The enlargement of the left lobe of the liver and the shrinkage of the right lobe are helpful signs at MR imaging in diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver. To investigate whether the volume ratio of left-to-whole (LTW) is effective to differentiate cirrhosis from a normal liver, we developed an automatic algorithm for three-dimensional (3D) segmentation and volume calculation of the liver region in multi-detector row CT scans and MR imaging. From one manually selected slice that contains a large liver area, two edge operators are applied to obtain the initial liver area, from which the mean gray value is calculated as threshold value in order to eliminate the connected organs or tissues. The final contour is re-confirmed by using thresholding technique. The liver region in the next slice is generated by referring to the result from the last slice. After continuous procedure of this segmentation on each slice, the 3D liver is reconstructed from all the extracted slices and the surface image can be displayed from different view points by using the volume rendering technique. The liver is then separated into the left and the right lobe by drawing an inter-segmental plane manually, and the volume in each part is calculated slice by slice. The degree of cirrhosis can be defined as the ratio of volume in these two lobes. Four cases including normal and cirrhotic liver with MR and CT slices are used for 3D segmentation and visualization. The volume ratio of LTW was relatively higher in cirrhosis than in the normal cases in both MR and CT cases. The average error rate on liver segmentation was within 5.6% after employing in 30 MR cases. These results demonstrate that the performance in our 3D segmentation was satisfied and the LTW ratio may be effective to differentiate cirrhosis.

A large body of research in the measurement of software complexity at code level has been conducted, but little effort has been made to measure the architectural-level complexity of a software system. In this paper, we propose some architectural-level metrics which are appropriate for evaluating the architectural attributes of a software system. The main feature of our approach is to assess the architectural-level complexity of a software system by analyzing its formal architectural specification, and therefore the process of metric computation can be automated completely.

In order to get the knowledge of gas dynamics in interruption process of molded case circuit breakers, a quenching chamber model with gas-driven arc is proposed. The two-dimensional optical fiber digital testing system has been used to measure the arc current, arc voltage, pressure in the quenching chamber, and the movement of the arc when interrupting the 10 kA prospective current in different conditions. The influence of venting conditions, the configuration of splitter plates and gassing material characteristics on the performance of gas-driven arc has investigated. It demonstrates that the performance can be improved effectively by the ways of closing the bottom venting, adopting shorter splitter plate configuration, and POM and Nylon gassing materials.

A fast motion estimation algorithm is proposed, which performs a tree-structured motion vector search for variable blocks in the integer-pixel unit. The proposed method is based on the inequality of sum norms to find the best estimate of the motion vectors for variable blocks. The proposed motion estimation algorithm is applied to the Joint Video Team (JVT) encoder that performs variable-block motion estimation (ME) with quarter-pixel unit. In terms of computational complexity, the proposed motion estimation algorithm searches motion vectors about 10.7 times as fast as the spiral full search with early termination and 6.6 times as fast as the fast full search using the hierarchical sum of absolute difference (SAD), while the PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) of the reconstructed image is slightly degraded.

The proposed DOA (Direction Of Arrival) estimation method by integrating the frequency array data generated from microphone pairs in an equilateral-triangular microphone array is extended here. The method uses four microphones located at the apices of regular tetrahedron to enable to estimate the elevation angle from the array plane as well. Furthermore, we introduce an idea for separate estimation of azimuth and elevation to reduce the computational loads.

Development of new sliding contact, usable under sever conditions such as high-temperature, extremely low-temperature or high vacuum, has recently become an urgent necessity. This research mainly examined the contact resistance and coefficient of friction of 3 kinds of self-lubricant composite materials with electrical conductivity and mechanical stiffness. The result showed that a composite material (CMML-1) containing the least quantity of solid lubricants [WS2, Gr.(Graphite)] among them was low in both contact resistance and coefficient of friction and less in fluctuation. By EPMA analysis, contribution of Sn to electrical conductivity was suggested.

The vacuum arc root properties (temperature, current density, radius of an arc root, fraction of current density carried by electrons, evaporation rate etc.) of graphite and copper are calculated with the cathode-fall voltage as parameter and the arc root properties of graphite are compared with that of copper. Especially, there is big difference between the evaporation rate of graphite and that of copper. This reason is thought that the thermal conductivity of graphite is low and its evaporating temperature is high.

A new indirect approach for designing low-order linear-phase IIR filters is presented in this paper. Given an FIR filter, we utilize a new Krylov subspace projection method, called the rational Arnoldi method with adaptive orders, to synthesize an approximated IIR filter with small orders. The synthesized IIR filter can truly reflect essential dynamical features of the original FIR filter and indeed satisfies the design specifications. Also, from simulation results, it can be observed that the linear-phase property in the passband is stilled retained. This indirect approach is accomplished using the state-space realization of FIR filters, multi-point Pade approximations, the Arnoldi algorithm, and an intelligent scheme to select expansion points in the frequency domain. Such methods are quite efficient in terms of computational complexity. Fundamental developments of the proposed method will be discussed in details. Numerical results will demonstrate the accuracy and the efficiency of this two-step indirect method.

Arrival of the packet data is acknowledged by detecting the preambles of the received bursty packets. To increase system throughput and reduce transmission latency, a simple and robust signal detection algorithm is required. Furthermore, the threshold for signal detection must be set adaptively for different channel conditions. In this paper, we design and compare three signal detection algorithms for bursty packet systems.

Based on Radon transform, a novel method for registering a periodic (self-referencing) watermark is presented. Although the periodic watermark is widely used as a countermeasure for affine transformation, there is no known efficient method to register it. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for registering the watermark from an image that had undergone both affine transformations and severe lossy compression.

A high-attenuation waveguide filter using electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) substrates is introduced. With a simple design modification on the EBG covers, the waveguide filter produced an almost full Ku-band rejection bandwidth showing better than 20 dB input-to-output isolation from 12.3 to 17.2 GHz.

This paper presents a novel blind multiple access interference (MAI) suppression filter in DS/CDMA systems. The filter is adaptively updated by parallel projections onto a series of convex sets. These sets are defined based on the received signal as well as a priori knowledge about the desired user's signature. In order to achieve fast convergence and good performance at steady state, the adaptive projected subgradient method (Yamada et al., 2003) is applied. The proposed scheme also jointly estimates the desired signal amplitude and the filter coefficients based on an approximation of an EM type algorithm, following the original idea proposed by Park and Doherty, 1997. Simulation results highlight the fast convergence behavior and good performance at steady state of the proposed scheme.

Cutoff rate of m-ary PPM is derived for an avalanche photodiode (APD) based receiver. The cutoff rate is compared among m=8-256 under the condition of the same total signal energy in 256 slots, where the effects of the timing jitter and atmospheric turbulence are included. Numerical results are shown for the illustrative examples of the cutoff rate.

In this paper, we will propose a robust watermarking system for digital audio sound to protect the copyright of publication and claim of ownership. The proposed watermarking scheme uses the frequency extent between 1 Hz and 20 Hz, which cannot be heard by the unaided human ear, to embed the watermark. Thus, the original audio quality will not be influenced by the watermark. Currently, the techniques of Perceptual Audio Coder contain MPEG-1, -2, -2.5, MPEG-2 AAC, MPEG-4 AAC and Window Media Audio. From experimental results, the proposed watermarking system can resist attacks of previous audio coders and low bit-rate compression. The watermark is extracted with 100% correction after previous encoder attacks. Furthermore, to authenticate the audio signal, the system can quickly extract the watermark without the knowledge of original audio signals.

We attempt to achieve corporative behavior of autonomous decentralized agents constructed via Q-Learning, which is a type of reinforcement learning. As such, in the present paper, we examine the piano mover's problem including a find-path problem. We propose a multi-agent architecture that has an external agent and internal agents. Internal agents are homogenous and can communicate with each other. The movement of the external agent depends on the composition of the actions of the internal agents. By learning how to move through the internal agents, avoidance of obstacles by the object is expected. We simulate the proposed method in a two-dimensional continuous world. Results obtained in the present investigation reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method.

High speed core networks with optical fibers have spread widely, but it is still difficult to access the core networks from many rural areas. Synchronous CDMA systems with GEO satellite links are attractive to solve this problem, since they have wide service areas and are suitable for packet-based networks due to their statistically multiplexing effects. Additionally, the synchronous CDMA systems have more effective frequency utilization and power efficiency than asynchronous ones. In the synchronous CDMA systems, transmitted signals from fixed earth stations are required to achieve synchronization with each other. The broadband systems require extremely precise timing control as their bit rates increase. In this paper, we propose a synchronization method for a synchronous CDMA communication system using a GEO satellite and verify the feasibility of Gigachip rate synchronous CDMA systems.

In this paper, the design of a mobile satellite Internet access (MSIA) system and a mobile broadband satellite access system, called Mobile Broadband Interactive Satellite Multimedia Access Technology System (MoBISAT) are presented. MSIA system provides Internet service, broadcasting, and digital A/V service in both fixed and mobile environments using Ku-band geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellite. A Ku-band two-way active phased array antenna installed on top of the transportation vehicles can enable the transmission of signals to satellite as well as signal tracking and reception. The forward link and return link are a high speed Time Division Multiplex (TDM) and TDMA transmission media, respectively, both of which carry signaling and user traffic. The MoBISAT, which is a next generation mobile broadband satellite access system, provides both Ku-band satellite TV and Ka-band high-speed Internet to the passengers and crews for land, maritime, and air vehicles. This paper addresses the main technological solutions adopted for the implementation and test results for the MSIA system and the main design features of the MoBISAT system.

This paper presents an algorithm to analyze the stability and detect an upper-bound of every possible overload of a ΣΔ modulator for a set of input signals that are characterized by specified peak amplitudes and auto-correlations. The approach is to introduce a hyper cube in which all possible state vectors are recursively mapped into a subset of the hyper cube itself for the specified inputs and detect such a hyper cube by iteratively solving linear programming problems. Then the proposed algorithm may not identify every stable ΣΔ modulator but cannot evaluate any unstable ΣΔ modulator as a stable one. In numerical examples, two 1-bit ΣΔ modulators are analyzed, and it is revealed that a band-limitation of inputs to OSR 256 guarantees the rigorous stability even with an extension of input range to at least 240% of conventional range.

Common-mode (CM) current on a feed cable attached to printed circuit board (PCB), which is one of main source of undesired electromagnetic radiation problem, is investigated by experimental and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modeling. In this paper, frequency responses of CM current on PCB and feed cable are modeled and analyzed as an electromagnetic interference (EMI) antenna, which depends on the configuration of PCB with a wire cable. Several different configurations are prepared to demonstrate the effect of PCB dimension on resonance frequencies of CM current. In the results, EMI antenna in the frequency band around the first resonance frequency was comprised of the ground plane and cable. In order to explain the frequency response of CM current, two EMI antenna models are proposed and demonstrated. EMI antenna is comprised of the ground plane and cable, and the other EMI antenna is comprised of the trace on the ground plane. It is suggested that the result is one of basic consideration for the ground plane with cable that have high EMI problem and resonance frequency of CM current.

The current paper presents the design, analysis, and implementation of a low-profile resonant dc-to-dc converter that utilizes a coreless printed circuit board transformer as a substitute for the conventional magnetic core-based transformer. A prototype series resonant converter, fabricated in a 40 mm80 mm area with a 4 mm thickness while achieving the maximum efficiency of 85% at a 58 W output power, is used as an example to address the theoretical and practical issues involved in the design, analysis, and implementation of a PCB transformer-based low-profile dc-to-dc converter.