This paper deals with a TM plane wave reflection and transmission from a one-dimensional random slab with stratified fluctuation by means of the stochastic functional approach. Based on a previous manner [IEICE Trans. Electron. E88-C, 4, pp.713-720, 2005], an explicit form of the random wavefield is obtained in terms of a Wiener-Hermite expansion with approximate expansion coefficients (Wiener kernels) under small fluctuation. The optical theorem and coherent reflection coefficient are illustrated in figures for several physical parameters. It is then found that the optical theorem by use of the first two or three order Wiener kernels holds with good accuracy and a shift of Brewster's angle appears in the coherent reflection.

We have proposed a random curved surface model as a new mathematical concept which enables the expression of spatial correlation. The model gives us an appropriate methodology to deal with the systematic components of device variation in an LSI chip. The key idea of the model is the fitting of a polynomial to an array of Gaussian random numbers. The curved surface is expressed by a new extension from the Legendre polynomials to form two-dimensional formulas. The formulas were proven to be suitable to express the spatial correlation with reasonable computational complexity. In this paper, we show that this approach is useful in analyzing characteristics of device variation of actual chips by using experimental data.

Conventional narrowband interference (NBI) rejection algorithms often assumed perfect pseudo-noise (PN) code synchronization. The functions of NBI rejection and code tracking are performed separately and independently by an adaptive filter and a code tracking loop, respectively. This paper presents two new receiver structures for direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) systems, one operates in coherent mode and the other operates in noncoherent mode. Both receivers are designed to suppress NBI and minimize tracking jitter. Numerical results show that the proposed coherent receiver performs as good as the conventional receiver that uses an LMS NBI rejection filter with zero tracking jitter. The noncoherent receiver, when compared with the coherent one, suffers less than 3 dB degradation for bit error probability smaller than 10-3.

MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) technologies have attracted much interest for high-rate and high-capacity wireless communications. MIMO technologies under frequency-selective fading environments (wideband MIMO technologies) have also been studied. A wideband MIMO system is affected by ISI (Inter Symbol Interference) and CCI (Co-Channel Interference). Hence, we need a MIMO signal detection technique that simultaneously suppresses ISI and CCI. The OFDM system and SC-FDE (Single Carrier-Frequency Domain Equalization) techniques are often used for suppressing ISI. By employing these techniques with the ZF (Zero Forcing) or the MMSE (Minimum Mean Square Error) spatial filtering technique, we can cancel both ISI and CCI. To use ZF or MMSE, we need channel state information for calculating the receive weights. Although an LS (Least Square) channel estimation technique has been proposed for MIMO-OFDM systems, it needs a large estimation matrix at the receiver side to obtain sufficient estimation performance in heavy multipath environments. However, the use of a large matrix increases computational complexity and the circuit size. We use frequency domain channel estimation to solve these problems and propose an iterative method for achieving better estimation performance. In this paper, we assume the use of a MIMO-UWB system that employs a UWB-IR (Ultra-Wideband Impulse Radio) scheme with the FDE technique as the wideband wireless transmission scheme for heavy multipath environments, and we evaluate the iterative frequency domain channel estimation through computer simulations and computational complexity calculations.

Steganography aims to hide secret data into an innocuous cover-medium for transmission and to make the attacker cannot recognize the presence of secret data easily. Even the stego-medium is captured by the eavesdropper, the slight distortion is hard to be detected. The LSB-based data hiding is one of the steganographic methods, used to embed the secret data into the least significant bits of the pixel values in a cover image. In this paper, we propose an LSB-based scheme using reflected-Gray code, which can be applied to determine the embedded bit from secret information. Following the transforming rule, the LSBs of stego-image are not always equal to the secret bits and the experiment shows that the differences are up to almost 50 %. According to the mathematical deduction and experimental results, the proposed scheme has the same image quality and payload as the simple LSB substitution scheme. In fact, our proposed data hiding scheme in the case of G1 (one bit Gray code) system is equivalent to the simple LSB substitution scheme.

This paper proposes a new parameter estimation method for the MIMO-OFDM MAP receiver with spatial-temporal filters. The proposed method employs eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) so as to attain precise estimates especially under interference-limited conditions in MIMO-OFDM mobile communications. Recursive EVD is introduced to reduce the computational complexity compared to the nonrecursive EVD. The spatial-temporal prewhitening is placed prior to FFT because this arrangement is superior to that of conventional prewhitening posterior to FFT in accuracy of the parameter estimation. In order to improve tracking capability to fast fading, the proposed scheme applies a decision-directed algorithm to the parameter estimation by using log-likelihood ratios of coded bits. Computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can track fast fading and reduce the complexity to 18 percents of the conventional one, and that the spatial-temporal filtering prior to FFT outperforms the conventional one posterior to FFT.

This paper proposes the minimum transition random X-filling (MTR-fill) technique, which is a new X-filling method, to reduce the amount of power dissipation during scan-based testing. In order to model the amount of power dissipated during scan load/unload cycles, the total weighted transition metric (TWTM) is introduced, which is calculated by the sum of the weighted transitions in a scan-load of a test pattern and a scan-unload of a test response. The proposed MTR-fill is implemented by simulated annealing method. During the annealing process, the TWTM of a pair of test patterns and test responses are minimized. Simultaneously, the MTR-fill attempts to increase the randomness of test patterns in order to reduce the number of test patterns needed to achieve adequate fault coverage. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is shown through experiments for ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits.

One hardware efficient and high speed architecture for variable block size motion estimation (VBSME) in H.264 is presented in this paper. By improving the pipeline structure and processing element (PE) circuits, the system latency and hardware cost is reduced, which makes this structure more hardware efficient than the original Propagate Partial SAD architecture. For small and middle frame size picture's coding, the proposed structure can save 12.1% hardware cost compared with original Propagate Partial SAD structure. In the case of HDTV, since small inter modes trivially contribute to the coding quality, we remove modes below 88 in our design. By adopting mode reduction technique, when the set number of PE array is less than 8, the proposed mode reduction based Propagate Partial SAD structure can work at faster clock speed and consume less hardware cost than widely used SAD Tree architecture. It is more robust to the high speed timing constraint when parallel processing is considered. With TSMC 0.18 µm technology in worst work conditions (1.62 V, 125), its peak throughput of 8-set PE array structure is 720p@30 Hz with 12864 search range and 5 reference frames. 12 k gates hardware cost can be reduced by our design compared with the parallel SAD Tree architecture.

We have developed a visual entertainment system called "Future Cast" which enables anyone to easily participate in a pre-recorded or pre-created film as an instant CG movie star. This system provides audiences with the amazing opportunity to join the cast of a movie in real-time. The Future Cast System can automatically perform all the processes required to make this possible, from capturing participants' facial characteristics to rendering them into the movie. Our system can also be applied to any movie created using the same production process. We conducted our first experimental trial demonstration of the Future Cast System at the Mitsui-Toshiba pavilion at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi Japan.

This paper presents discussion about channel fluctuation on channel estimation in digital terrestrial television broadcasting. This channel estimation uses a two-dimensional (2D) filter. In our previous work, only a structure of a lattice is considered for generation of nonrectangular 2D filter. We investigate generation of nonrectangular 2D filter with adaptive method, because we should refer to not only a lattice but also channel conditions. From the computer simulations, we show that bit error rate of the proposed filter is improved compared to that of the filter depending on only lattices.

For the success of a large deployment of UHF RFID, easy-to-use and low-cost engineering tools to facilitate the performance evaluation are demanded particularly in installations and for trouble shooting. The measurement of interrogation area is one of the most typical industrial demands to establish the stable readability of UHF RFID. Exhaustive repetition of tag position change with a read operation and a usage of expensive measurement equipment or special interrogators are common practices to measure the interrogation area. In this paper, a practical method to measure the interrogation area of a UHF RFID by using a battery assisted passive tag (BAP) is presented. After introducing the fundamental design and performances of the BAP that we have developed, we introduce the measurement method. In the method, the target tag in the target installation is continuously traversed either manually or automatically while it is subjected to a repetitive read of a commercial interrogator. During the target tag traversal, the interrogator's commands are continuously monitored by a BAP. With an extensive analysis on interrogator commands, the BAP can differentiate between its own read timings and those of the target tag. The read timings of the target tag collected by the BAP are recorded synchronously with the target tag position, yielding a map of the interrogation area. The present method does not entail a measurement burden. It is also independent of the choice of interrogator and tag. The method is demonstrated in a practical UHF RFID installation to show that the method can measure a 40 mm resolution interrogation area measurement just by traversing the target tag at a slow walking speed, 300 mm/sec.

Ultrasonic distance measurement using the pulse-echo method is based on the determination of the time of flight of ultrasonic waves. The pulse-compression technique, in which the cross-correlation function of a detected ultrasonic wave and a transmitted ultrasonic wave is obtained, is the conventional method used for improving the resolution of distance measurement. However, the calculation of a cross-correlation operation requires high-cost digital signal processing. This paper presents a new method of sensor signal processing within the pulse-compression technique using a delta-sigma modulated single-bit digital signal. The proposed sensor signal processing method consists of a cross-correlation operation employing single-bit signal processing and a smoothing operation involving a moving average filter. The proposed method reduces the calculation cost of the digital signal processing of the pulse-compression technique.

This paper presents a Multiprocessor System-on-Chips (MPSoC) architecture used as an execution platform for the new C-language based MPSoC design framework we are currently developing. The MPSoC architecture is based on an existing SoC platform with a commercial RISC core acting as the host CPU. We extend the existing SoC with a multiprocessor-array block that is used as the main engine to run parallel applications modeled in our design framework. Utilizing several optimizations provided by our compiler, an efficient inter-communication between processing elements with minimum overhead is implemented. A host-interface is designed to integrate the existing RISC core to the multiprocessor-array. The experimental results show that an efficacious integration is achieved, proving that the designed communication module can be used to efficiently incorporate off-the-shelf processors as a processing element for MPSoC architectures designed using our framework.

Encapsulating critical computation subgraphs as application-specific instruction set extensions is an effective technique to enhance the performance of embedded processors. However, the addition of custom functional units to the base processor is required to support the execution of these custom instructions. Although automated tools have been developed to reduce the long design time needed to produce a new extensible processor for each application, short time-to-market, significant non-recurring engineering and design costs are issues. To address these concerns, we introduce an adaptive extensible processor in which custom instructions are generated and added after chip-fabrication. To support this feature, custom functional units (CFUs) are replaced by a reconfigurable functional unit (RFU). The proposed RFU is based on a matrix of functional units which is multi-cycle with the capability of conditional execution. A quantitative approach is utilized to propose an efficient architecture for the RFU and fix its constraints. To generate more effective custom instructions, they are extended over basic blocks and hence, multiple exits custom instructions are proposed. Conditional execution has been added to the RFU to support the multi-exit feature of custom instructions. Experimental results show that multi-exit custom instructions enhance the performance by an average of 67% compared to custom instructions limited to one basic block. A maximum speedup of 4.7, compared to a general embedded processor, and an average speedup of 1.85 was achieved on MiBench benchmark suite.

In this letter, the influence of the downlink average ratio of the other cell interference to other-user interference in the serving cell (DARI) on the distributed repeater system (DRS) performance is analyzed. It is found that the improvement of DARI depends on a propagation path loss environment. Applying the computed DARI to a 3-RS DRS cell, as high as 13.9% capacity enhancement was obtained when the path loss exponent is 4.5. In addition, by using the power allocation equation, it is expected that a hexagonal DRS cell without coverage holes or excessive coverage overlap can be realized.

This letter proposes an efficient transmit power allocation using partial channel information feedback for the closed-loop sorted QR decomposition (SQRD) based V-BLAST systems. For the feedback information, the positive real-valued diagonal elements of R are forwarded to the transmitter. With the proposed transmit power allocation that is numerically derived by the Lagrange optimization method, the bit error rate performance of the system can be remarkably improved compare to the conventional open-loop SQRD based V-BLAST systems without increasing the receiver complexity.

The subject of this paper is maximum weight matchings of graphs. An edge set M of a given graph G is called a matching if and only if any pair of edges in M share no endvertices. A maximum weight matching is a matching whose total weight (total sum of edge-weights) is maximum among those of G. The maximum weight matching problem (MWM for short) is to find a maximum weight matching of a given graph. Polynomial algorithms for finding an optimum solution to MWM have already been proposed: for example, an O(|V|4) time algorithm proposed by J. Edmonds, and an O(|E||V|log |V|) time algorithm proposed by H.N. Gabow. Some applications require obtaining a matching of large total weight (not necessarily a maximum one) in realistic computing time. These existing algorithms, however, spend extremely long computing time as the size of a given graph becomes large, and several fast approximation algorithms for MWM have been proposed. In this paper, we propose six approximation algorithms GRS+, GRS_F+, GRS_R+, GRS_S+, LAM_a+ and LAM_as+. They are enhanced from known approximation ones by adding some postprocessings that consist of improved search of weight augmenting paths. Their performance is evaluated through results of computing experiment.

Bone Mineral Density (BMD) is an indicator of osteoporosis that is an increasingly serious disease, particularly for the elderly. To calculate BMD, we need to measure the volume of the femur in a noninvasive way. In this paper, we propose a noninvasive bone volume measurement method using x-ray attenuation on radiography and medical knowledge. The absolute thickness at one reference pixel and the relative thickness at all pixels of the bone in the x-ray image are used to calculate the volume and the BMD. First, the absolute bone thickness of one particular pixel is estimated by the known geometric shape of a specific bone part as medical knowledge. The relative bone thicknesses of all pixels are then calculated by x-ray attenuation of each pixel. Finally, given the absolute bone thickness of the reference pixel, the absolute bone thickness of all pixels is mapped. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments on 300 subjects were performed. We found that the method provides good estimations of real BMD values of femur bone. Estimates shows a high linear correlation of 0.96 between the volume Bone Mineral Density (vBMD) of CT-SCAN and computed vBMD (all P<0.001). The BMD results reveal 3.23% difference in volume from the BMD of CT-SCAN.

We present an evaluation method for estimating the lower bound number of Monte Carlo STA trials required to obtain at least one sample which falls within top-k % of its parent population. The sample can be used to ensure that target designs are timing-error free with a predefined probability using the minimum computational cost. The lower bound number is represented as a closed-form formula which is general enough to be applied to other verifications. For validation, Monte Carlo STA was carried out on various benchmark data including ISCAS circuits. The minimum number of Monte Carlo runs determined using the proposed method successfully extracted one or more top-k % delay instances.

In this paper, we propose new external context features for the semantic classification of bio-entities. In the previous approaches, the words located on the left or the right context of bio-entities are frequently used as the external context features. However, in our prior experiments, the external contexts in a flat representation did not improve the performance. In this study, we incorporate predicate-argument features into training the ME-based classifier. Through parsing and argument identification, we recognize biomedical verbs that have argument relations with the constituents including a bio-entity, and then use the predicate-argument structures as the external context features. The extraction of predicate-argument features can be done by performing two identification tasks: the biomedically salient word identification which determines whether a word is a biomedically salient word or not, and the target verb identification which identifies biomedical verbs that have argument relations with the constituents including a bio-entity. Experiments show that the performance of semantic classification in the bio domain can be improved by utilizing such predicate-argument features.