The reverse link bandwidth efficiency of a spectrally overlapped CDMA system with fast transmit power control is evaluated to find the optimum overlapping, where the bandwidth efficiency is defined as the maximum aggregate bit rate of all subsystems per unit bandwidth (bps/Hz). Single and multiple cell environments are considered. Besides the rectangular chip pulse, the impact of a pulse-shaping filter is discussed. It is found that the raised cosine spectrum pulse shaping helps to increase the bandwidth efficiency and strict pulse shaping filter problem can be avoided if a large number of subsystems are overlapped. It is also found that the optimum carrier spacing remains unchanged irrespective of the power delay profile shape of the multipath channel, whether multipath fading exists or not, and whether a single cell or multiple cell system is considered. However, the bandwidth efficiency strongly depends on them and the impacts of the related parameters are discussed.

We applied a Brillouin-OTDR, which is a distributed optical fiber strain sensor, to two actual concrete piles. The piles were made for use as highway foundations by on-site-pouring at construction sites and underwent load testing to ensure that their characteristics satisfied the required levels. Compressive strain caused by the load exerted on the piles was measured to an accuracy of 0.01% and a spatial resolution of 1 m. This measurement was obtained by embedding a strain-sensing optical fiber in the piles during construction. The results showed that there was good agreement between the measured strain and both the theoretical values and the values obtained with a conventional strain gauge based on electric resistance. Furthermore, the obtained strain distribution reflected the effects of friction between the pile surface and the ground. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the Brillouin-OTDR for this kind of testing and also as a means of obtaining detailed data on the strain in concrete piles.

Locating corner points from an edge detected image is very important in view of simplifying the post processing part of a system that utilizes a corner information. In this paper, we propose a robust geometrical approach for corner detection. Unlike classical corner detection methods, which idealize corners as junction points of two line segments, our approach considers the possibility of multiple line segments intersecting at a point. Moreover, junctions caused by two or more curved segments of different curvature are thought of as a corner point. The algorithm has been tested and proved competence with different types of images demonstrating its ability to detect and localize the corners in the image, though we found it to be best suited for images with relatively few curved segments. With the help of non-maximum response suppression technique our approach yields comparatively better result than any other method.

In this paper, we study system-level diagnosis under the comparison approach proposed by Maeng and Malek. Sengupta and Dahbura designed an O(n5) time diagnosis algorithm for identifying all faulty nodes in general graphs (n is the number of nodes in a system). We consider diagnosis on a butterfly network BF(k,r) and propose O(k2 n) time diagnosis algorithms for locating all faulty nodes in BF(k,r).

Low cost optical subscriber systems and effective operation are indispensable to the construction and maintenance of greatly expanded optical fiber networks. An optical fiber line monitoring system is essential for reducing maintenance costs and improving service reliability in optical access networks. To promote cost-effective optical fiber line operation, we propose an extended automatic optical fiber operations support system (AURORA) with a remotely installed fiber selector. We suggest a configuration for extended AURORA and design the dynamic range of the system. We confirmed that testing could be carried out on an extended optical network section of 10 km in length by using extended AURORA when the optical trunk line was less than 15 km. We also discuss the effect on the maintenance cost of optical fiber cables in access networks. We calculated the annual maintenance cost for periodic tests in actual operation areas, and confirmed that this cost could be reduced by 30% compared with that for a conventional system.

Optical disk systems have been used in a wide range of applications and the performance of these systems has been improving rapidly. The optical integration is one of the important technologies of the progress of the optical pickup head in the system. It can make the optical pickup head miniature, light sized, ease to assemble, cost reduced and reliable during long time operation. In this paper, at first, merits and features of the optical integration for optical disk systems are briefly reviewed. Then, our activities on the development of the various hybrid-integrated optical devices, "Laser Couplers" are reported. Especially, the most recent results on the "Two-wavelength-beam Laser Coupler," are described in detail. It has two-wavelength laser emission/detection functions and easily realizes an ultimate solution of the optical pickup head for the DVD/CD system, now being used in "PlayStaion2. " To simplify the structure and the fabrication of this device, a new monolithic-integrated two-wavelength laser diode, called a visible and infrared laser diode, has been developed, which can be easily fabricated using only two steps of metal organic chemical vapor deposition. The structures and characteristics of this device are reported. Lastly, other recent technologies of the optical integration, including monolithically integration, near field optics and so on, are reviewed.

A parallel file system is normally used to support excessive file requests from parallel applications in a cluster system, whereas prefetching is useful for improving the file system performance. This paper proposes dynamic file prefetching scheme based on file access patterns, named table-comparison prefetching policy, that is particularly suitable for parallel scientific applications and multimedia web services in a VIA-based parallel file system. VIA relieves the communication overhead of traditional communication protocols, such as TCP/IP. The proposed policy introduces a table-comparison method to predict data for prefetching. In addition, it includes an algorithm to determine whether and when prefetching is performed using the current available I/O bandwidth. Experimental results confirmed that the use of the proposed prefetching policy in a VIA-based parallel file system produced a higher file system performance for various file access patterns.

A new method of error concealment for MPEG videos, in which motion vectors are hidden in an MPEG bitstream as a watermark, is proposed in this paper. Several conventional methods conceal error regions by using motion vectors, which are re-estimated in a decoding process. These methods, however, have two problems: (1) The accuracy of a re-estimated motion vector is lower than that of an estimated motion vector in an encoding process. (2) A large amount of calculation is required to re-estimate motion vectors. The proposed method overcomes these problems by using hidden accurate motion vectors. That is, it hides several bits in each 88 DCT block of all frames and, simultaneously, inhibits the image degradation caused by hiding motion vectors. In addition, it has upward compatibility with a standard MPEG decoder and can be combined with conventional methods. Simulation results show that the accuracy of error concealment by the new method is higher than that of the conventional methods.

We propose a novel method for analysis of time-related neuronal activities. This method can be used for the detection of firing patterns in the presence of noise, which is inevitable in physiological experiments. This method is also useful for probability density estimation, because it enables precise information quantification from a small amount of data.

An electric filed sensor using Mach-Zehnder interferometers has been designed to operate more than 10 GHz. The velocity of optical wave on the waveguide is investigated to determine the electrode length, and the characteristics of frequency response are analyzed using the moment method to determine the sensor element length. The electrode length of 1 mm and the element length of 8 mm are settled by these investigations. An isotropic electric field sensor is constructed using three sensors. The minimum detectable electric field strength is 22 mV/m at frequency bandwidth of 100 Hz. This is about 100 times for the conventional electric field sensor using the similar element. The sensitivity deviation is within 3 dB when temperature changes from 0 degree to 40 degree. The deviation of directivity can be tuned within 1 dB to calibrate the sensitivity of the each element. The sensitivity degradation is within 6 dB up to 5 GHz and within 10 dB up to 10 GHz. This is almost agree with the calculated results. The sensor can measure almost the same waveform as the applied electric field pulse whose width is 6 ns and rise time is less than 2.5 ns.

We describe hybrid integration technologies that employ silica-based planar lightwave circuit (PLC) platforms, and report several high-performance optical components based on these technologies. First, we describe the requirements for optical integrated circuits. Then, we discuss the technologies used in hybrid integration, namely optical coupling between a semiconductor optical device and a silica waveguide, electrical signal transmission to the semiconductor optical device, and high quality optical signal processing. In addition, we describe optical integrated circuits developed for short- and long-haul networks. We realized these high-performance integrated components by combining appropriate hybrid integration technologies.

Using a full-vector finite element method (FEM) with curvilinear hybrid edge/nodal elements, a single-mode nature of index-guiding photonic crystal fibers, also called holey fibers (HFs), is accurately analyzed as a function of wavelength. The cladding effective index, which is very important design parameter for realizing a single-mode HF and is defined as the effective index of the infinite photonic crystal cladding if the core is absent, is also determined using the FEM. In traditional fiber theory, a normalized frequency, V, is often used to determine the number of guided modes in step-index fibers. In order to adapt the concept of V-parameter to HFs, the effective core radius, aeff, is determined using the actual numerical aperture given by the FEM. Furthermore, the group velocity dispersion of single-mode HFs is calculated as a function of their geometrical parameters, and the modal birefringence of HFs is numerically investigated.

Properly representation of the complexity of class structure will be useful in object oriented software developments. Although some class complexity metrics have been proposed, they have ignored directions of coupling relationships among methods and attributes, such as whether a method writes data onto an attribute or reads data from the attribute. In this paper, we use a directed graph model to represent such coupling relationships. Based on the directed graph model, we propose a metric of class structural complexity. The proposed metric satisfies necessary conditions of complexity metric suggested by Briand and others. The following fact is showed by experimental data of Java classes. While the proposed metric follows a conventional metric, the proposed metric can capture an aspect of class structural complexity which is lost by the conventional one.

All-optical switching operating at 1.55 µm band in fabricated GaInAsP directional couplers loaded with grating are reported experimentally. These switching operations were realized in spatially separated output ports. The devices are suitable for optical integrated circuits and would operate as all-optical routing switches in practical power level by use of optical Kerr effect and Bragg grating. Using the optical bistability in the device, latching operation for output signal can be realized in spatially separated output ports and the outputs from each port are complementary. Two all-optical gate operations, which are optical inverting operation and optically controlled switching in spatially separated output ports, are also demonstrated, where the signal and control lights have different wavelength.

A time-interleaved ADC system is an effective way to implement a high-sampling-rate ADC with relatively slow circuits. In the system, several channel ADCs operate at interleaved sampling times as if they were effectively a single ADC operating at a much higher sampling rate. Mismatches among channel ADCs degrade SNR and SFDR of the ADC system as a whole, and the effects of offset, gain and bandwidth mismatches as well as timing skew of the clocks distributed to the channels have been well investigated. This paper investigates the channel linearity mismatch effects in the time-interleaved ADC system, which are very important in practice but had not been investigated previously. We consider two cases: differential nonlinearity mismatch and integral nonlinearity mismatch cases. Our numerical simulation shows distinct features of such mismatch especially in frequency domain. The derived results can be useful for deriving calibration algorithms to compensate for the channel mismatch effects.

In this paper, we present an approximate analysis method for computing the call blocking probability and Erlang capacity of CDMA systems. The approximated results provide only a few percent difference from the exact values, while reducing the calculation complexity. For CDMA systems with 3 sectors, we also show that the system performances such as call blocking probability and Erlang capacity can be characterized just with two traffic parameters (the traffic load of the most loaded sector and the sum of traffic loads of the other remaining sectors) instead of three sector traffic loads especially when the required call blocking probability is given less than 2e-2, which makes the traffic engineers manage the system more easily.

This paper proposed an automated segmentation algorithm for MR brain images through the complementary use of T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and PD images. The proposed segmentation algorithm is composed of 3 steps. The first step involves the extraction of cerebrum images by placing a cerebrum mask over the three input images. In the second step, outstanding clusters that represent the inner tissues of the cerebrum are chosen from among the 3-dimensional (3D) clusters. The 3D clusters are determined by intersecting densely distributed parts of a 2D histogram in 3D space formed using three optimal scale images. The optimal scale image results from applying scale-space filtering to each 2D histogram and a searching graph structure. As a result, the optimal scale image can accurately describe the shape of the densely distributed pixel parts in the 2D histogram. In the final step, the cerebrum images are segmented by the FCM (Fuzzy c-means) algorithm using the outstanding cluster center value as the initial center value. The ability of the proposed segmentation algorithm to calculate the cluster center value accurately then compensates for the current limitation of the FCM algorithm, which is unduly restricted by the initial center value used. In addition, the proposed algorithm, which includes a multi spectral analysis, can achieve better segmentation results than a single spectral analysis.

Due to large capacitance, high access ratio and wide access bitwidth, frame memory is one of the most energy consuming devices in modern video encoders. This paper proposes a new architectural technique to reduce energy dissipation of frame memory through adaptive bitwith compression. Unlike related approaches, the technique utilizes the fixed order of memory accesses and data correlation of video sequences, by dynamically adjusting the memory bitwidth to the number of bits changed per pixel. Instead of treating the data bits independently, we group the most significant bits together, activating the corresponding group of bit-lines adaptively to data variation. The approach is not restricted to the specific bit-patterns nor depends on the storage phase. It works equally well on read and write accesses, as well as during precharging. Simulations show that using this method we can reduce the total energy consumption of the frame memory cell array by 20% without affecting the picture quality. The implementation scheme is simple yet compact.

The electronically steerable passive array radiator (ESPAR) antenna is one kind of the parasitic elements based single-port output antennas with several variable reactances. It performs analog aerial beamforming and none of the signals on its passive elements can be observed. This fact and one that is more important--the nonlinear dependence of the output of the antenna from adjustable reactances--makes the problem substantially new and not resolvable by means of conventional adaptive array beamforming techniques. A novel approach based on stochastic approximation theory is proposed for the adaptive beamforming of the ESPAR antenna as a nonlinear spatial filter by variable parameters, thus forming both beam and nulls. Two learning rate schedule were examined about output SINR, stability, convergence, misadjustment, noise effect, bias term, etc., and the optimal one was proposed. Further development was traced. Our theoretic study, simulation results and performance analysis show that the ESPAR antenna can be controlled effectively, has strong potential for use in mobile terminals and seems to be very perspective.

In this paper, we discuss noise reduction approaches to improving range images using a nonlinear 2D Kalman filter. First, we propose the nonlinear 2D Kalman filter, which can reduce noise in the range image using an estimated edge vector and a nonlinear function that does not distort sharp edges. Second, we evaluate reduction of the additive noise in a test range image using the mean square error (MSE). Third, we discuss the detection rate and the number of false detections in the estimated range image. Fourth, a simulation example demonstrating the performance of the proposed 2D Kalman filter for a real range image having abrupt changes is presented. Finally, simulation results are presented which show that the estimated image of the nonlinear 2D Kalman filter is effective in reducing the amount of noise, while causing minimal smoothing of the abrupt changes.