The one-sample locally optimum rank detector test statistics for composite signals in multiplicative and signal-dependent noise are obtained. Since the one-sample locally optimum rank detector makes use of the sign statistics of observations as well as the rank statistics, both 'even' and 'odd' score functions have to be considered. Although the one-sample locally optimum rank detector requires two score functions while the two-sample detector requires only one score function, the one-sample detector requires fewer calculations since it has to rank fewer observations.

In this paper, three algorithms are proposed for rate maximization (RM) of transmitted data in multichannel (MC) communications, subject to joint constraints on available energy budget and tolerable degradation of service (DOS). Altogether referred to as the RM algorithms, they consist of the EADRM, the DADRM, and the fDADRM algorithms. Based on the rate-distortion optimization theory, closed-form expressions for optimally distributing the energy (for EADRM) or DOS (for DADRM and fDADRM ) among the subchannels (SC's) are derived, when the bit allocation is pre-specified. The specification of bit allocations is achieved by the use of the so-called eligible bit allocation matrix (EBAM), which is a function of the total data rate and the number of SC's. A greedy approach is adopted, where the total data rate is kept on raising until the relevant constraints can no longer be satisfied. While all three RM algorithms essentially generate identical maximum data rates, the fDADRM algorithm is much faster than the other two in computation. As compared to the result achievable by a single-channel communication scheme, the RM algorithms produce a much higher data rate for spectrally shaped channels.

We present the effects of N2O plasma treatment for hot carrier reliability and gate oxide stability in excimer-laser annealed poly-Si TFTs. N2O plasma treatment between SiO2 and poly-Si suppresses both the reduction in mobility caused by hot carrier stress and the Vth shift caused by gate bias stress. The results of XPS spectra and the energy distribution of the trap state density of stressed TFTs show that the introduction of Si-N bonds plays an important role in poly-Si TFT reliability.

This paper presents circuit models for the description of the frequency-dependent behavior of coils for horizontal deflection in CRTs. This enables CRT circuit designers to use circuit simulation programs to predict the high-frequency behavior of the interaction between the deflection coils and the drive circuit. An overview is given of the major phenomena that occur in CRT deflection coils at various frequencies. Models are presented for the dissipative, the capacitive, and the resonant behavior in successive frequency intervals. With these models, phenomena such as power dissipation and ringing can not only be related to design parameters, but can also be calculated from impedance characteristics which are relatively easy to measure.

Intelligent transport systems (ITS) are promising systems to give excellent solutions for many problems that we face in transport today. Not only road-to-vehicle communications but also inter-vehicle communications in ITS are expected to become popular in the future. On the other hand, an intra-vehicle communication network should be supported by multimedia information according to the explosive expansion of the Internet use and the like. An inexpensive transmission medium and transceiver becomes indispensable in such in-vehicle local area network (LAN) for multimedia information as these must handle full-motion video signals, without any electromagnetic interference. We have proposed on-board network architecture based on optical P1394b to realize effective inter-vehicle communications and enable all equipment which freely add and remove to the intra-vehicle network. And according to the proposed architecture, we have developed a 500-Mbit/s low-cost optical transceiver for the intra- and inter-vehicle communication network using a commercially available plastic clad fiber. An LD for the compact disk drive and a large area photodiode were adopted as low-cost and high-speed optical devices, and a logic direct driving type simple circuit having temperature compensation function was developed. Simple assembly technologies such as plastic molding and optical element press-fitting were also developed for mounting to reduce assembly cost. The total cost of the fabricated optical transceiver can be reduced less than 2/3, comparing with that of conventional one. We have performed transmission experiments and vibration tests using our optical transceivers that are mounted in on-board elements and connected to the on-board network, and have confirmed these stable operations. Experimental results show our proposed architecture and fabricated optical transceiver can play a key role in the intra- and inter-vehicle communication network.

We have successfully produced laterally-grown grains on large (300 350 mm) glass substrates by means of a newly developed excimer laser crystallization system that features a high-precision mask stage and an auto-focusing system. The original grains were produced with a steep beam edge and their lateral growth was extended by repeated irradiation and translation. TFTs fabricated with these extended grains were found to have mobilities that remained almost constant at 270 cm2/Vs (n-ch. TFTs) and 230 cm2/Vs (p-ch. TFTs) over a wide range of laser fluence (400-600 mJ/cm2).

Adaptive prediction iterative channel estimation is presented for combined antenna diversity and coherent rake reception of direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) signals. Its first stage uses pilot-aided adaptive prediction channel estimation, while the succeeding iteration stages use decision feedback and moving average filtering for channel re-estimation. The bit error rate (BER) performance of DSSS signal computer simulations evaluate transmission in a frequency selective Rayleigh fading channel. It is found that the adaptive prediction iterative channel estimation is superior to the non adaptive iterative channel estimation using the conventional weighted multi-slot averaging (WMSA) filtering at the first iteration stage, particularly in a fast fading channel.

We describe in this paper our experience of developing a large-scale, highly distributed multi-agent system using wireless-networked sensors. We provide solutions to the problems of localization (position estimation) and dynamic, real-time mobile object tracking, which we call PET problems for short, using wireless sensor networks. We propose system architectures and a set of distributed algorithms for organizing and scheduling cooperative computation in distributed environments, as well as distributed algorithms for localization and real-time object tracking. Based on these distributed algorithms, we develop and implement a hardware system and software simulator for the PET problems. Finally, we present some experimental results on distance measurement accuracy using radio signal strengths of the wireless sensors and discuss future work.

Among ITS applications, it is very important to acquire detailed statistics of traffic flows. For that purpose, vision sensors have an advantage because of their rich information compared to such spot sensors such as loop detectors or supersonic wave sensors. However, for many years, vehicle tracking in traffic images has suffered from the problems of occlusion effect and illumination effect. In order to resolve occlusion problems, we have been proposing the Spatio-Temporal Markov Random Field model(S-T MRF) for segmentation of Spatio-Temporal images. This S-T MRF model optimizes the segmentation boundaries of occluded vehicles and their motion vectors simultaneously by referring to textures and segment labeling correlations along the temporal axis as well as the spatial axis. Consequently, S-T MRF has been proven to be successful for vehicle tracking even against severe occlusions found in low-angle traffic images with complicated motions, such at highway junctions. In addition, in this paper, we define a method for obtaining illumination-invariant images by estimating MRF energy among neighbor pixel intensities. These illumination-invariant images are very stable even when sudden variations in illumination or shading effect are occurred in the original images. We then succeeded in seamlessly integrating the method for MRF energy images into our S-T MRF model. Thus, vehicle tracking was performed successfully by S-T MRF, even against sudden variations in illumination and against shading effects . Finally, in order to verify the effectiveness of our tracking algorithm based on the S-T MRF for practical uses, we developed an automated system for acquiring traffic statistics out of a flow of traffic images. This system has been operating continuously for ten months, and thus effectiveness of the tracking algorithm based on S-T MRF model was proven.

This paper presents a method of extracting car license plates captured from the arbitrary directions by using symmetry features. The generalized symmetry transform (GST) produces continuous features of symmetry between two points by combining locality constraint and reflectional symmetry, but its time complexity of GST is increased by the second power of the radius of a searching window. To achieve considerable reduction of this time complexity, we propose a scan line based GST (SLGST) which calculates the symmetry between a pair of edge pixels along the scan lines. Instead of calculating the global symmetry of a license plate, we assign the symmetry contribution acquired from SLGST to the corner point estimated from two edge points and their gradient orientations. The right angle tuned SLGST (RATSLGST) is newly proposed to detect the right angle corners more effectively. Image normalization by image warping is adopted to make such segmentation of license plate and later identification much easier. We also adopt the verifier that evaluates a candidate license plate to enhance extraction rate. Our experiments show that the proposed method for extracting perspectively distorted license plates is fairly reliable.

The two-sample locally optimum rank detector test statistics for composite signals in additive, multiplicative, and signal-dependent noise are obtained in this letter. Compared with the structure of the one-sample locally optimum rank detector, that of the two-sample locally optimum rank detector is shown to be simpler, although it needs more computations. It is known that there is a trade-off of computational complexity and structural simplicity between the one- and two-sample detectors.

In transmitter diversity, the received signal is the superposition of signals transmitted from transmitter antennas. Thus, the separation of channel characteristics corresponding to each transmitter antennas from these signals is very important. The conventional channel estimation scheme tends to show higher computational complexity for larger channel delay profile. To reduce this computational complexity, significant-tap-catching method has been proposed. However, there is still a burden of complexity for data transmission mode. Reference [14] has shown how to reduce the complexity for data transmission mode in system with constant modulus modulation. However, this method can't reduce the complexity required for multi-level signals such as QAM. In this paper, we propose an efficient channel estimation scheme for OFDM systems with transmitter diversity using space-time trellis coding. The computational complexity of the proposed scheme is independent of channel delay profile. Also, compared with the conventional scheme, the complexity of the proposed scheme is not related to modulation methods including multi-level signals such as QAM. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by computer simulation in various multipath fading environments.

In this paper, we study a low profile top loaded monopole antenna. By changing the number, thickness, position and shape of post(s), the input and radiation characteristic due to parameters of matching post(s) are investigated. The low profile top loaded monopole antenna (TLMA) is known as a suitable way for antenna's miniaturization. But it is also reported that the parameters of matching post influence the input and radiation characteristic greatly. The FDTD method is well suit for use in analyzing both the plate and wire structure. And to improve the calculation effect efficiency, the non-uniform mesh FDTD algorithm is used. From the measurement and simulation results, we propose the most suitable parameters of matching structure for low profile top loaded monopole antenna.

This paper proposes a new blind adaptive algorithm for computing the weight vector of an antenna array system. The new technique utilizes a Generalized On-Off algorithm to obtain the weight vector from the pilot channel of IS2000 1X system, of which the processing gain can be controlled arbitrarily. The proposed algorithm generates a suboptimal weight vector maximizing the SINR (signal to interference plus noise ratio) with a linear computational load. Based on the analysis obtained from various simulations, it is observed that the proposed algorithm is suitable for the practical IS2000 1X mobile communication environments.

The present study introduces the adaptive BPF to the BPSK coherent detection system and the characteristic of the resulting system is investigated.

Finite-state vector quantization (FSVQ) is a well-known block encoding technique for digital image compression at low bit rate application. In this paper, an improved feature map finite-state vector quantization (IFMFSVQ) algorithm using three-sided side-match prediction is proposed for image coding. The new three-sided side-match improves the prediction quality of input blocks. Precoded blocks are used to alleviate the error propagation of side-match. An edge threshold is used to classify the blocks into nonedge or edge blocks to improve bit rate performance. Furthermore, an adaptive method is also obtained. Experimental results reveal that the new IFMFSVQ reduces bit rate significantly maintaining the same subjective quality, as compared to the basic FMFSVQ method.

DS-CDMA provides a flexible support for the low-to-high bit rate of multimedia services upon a specific user's request. A simple capacity expression is derived for a power-controlled reverse link of orthogonal multi-code DS-CDMA with multiple connections. It is found that an orthogonal multi-code user having multiple connections is equivalent to a single connection user, but with a spreading factor reduced by a factor of the total number of parallel codes and a required signal energy per symbol-to-interference plus noise power spectrum density ratio which is the average taken over multiple connections. Furthermore, the use of antenna diversity is found equivalent to the use of higher spreading factor increased by a factor of the number of antennas.

It is well known that some of urban man-made noises can be characterized by a wideband impulsive noise (pure impulsive noise). The presence of this pure impulsive noise may significantly degrade the wireless digital transmission performance. As the data rate becomes higher and the radio bandwidth becomes wider, the performance degradation due to pure impulsive interference may become larger. In this paper, the DS-CDMA transmission performance in the presence of pure impulsive interference is theoretically analyzed. First, the BER expressions are derived for DS-CDMA with antenna diversity and Rake combining in a frequency selective fading channel. Then, the numerical computation based on Monte-Carlo method is performed to evaluate the BER performance. Two types of error floor are observed: one is due to impulsive interference and the other due to the multi access interference (MAI). It is found that the error floor due to impulsive interference becomes larger as the area of impulse and the error floor is linearly proportional to the impulse occurrence rate. Furthermore, it is found that the antenna diversity and Rake combining do not help to reduce the error floor caused by impulsive interference and that the influence of impulsive interference can be negligible when the channel is limited by the MAI (i.e., large number of users are in communication).

To design a high-speed m-bit parallel inversion circuit over GF(2m), we study two variations for the repetition-operation of the numerical formula, AB2, in employing square-first and multiply-first type operations. From the proposed two variations, we propose four inversion architectures, adopting the multiplier and square in [10], as follows: simple duplication semi-systolic architecture for multiply-first inversion circuit (MFIC), m-bit parallel semi-systolic architecture for MFIC, simple duplication semi-systolic architecture for square-first inversion circuit (SFIC), and simplified m-bit parallel semi-systolic architecture for SFIC. Among them, performance of the simplified m-bit parallel semi-systolic architecture for SFIC is recommended for a high-speed applications to get a maximum throughput in the sense of small hardware-complexity, and low latency. When we implement the simplified 8-bit parallel semi-systolic architecture for SFIC over GF(28) by using 0.25 µm CMOS library, necessary are 2495 logic-gates and 1848 latches, and the latency is 56 and the estimated clock-rate is 580 MHz at 100% throughput.

Space-time turbo codes have both advantages of space-time codes and turbo codes, and the space-time turbo code proposed by Su and Geraniotis is known to achieve full coding rate and full antenna diversity. This paper presents some improvements of their space-time turbo code in a two-antenna configuration. We first propose a new condition for full antenna diversity which imposes less constraints on the interleaver. Next, by applying a method used to improve turbo trellis-coded modulation to the space-time turbo code, we propose a new decoding algorithm which utilizes more precise estimates on extrinsic information. Simulation results show that the proposed condition assures full antenna diversity and the new decoding algorithm provides a better performance than that of Su and Geraniotis'.