We compared two edge-blending methods for multi-projection displays, elliptic and rectangular blending, by simulating three common situations: (1) an inaccurately estimated calibration parameter, (2) a worn projector lamp, and (3) a shifted viewpoint. We used a two-level-of-detail display including a high-gain rear-projection screen in the simulation to demonstrate an extreme case. The comparisons showed how strongly inaccurate elements affect a composite besides affecting the appearance itself. A subjective assessment was also carried out to obtain the evaluations of actual users. The simulation results showed that in many cases elliptic blending is more effective than rectangular blending.

Connectedness oriented communication denotes a mode of communication in which the activities of communication are more important than the contents of communication. It is targeted at maintaining and enhancing human social relationships. As our lifestyles and societies are shifting along with the progress of Information Technology, communication media that are connectedness oriented will play an important role. In this paper we propose a media called FaintPop, which is an example of such new media that are suitable for connectedness oriented communication. It is a communication media designed for a community, with which the sense of connectedness can be shared among members. Furthermore, it provides a general overview of the communication activities occurring in the community. We discuss several principles and points in designing the media, especially about the interaction of the users. Results and findings from the experiment using the media are reported.

A data stream is a massive unbounded sequence of data elements continuously generated at a rapid rate. Consequently, the knowledge embedded in a data stream is likely to be changed as time goes by. However, most of mining algorithms or frequency approximation algorithms for a data stream are not able to extract the recent change of information in a data stream adaptively. This is because the obsolete information of old transactions which may be no longer useful or possibly invalid at present is regarded as important as that of recent transactions. This paper proposes an information decay method for finding recent frequent itemsets in a data stream. The effect of old transactions on the mining result of a data steam is gradually diminished as time goes by. Furthermore, the decay rate of information can be flexibly adjusted, which enables a user to define the desired life-time of the information of a transaction in a data stream.

This paper addresses issues regarding to the development of teleconferencing support collaboration focusing on the realistic sensation domain. It argues that the gaze communications are the important mechanisms to enable visual channel and social presence in human-human communications. We propose a new aspect to establish multiple eye contacts and community awareness in multiparty videoconference (VC). The participants can aware of being recognized from any remote sites while they are talking with each other. Community awareness means the ability to aware of group communication in the videoconference. The participant can recognize of who is talking with whom and any communicative groups in a conference. An intelligent image arrangement through a unique position of camera is built and simulated. The systematic placement of images serves the gaze communications by utilizing the characteristic of gaze direction and image's position. The experimental results show that the proposed approach has the significant improvement in the interpersonal communication compared with the conventional VC system.

In story-based communication, where a message is conveyed in story form, it is important to embody the story with expressive materials. However, it is quite difficult for users to create rich multimedia contents using multimedia editing tools. This paper proposes a web-based multimedia environment, SPOC (Stream-oriented Public Opinion Channel), aiming at helping non-skillful people to convert their stories into TV-like programs very easily. The system can produce a digital camera work for graphics and video clips as well as generate an agent animation automatically according to a narration text. Findings in evaluation experiments showed that SPOC is easy-to-use and easy-to-learn for novice users. Given a short instruction, the subjects not only mastered the operations of the software, but also succeeded in creating highly original programs. In subjective evaluation, the subjects answered that they enjoyed using the software without feeling difficulty. These results suggest that this system reduces user's cost in making a program, and encourages communication in a network community.

The relative window method provides quantitative crosstalk delay degradation for the post-layout timing analysis in deep sub-micron VLSI design. However, to the best of our knowledge, the relative window method has not been applied to the crosstalk minimization in gridded channel routing problem. Most conventional crosstalk optimizers only use the coupling length to estimate the crosstalk. In this paper, we present a post-layout timing driven crosstalk optimizer based on the relative window method. According to the relative signal arrival time and the coupling length, we define a delay degradation graph to describe the crosstalks between nets in a routing solution. Our optimization goal is to maximize the time slack by iteratively improving the delay degradation graph without increasing the channel height. Benchmark data consistently show that our post-layout timing driven crosstalk optimizer can further improve the routing solution obtained by a conventional crosstalk optimizer.

Management of diet and exercise is especially significant in preventing "lifestyle-related diseases" for patients and subclinical cases. This paper introduces a questionnaire survey on diabetic regimens that targets 38 professional users such as physicians and nurses at a diabetic clinic. Based on the results of the questionnaire survey, a design concept for a wearable healthcare support system has been developed to provide patients with timely instruction in accordance with their current context. On the basis of this design concept, we developed a prototype of a wearable healthcare support system called "LifeMinder". "LifeMinder" is composed of a wristwatch-shaped wearable sensor module and a personal digital assistant (PDA). The sensor module measures 3-axis acceleration, pulse rate, galvanic skin reflex (GSR), and skin temperature. The PDA receives this data via BluetoothTM and recognizes the patient's general behavior such as "walking" or "eating". The recognition of these behaviors reduces the patient's mental and physical burden in daily healthcare and assists in support of medical treatment.

As one of control command input methods for functional electrical stimulation (FES) system, using the head movements was considered in this paper. In order to detect the head movements, we designed a prototype control command input device using acceleration sensors and verified its validity in experiments. The experimental results showed that the head movements in the lateral flexion and in the flexion/extension were highly detected and separated by the acceleration sensors.

In this paper, we perform some experiments to show that the quantization noise caused by low-bit-rate speech coding can be characterized as a white noise process. Then, the signal-to-quantization noise ratio of the decoded speech for a given bit-rate is estimated by observing the perceptual speech quality equivalent to the artificially generated noisy speech obtained by adding a white Gaussian noise source. This information is incorporated into the parameter tuning of a noise-robust compensation algorithm for speech recognition so that the compensation algorithm can be performed better under a range of the estimated SNRs. Finally, we apply the compensation algorithm to a connected digit string recognition system that utilizes speech signals decoded by the GSM adaptive multi-rate (AMR) speech coder. It is shown that the noise-robust compensation algorithm reduces word error rates by 15% or more at low bit-rate modes of the AMR speech coder.

The unpredictable behavior of cache memory makes it difficult to statically analyze the worst-case performance of real-time systems. This problem is further exacerbated in the case of preemptive multitask systems because of inter-task cache interference, called Cache-Related Preemption Delay (CRPD). This paper proposes an approach to analyzing the tight upper bound on CRPD which a task might impose on lower-priority tasks. Our method finds the program execution path which requires the maximum number of cache blocks using an integer linear programming technique. Experimental results show that our approach provides up to 69% tighter bounds on CRPD than a conservative approach.

In this paper, the effects of visual information on associated auditory information were investigated when presented simultaneously under dynamic conditions on a wide screen. Experiments of an auditory-visual stimulus presentation using a computer graphics movie of a moving patrol car and its siren sound, which were combined in various locations, were performed in 19 subjects. The experimental results showed the following: the visual stimulus at the beginning of the presentation captured the sound image stronger than that at the end (i.e., beginning effect), the sound image separated from the visual image even when both stimulus locations were exactly at the same place and then when both stimuli moved in opposite directions from each other, the visual stimulus tended to capture the sound image stronger in the peripheral visual field than in the central visual field, and the visual stimulus moving toward the sound source captured the sound image stronger than that moving away from the sound source.

This paper describes an all-digital DLL (Delay Locked Loop) circuit with a high phase resolution. The proposed architecture is based on three-stage phase tuning blocks for coarse, fine and ultra fine phase control. Each block has a phase detector, a phase selection block and a delay line, respectively. It was simulated in a 0.35 µm CMOS technology under 3.3 V power supply. The simulation result shows the maximum phase error can be reduced to 13-42 ps with the operating range of 250 MHz to 800 MHz.

In this paper, we propose a new technique to generate virtual views of three-dimensional (3D) models. The technique is implemented into our facial pose transformation system, which takes only one frontal image and transforms it into virtual views. In our system, to overcome the complex of 3D geometric model, Image Based Rendering based algorithm and mesh-based methods are applied. We also introduce our new Invertible Meshwarp Algorithm, which is developed based on Two-pass Meshwarp Algorithm. Firstly, in the system, for any given person, we take a frontal face image to compose a frontal mesh for it. The standard mesh set of a specific person is created for several face sides; front, half left, half right, left and right side. The other meshes are then automatically generated based on the standard mesh set and the frontal mesh. Continually, we use Invertible Meshwarp Algorithm, which improvably solves the overlap or inversion of neighbor vertices of those created meshes. This step will finalize the generation of different views or the virtual looks of the frontal face image. We then evaluate our transformation system performance by comparing the normalized distance between several feature points in the real and transformed face images. The system is built based on C/C++ language and our result shows that the average error in the feature location is about 7% of the distance from the center of both eyes to the center of a mouth between the actual and transformed face images.

We present a new method in multiresolution rendering of a complex object. Our method uses viewer-centered features including the silhouette in generating multiresolution model. Because the silhouette of an object depends on the position of the viewer, the silhouette has difficulties in real-time generation. We propose the AGSphere for real-time management of the silhouette. The AGSphere easily identifies silhouette parts and manages it in multiresolution manner. The primary applicable feature of the AGSphere is the silhouette from the viewer, but we can also use the AGSphere for other directional features like light silhouette. In this paper, we show experimental results for the silhouette either from the viewer or the light. The efficiency of the proposed method is compared with other methods. We also propose new texture map generation method to use with the multiresolution geometry. Generated texture map has valid mapping function for the multiresolution geometry minimizing texture distortions.

Recently, the small-world network model has been popular to describe a wide range of networks such as human social relations and networks formed by biological entities. The network model achieves a small diameter with relatively few links as measured by the ratio of clustering coefficient and the number of links. It is quite natural to consider email communication similar to social network patterns. Quite surprisingly, we find from our empirical study that local email networks follow a different type of network model that falls into the category of scale-free network. We propose new network models to describe such communication structure.

Commercial breaks are often placed at the climax of stories in recent TV programs in Japan, which may cause some serious effects on audiences, especially children, since this practice disturbs the concentrations. The experiment measured the psycho-physiological state of four children before and after commercials. The results showed that the next peak of attention is delayed by distracting the attention.

This paper presents a methodology for optimizing the layout of on-chip spiral inductors using structural parameters and design frequency in a response surface method. The proposed method uses scattering parameters (S-parameter) to express inductor characteristics, and hence is independent of spiral geometries and equivalent circuit models. The procedure of inductor optimization is described, and a design example is presented.

An RF CMOS active inductor with a novel loss compensation circuit network is proposed. Performance of this active inductor can be improved by adding a novel network, which simultaneously reduces parallel and series losses. Consequently, this technique not only increases Q value, inductance, and operating frequency, but also reduces power consumption and circuit complexity. Simulation results show that better performance indices can be achieved, such as minimum total equivalent loss of 1 mΩ, maximum Q value about 3E5, and inductance value from 20 nH to 45 nH in the RF range of 0.6 GHz to 1.6 GHz. Power dissipation is around 1.76 mW under 2.5 V dc supply voltage.

This paper presents a network architecture with a dual interface IP handoff technique that allows smooth node mobility without using any intermediate proxy. The proposed architecture is suitable for low bit-rate time sensitive real time applications, where payload tends to be short and packet header overhead is particularly significant. Connections are established as per permanent addresses of the nodes but are carried on by the IP layer according to the temporary addresses by address translation within the end hosts. The mapping information is maintained by database servers, which can be placed in the Internet in a distributed manner. We describe the architecture and show its mobile capabilities by prototype implementation and performance evaluation. Furthermore a dual-interface handoff suitable to the proposed architecture is also introduced. Preliminary results show that the proposed architecture has significantly low overheads. It is compatible with the existing infrastructure and works fine in both IPv4 and IPv6 environments. Analysis also shows that with dual-interface handoff it is possible to achieve seamless handoff without any packet loss by exploiting overlapping coverage area and speed of the mobile node. Handoff latency is reduced significantly as compare to MIPv6. We believe that with more powerful network interface card drivers our concept of dual interface handoff can be realized.

Compressed video bitstream is sensitive to errors that may degrade the reconstructed images severely even the bit error rate is small. One approach to combat the impact of error is error concealment at the decoder without increasing the bit rate and changing the encoder. We propose motion vector based error concealment algorithms to recover the motion vector per pixel instead of that per block according to the relation of neighboring motion vectors. The displacement per pixel can be estimated more accurately by using the tendency of neighboring motion vectors. Besides, we use not only the relation among motion vectors, but also the pixels. The pixels of the error block are divided into different parts according to their consistency with neighboring blocks and the displacement at each pixel of these parts is interpolated by relative motion vectors. From simulation results, the proposed motion vector based methods provide better reconstruction quality for damaged images than other methods.