects were calculated and measured from 1 GHz to 3 GHz. The results showed that the tendency of the calculated value closely agreed with that of the measured value. Using the antenna, the shielding effect of the PC cases were investigated from 1 GHz to 8 GHz. The results indicated that the shielding effect is decreased in proportion with the increase of frequency, and the careful design was important to maintain the shielding effect in this frequency range.

This paper proposes and verifies a specific absorption rate (SAR) measurement procedure for multi-antenna transmitters that requires measurement of two-dimensional electric field distributions for the number of antennas and calculation in order to obtain the three-dimensional SAR distributions for arbitrary weighting coefficients of the antennas prior to determining the average SAR. The proposed procedure is verified based on Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) calculation and measurement using electro-optic (EO) probes. For two reference dipoles, the differences in the 10 g SAR obtained based on the proposed procedure compared numerically and experimentally to that based on the original calculated three-dimensional SAR distribution are at most 4.8% and 3.6%, respectively, at 1950 MHz. At 3500 MHz, this difference is at most 5.2% in the numerical verification.

A new type of the wide-band BPF made up of an inter-digital resonator and parallel-coupled lines was proposed. The bandwidth of the inter-digital resonator becomes wider by increasing the number of fingers. The design of the parallel-coupled line was performed by optimazing the structural parameters so that the bandwidth is the same as that of the inter-digital resonator. The measured results of the combination of above elements for the BPF agreed well with the simulated ones such that the insertion loss is less than 0.67 dB and that the sharp skirt characteristics are realized by attenuation poles near the edges of the passband.

It has been reported that by adding two folded elements, bow-tie antenna can be miniaturized, but the antenna has VSWR degradation problem. In this paper, the details of the VSWR degradation are investigated and the physical mechanism of the degradation is clarified. The best position for folded element is also shown. Moreover, the bow-tie antenna is bent in half in order to realize more size reduction. When the two folded elements are added to the half bent bow-tie antenna, the lowest operation frequency goes down and the proposed antenna can be more downsized than the previous proposed antenna. The gain is slightly lower than that of the previous model, however, the antenna area is reduced from 31%, which is the antenna area ratio of privious proposed antenna and conventional bow-tie antenna, to 19%. The bandwidth of 92% is obtained for VSWR≤2.

In this paper, we propose a new differential MIMO single-carrier system with frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) aided by the insertion of cyclic prefix. This block transmission system not only inherits all the merits of the SISO SC-FDE system, but is also equipped with a differential space-time block coding (DSTBC) such as to combat the fast-changing frequency selective fading channels without the needs to estimate and then compensate the channel effects. Hence, for practical applications, it has the additional merits of decoding simplicity and robustness against high mobility transmission environments. Computer simulations show that the proposed system can provide diversity benefit as the non-differential system does, while greatly reducing the receiver complexity.

This paper presents a novel spur suppression technique using a three-phase holding pulse for a direct digital synthesizer (DDS) with a two-phase holding digital-to-analog converter (2PH-DAC). A 2PH-DAC, which uses a reverse-sign step-function as a sampling pulse waveform instead of a commonly-used gate function of zeroth-order hold, enhances the first image of aliasing, which is of higher frequency than the fundamental. Therefore, the first image can be treated as a desired signal, while the fundamental and the second image are spurs for a DDS with a 2PH-DAC (2PH-DDS). The main problem of the 2PH-DDS is close spurs in the case that signal frequency is near Nyquist frequency or sampling frequency. This paper proposes a novel spur suppression technique for a 2PH-DDS. A configuration of a 2PH-DDS is first explained, and spectral properties are analyzed. Based on the analysis, a technique using a three-phase holding pulse to cancel spurs is proposed. Evaluated spur levels of the proposed synthesizer are from -51 to -34 dBc, and are improved by 25 dB or more by the proposed technique.

Orientation field (OF) estimation is a fundamental process in fingerprint authentication systems. In this paper, a novel binary pattern based low-cost OF estimation algorithm is proposed. The new method consists of two modules. The first is block-level orientation estimation and averaging in vector space by pixel level orientation statistics. The second is orientation quantization and smoothing. In the second module, the continuous orientation is quantized into fixed orientations with sufficient resolution (interval between fixed orientations). An effective smoothing scheme on the quantized orientation space is also proposed. The proposed algorithm is capable of stably processing poor-quality fingerprint images and is validated by tests conducted on an adaptive OF matching scheme. The proposed algorithm is also implemented into a fingerprint System on Chip (SoC) to comfirm that it satisfies the strict requirements of embedded system.

A novel filter is introduced in this paper to improve the ability of radiometric based method on suppressing impulse noise. Firstly, a new method is introduced to design the impulsive weight by measuring how impulsive a pixel is. Then, the impulsive weight is combined with the radiometric weight to obtain the evaluated values on each pixel in the whole corrupted image. The impulsive weight is mainly designed to suppress the impulse noise, while the radiometric weight is mainly designed to protect the noise-free pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can perform much better than other filters in terms of the quantitative and qualitative aspects.

In this article, we propose a new way to estimate fog extinction at night with a camera. We also propose a method for the classification of fog depending on the forward scattering. We show that a characterization of fog based on the atmospheric extinction parameter only is not sufficient, specifically in the perspective of adaptive lighting for road safety. This method has been validated on synthetic images generated with a semi Monte-Carlo ray tracing software dedicated to fog simulation as well as with experiments in a fog chamber, we present the results and discuss the method, its potential applications and its limits.

Capture-safety, (defined as the avoidance of timing error due to unduly high launch switching activity in capture mode during at-speed scan testing), is critical in avoiding test induced yield loss. Although several sophisticated techniques are available for reducing capture IR-drop, there are few complete capture-safe test generation flows. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a novel and practical capture-safe test generation flow, featuring (1) a complete capture-safe test generation flow; (2) reliable capture-safety checking; and (3) effective capture-safety improvement by combining X-bit identification & X-filling with low launch-switching-activity test generation. The proposed flow minimizes test data inflation and is compatible with existing automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) flow. The techniques proposed in the flow achieve capture-safety without changing the circuit-under-test or the clocking scheme.

We develop a novel construction method for n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curves. The construction method includes four steps: block allocation, Gray permutation, coordinate transformation and recursive construction. We use the tensor product theory to formulate the method. An n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curve of 2r elements on each dimension is specified as a permutation which rearranges 2rn data elements stored in the row major order as in C language or the column major order as in FORTRAN language to the order of traversing an n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curve. The tensor product formulation of n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curves uses stride permutation, reverse permutation, and Gray permutation. We present both recursive and iterative tensor product formulas of n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curves. The tensor product formulas are directly translated into computer programs which can be used in various applications. The process of program generation is explained in the paper.

This paper presents an automatic system for detecting and re-identifying people moving in different sites with non-overlapping views. We first propose an automatic process for silhouette extraction based on the combination of an adaptive background subtraction algorithm and a motion detection module. Such a combination takes advantage of both approaches and is able to tackle the problem of particular environments. The silhouette extraction results are then clustered based on their spatial belonging and colorimetric characteristics in order to preserve only the key regions that effectively represent the appearance of a person. The next important step consists in characterizing the extracted silhouettes by the appearance-based signatures. Our proposed descriptor, which includes both color and spatial feature of objects, leads to satisfying results compared to other descriptors in the literature. Since the passage of a person needs to be characterized by multiple frames, a large quantity of data has to be processed. Thus, a graph-based algorithm is used to realize the comparison of passages of people in front of cameras and to make the final decision of re-identification. The global system is tested on two real and difficult data sets recorded in very different environments. The experimental results show that our proposed system leads to very satisfactory results.

Wireless ad hoc network is one of the most suitable platforms for providing communication services to support mobile applications in public areas where no fixed communication infrastructure exists. However, due to the open nature of wireless links and lack of security infrastructure in an ad hoc network environment, applications operating on ad hoc network platforms are subjected to non-trivial security challenges. Asymmetric key management, which is widely adopted to be an effective basis for security services in an open network environment, typically plays a crucial role in meeting the security requirements of such applications. In this paper, we propose a secure asymmetric key management scheme, the Ubiquitous and Secure Certificate Service (USCS), which is based on a variant of the Distributed Certificate Authority (DCA) - the Fully Distributed Certificate Authority (FDCA). Similar to FDCA, USCS introduces the presence of 1-hop neighbors which hold shares of DCA's private signature key, and can collaborate to issue certificates, thereby providing asymmetric key management service. Both USCS and FDCA aim to achieve higher availability than the basic DCA scheme; however, USCS is more secure than FDCA in that the former achieves high availability by distributing existing shares to new members, rather than generating new shares as the FDCA scheme does. In order to realise the high availability potential of USCS, a share selection algorithm is also proposed. Experimental results demonstrated that USCS is a more secure approach of the DCA scheme in that it can achieve stronger security than FDCA while attaining high availability similar to that of FDCA. Experiments also showed that USCS incurs only moderate communication overheads.