This paper presents a processor architecture for high-speed and reliable stereo matching based on adaptive window-size control of SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences) computation. To reduce its computational complexity, SADs are computed using images divided into non-overlapping regions, and the matching result is iteratively refined by reducing a window size. Window-parallel-and-pixel-parallel architecture is also proposed to achieve to fully exploit the potential parallelism of the algorithm. The architecture also reduces the complexity of an interconnection network between memory and functional units based on the regularity of reference pixels. The stereo matching processor is implemented on an FPGA. Its performance is 80 times higher than that of a microprocessor (Pentium4@2 GHz), and is enough to generate a 3-D depth image at the video rate of 33 MHz.

This paper describes an approach to extending the learning experience using a Web-CAI system incorporated with MATHEMATICA, which is an advanced calculating software widely used in science and engineering fields. This approach provides the possibility of extending access to the courses that students have learned at school. We can use variables in mathematical formulas so that different problems can be shown to students. At the same time, we can also use algebraic formulas. In addition, applying MATHEMATICA to the given process for the answer automatically makes the answer of the problem. And two types of the answer expressions are acceptable which are filling in text by keyboard and selecting by click. This paper presents the design for the system and its specific implementation, and the technical solving scheme. At the end of this paper, the learning evaluations and the problem-editing interface design are discussed.

When a large-size car exists on the ETC lane (Electronic Toll Collection System), there is the possibility that the interference on the adjacent lane occurs by the scattering waves from one. In this paper, we propose a new improvement method which the transparent EM wave absorber is placed between the ETC lane and the adjacent one in order to suppress the scattering waves from a large-size car. Therefore, we design the transparent EM wave absorber which consists of the transparent resistive and conductive films. Then, this absorber is produced, and its reflection and transmission coefficients are evaluated. In addition, its transmittance in optics is evaluated. As the results, the reflectivity of this absorber is obtained lower than -20 dB in the oblique incident angle from 0to 30at 5.8 GHz circular polarized wave, abbreviated as CP wave, and also the transmittivity is obtain lower than -27 dB in the oblique incident angle from 0to 70, respectively. On the other hand, the transmittance in optics is obtained higher than 60%. Moreover, we study experimentally on the ETC system with placing this absorber between the ETC lane and the adjacent one. We measured the distribution of receiving power on the adjacent lane, when a water sprinkler existed on the ETC lane. As a result, it is confirmed that the receiving power on the adjacent lane could be realized lower than -70.5 dBm, and then a new improvement method has proven to be very useful in the ETC system.

This letter presents a method of finding the optimal quantization stepsize that minimizes quantization loss and maximizes coded BER performance. We define 'Information Error Rate'(IER) and obtain the equation of the modified constraint length (Km) to obtain an upper bound of coded BER performance of a l bit quantized soft decision Viterbi decoder. Using IER and Km, we determine the optimal quantization stepsize of a 2 bit and 3 bit quantized soft decision decoding system in an AWGN channl with respect to SNR, and verify our strategies by simulation results.

This paper proposes a coordinator for workflow management systems (WFMSs). It is a basic module for developing WFMSs. It is also a coordinator to coordinate multiple WFMSs. The coordinator provides functions to facilitate executing workflows and to ensure secure access of workflow information. Facilitating workflow execution is well-known, but ensuring secure access of workflow information is identified as important only recently. Although many models ensure secure workflow information access, they fail to offer the features we need. We thus developed a new model for the control. This paper presents the coordinator its access control model.

In this paper, a new method based on the mode-matching method in the sense of least squares is presented for analyzing the two dimensional scattering problem of TE plane wave incidence to the infinite plane surface with an arbitrary imperfection of finite extent. The semi-infinite upper and lower regions of that surface are a vacuum and a perfect conductor, respectively. Therefore the discussion of this paper is developed about the Dirichlet boundary value problem. In this method, the approximate scattered wave is represented by the integral transform with band-limited spectrum of plane waves. The boundary values of those scattered waves are described by only abscissa z and Fourier spectra are obtained by applying the ordinary Fourier transform. Moreover, new approximate functions are made by inverse Fourier transform of band-limited those spectra. Consequently, the integral equations of Fredholm type of second kind for spectra of approximate scattered wave functions are derived by matching those new functions to exact boundary value in the sense of least squares. Then it is shown analytically and numerically that the sequence of boundary values of approximate wave functions converges to the exact boundary value, namely, the boundary value of the exact scattered wave in the sense of least squares when the profile of imperfection part is described by continuous and piecewise smooth function at least. Moreover, it is shown that this sequence uniformly converges to exact boundary value in arbitrary finite region of the boundary and the sequence of approximate wave functions uniformly converges to the exact scattered field in arbitrary subdomain in the upper vacuum domain of the boundary in wider sense when the uniqueness of the solution of the Helmholtz equation is satisfied with regard to the profile of the imperfection parts of the boundary.

In this paper, we propose a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) with up mode type Miller-integrator. The controlled voltage of this VCO can continuously change 0 V center in the positive and negative bidirection. Also, the relationship between control voltage and oscillating frequency shows the good linearity, and the calculated and the measured values agree well.

In this paper, a methodology based on a mix-mode interconnection architecture is proposed for constructing an application specific network on chip to minimize the total communication time. The proposed architecture uses a globally asynchronous communication network and a locally synchronous bus (or cross-bar or multistage interconnection network MIN). First, a local bus is given for a group of IP cores so that the communications within this local bus can be arranged to be exclusive in time. If the communications of some IP cores should be required to be completed within a given amount of time, then a non-blocking MIN or a crossbar switch should be made for those IP cores instead of a bus. Then, a communication ratio (CR) for each pair of local buses is provided by users, and based on the Huffman coding philosophy, a process is applied to construct a binary tree (BT) with switches on the internal nodes and buses on the leaves. Since the binary tree system is deadlock free (no cycle exists in any path), the router is just a relatively simple and cheap switch. Simulation results show that the proposed methodology and architecture of NOC is better on switching circuit cost and performance than the SPIN and the mesh architecture using our developed deadlock-free router.

A multiple-issue on-chip bus of a layered architecture in a Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) design style, supporting in-order/out-of-order completion, is proposed in this letter. The throughput of the proposed on-chip bus is increased by 31.3% and 34.3%, while power consumption overhead is only 6.76% and 3.98%, respectively, as compared to an asynchronous single-issue on-chip bus.

This paper proposes an effective JPEG 2000 encoding method for reducing tiling artifacts, which cause one of the biggest problems in JPEG 2000 encoders. Symmetric pixel extension is generally thought to be the main factor in causing artifacts. However this paper shows that differences in quantization accuracy between tiles are a more significant reason for tiling artifacts at middle or low bit rates. This paper also proposes an algorithm that predicts whether tiling artifacts will occur at a tile boundary in the rate control process and that locally improves quantization accuracy by the original post quantization control. This paper further proposes a method for reducing processing time which is yet another serious problem in the JPEG 2000 encoder. The method works by predicting truncation points using the entropy of wavelet transform coefficients prior to the arithmetic coding. These encoding methods require no additional processing in the decoder. The experiments confirmed that tiling artifacts were greatly reduced and that the coding process was considerably accelerated.

Fixed polarity Reed-Muller expressions (FPRMs) exhibit several useful properties that make them suitable for many practical applications. This paper presents an exact minimization algorithm for FPRMs for incompletely specified functions. For an n-variable function with α unspecified minterms there are 2n+α distinct FPRMs, and a minimum FPRM is one with the fewest product terms. To find a minimum FPRM the algorithm requires to determine an assignment of the incompletely specified minterms. This is accomplished by using the concept of integer-valued functions in conjunction with an extended truth vector and a weight vector. The vectors help formulate the problem as an assignment of the variables of integer-valued functions, which are then efficiently manipulated by using multi-terminal binary decision diagrams for finding an assignment of the unspecified minterms. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated through experimental results for code converters, adders, and randomly generated functions.

It has been observed in the literature that the characteristic polynomial of a discrete system can be computed from the characteristic impulse response Gramian. In this letter it is shown that a given characteristic impulse response Gramian, in fact, contains information on two characteristic polynomials. The importance of this result is illustrated through an application to model reduction of discrete systems.

In the letter we extend our previous work, which applies genetic programming to passive filter synthesis tasks. The extended method deals with the tolerance design considerations. Experimental results show that our method can effectively generate filters which outperform those generated by traditional methods. In addition, it provides filter designers with an effective CAD tool to manage the trade-off between manufacturing yield and circuit cost.

In conventional OFDM systems, the effect of inter-block-interference (IBI) can be completely removed by inserting sufficient redundant symbols between successive transmission blocks. In this paper, based on the reformulated received block symbols of the discrete multirate filterbanks model, a new transceiver model for the cyclic prefix (CP) OFDM systems is proposed, associated with the oblique projector technique (view as the pre-processor for achieving IBI-free). Consequently, a novel ISI-free receiver with the zero-order FIR zero-forcing (ZF) filterbanks equalizer can be devised, under noise-free environment. For performance comparison the bit-error-rate (BER) is investigated for the cases of noisy and noise-free channels. In all cases, viz., the length of CP is shorter or longer than the order of the channel impulse response, we show that the same BER performance compared with the one suggested in [3] can be achieved, under the same assumptions and conditions. Since a simple cascade configuration of the IBI cancellation using the oblique projector followed by the ISI cancellation using the zero-order FIR ZF filterbanks equalizer can be realized for OFDM systems with sufficient or insufficient CP, the complexity of transceiver design can be reduced.

Bluetooth is reputed as a wireless networking technology capable of forming ad-hoc networks between digital devices. In particular, the Bluetooth scatternet will be an essential part of the fully distributed ad-hoc networks. However, scatternet is not fully described in the Bluetooth specification. This has been the topic of discussion among researches in relation to the formation algorithm, scheduling scheme, etc. Most of the proposed algorithms reported in past researches on scatternet formation are too large and complex to be implemented in a real commercial Bluetooth hardware. Therefore, the verifications of the proposed algorithms reported in past researches were done through only simulations. In addition, the formation process takes too long and these past researches had been conducted only in static environment where no node enters or leaves the scatternet. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new scatternet formation algorithm called Node Ring Scatternet (NRS), emphasizing on two aspects, i.e. implementation and dynamic property of the algorithm. The algorithm is very simple and compact and is verified to be easily implementable in a real commercial Bluetooth device. For the dynamic properties, the NRS entails relatively short formation delay and a reformation algorithm in a dynamic environment was designed. Therefore, the network of the NRS can be scalable and flexible. In addition, a new protocol called SFMP (Scatternet Formation & Management Protocol) was designed and is presented herein. Using this protocol, the NRS algorithm was implemented in a real Bluetooth device, and the performance was verified through hardware experiments. Based on the experimental results, it was found that the NRS composed of up to 20 nodes is formed and the proposed algorithm has shown improvement in terms of formation delay, formation probability and reformation.

This work deploys Autonomous Decentralized System (ADS) based formulation to cluster of networked visual sensors. The goal is to utilize and integrate the sensing and networking capabilities of the sensors with the systematic and autonomous features of ADS to perform visual surveillance through object detection in the covered areas of interest. In the proposed approach, several cells are distributed through an area of interest called Autonomous Observer Cell. The decentralized subsystems detect and track moving objects present on the scene by looking through a camera embedded in each sensor. These subsystems form a cluster and each cluster sends information to an Autonomous Analysis Cell that determines if an object of interest is present. The Autonomous Observer Cells share a common data field and a cluster-head works as a gateway between the cluster and the Autonomous Analysis Cell.

This paper introduces a new approach to realize a multi-state operation on the microwave isolator using ferrite edge-mode. The voltage control of total transmission on the isolator is realized. The operation is based on the unique property of ferrite edge-mode and the variable resistance of PIN diodes. On the isolator, the frequency response is investigated both experimentally and numerically. The numerical analysis is performed by the FDTD method. Both numerical and experimental results have shown that the transmission between two ports can be totally controlled by the applied voltage for the diodes. The experimental results indicate that the transmission direction can be controlled at 11 GHz, and the isolation ratio can be controlled for more than 30 dB.

MT19937 is a kind of Mersenne Twister, which is a pseudo-random number generator. This study presents new designs for a MT19937 circuit suitable for custom computing machinery for high-performance scientific simulations. Our designs can generate multiple random numbers per cycle (multi-port design). The estimated throughput of a 52-port design was 262 Gbps, which is 115 times higher than the software on a Pentium 4 (2.53 GHz) processor. Multi-port designs were proven to be more cost-effective than using multiple single-port designs. The initialization circuit can be included without performance loss in exchange for a slight increase of logic scale.

Waveguide-type optical amplifiers doped with Ytterbium and Erbium ions are theoretically studied. Sensitization of Er-doped amplifiers with Yb ion doping have many advantages such as the possibility of using broader pumping wavelength range and efficient pumping with smaller pumping power. Transient amplification characteristics of optical short pulses are numerically analyzed using FDTD method. The amplification characteristics are compared with the result of the steady state analysis using the rate equations.

Target reconstruction algorithm from its monostatic radar cross section (RCS) has been proposed for polygonal cylinders with curved surfaces. This algorithm is based on our previous finding that the main contribution to the back scattering is due to edge diffracted fields excited at a facet of nearly specular reflection direction. Dimension of this constitutive facet of the target is estimated from the local maxima and its lobe width in the angular RCS variation. Half and quarter circular cylinders are used as canonical scattering objects, and their measured and numerically simulated monostatic RCS values have been studied extensively to find scattering pattern characteristic difference between flat and circularly curved surfaces. Thus estimated constitutive facets are connected in order, and this procedure will be continued until the distance between the first and the final edges would be minimized. Our algorithm has been tested for other targets, and it is found that it works well for predicting metal convex targets with flat and curved facets.