Recent investigations using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of human speech organs have opened up new avenues of research. Visualization of the speech production system provides abundant information on the physiological and acoustic realization of human speech. This article summarizes the current status of MRI applications with respect to speech research as well as our own experience of discovery and re-evaluation of acoustic events emanating from the vocal tract and physiological mechanisms.

In this paper, general definitions of collusion secure codes are shown. Previously defined codes such as frameproof code, secure frameproof code, identifiable parent property code, totally c-secure code, traceability code, and (c,g/s)-secure code are redefined under various marking assumptions which are suitable for most of the fingerprinting systems. Then, new relationships among the combined notions of codes and the marking assumptions are revealed. Some (non)existence results are also shown.

In this paper, we derive expressions for the bit error probability of QPSK/OFDM on frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels. In the OFDM system, ICI (interchannel interference) caused by Doppler spread of the channel degrades the error performance of the system and introduces the error floor even for coherent detection. Analysis results show that the error performance of QPSK/OFDM can be degraded as the normalized maximum Doppler frequency fD /Bsub is increased where fD is the maximum Doppler frequency and Bsub is the subchannel bandwidth. Computer simulations confirm the theoretical analysis results for BPSK and QPSK signals.

The complex dielectric image Green's function for metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) technology is proposed in this paper through dielectric image method. Then the Epsilon algorithm for Pade approximation is used to accelerate the convergence of the infinite series summation resulted from the complex dielectric image Green's function. Because of the complex dielectric permittivity of semiconducting substrate, the real and imaginary part of the resulted Green's function is accelerated by Epsilon algorithm, respectively. Combined with the complex dielectric image Green's function, the frequency-dependent capacitance and conductance of the transmission lines and interconnects based on MIS technology are investigated through the method of moments (MoM). The computational results of our method for 2-D and 3-D extraction examples are well agreement with experimental data gained from chip measurement and other methods such as full-wave analysis and FastCap.

Illegal distribution of signed documents can be considered as one of serious problems of digital signatures. In this paper, to solve the problem, we propose three protocols concerning signature schemes. These schemes achieve not only traceability of an illegal user but also universal verifiability. The first scheme is a basic scheme which can trace an illegal receiver, and the generation and tracing of a signed document are simple and efficient. However, in this scheme, it is assumed that a signer is honest. The second scheme gives another tracing method which does not always assume that a signer is honest. Furthermore, in the method, an illegal user can be traced by an authority itself, hence, it is efficient in terms of communication costs. However, in this scheme it is assumed that there exists only a legal verification algorithm. Thus, in general, this scheme cannot trace a modified signed document which is accepted by a modified verification algorithm. The third one is a scheme which requires no trusted signer and allows a modified verification algorithm. It can trace an illegal receiver or even a signer in such a situation. All of our schemes are constructed by simple combinations of standard signature schemes, consequently, one can flexibly choose suitable building blocks for satisfying requirements for a system.

Slant correction is a preprocessing technique to improve segmentation and recognition accuracy for handwritten word recognition. All conventional slant correction techniques were performed by the estimation of the average slant angle and the shear transformation. In this paper, a nonuniform slant correction technique for handwritten word recognition is proposed where the slant correction problem is formulated as a global optimal estimation problem of the sequence of local slant angles. The optimal estimation is performed by a dynamic programming based algorithm. From experimental results it was shown that the present technique outperforms conventional uniform slant correction techniques.

The concepts of M-convexity and L-convexity, introduced by Murota (1996, 1998) for functions on the integer lattice, extract combinatorial structures in well-solved nonlinear combinatorial optimization problems. These concepts are extended to polyhedral convex functions and quadratic functions on the real space by Murota-Shioura (2000, 2001). In this paper, we consider a further extension to general convex functions. The main aim of this paper is to provide rigorous proofs for fundamental properties of general M-convex and L-convex functions.

To examine the computational complexity of cryptographic primitives such as the discrete logarithm problem, the factoring problem and the Diffie-Hellman problem, we define a new problem called square-root exponent, which is a problem to compute a value whose discrete logarithm is a square root of the discrete logarithm of a given value. We analyze reduction between the discrete logarithm problem modulo a prime and the factoring problem through the square-root exponent. We also examine reductions among the computational version and the decisional version of the square-root exponent and the Diffie-Hellman problem and show that the gap between the computational square-root exponent and the decisional square-root exponent partially overlaps with the gap between the computational Diffie-Hellman and the decisional Diffie-Hellman under some condition.

An efficient architecture for a FPGA symmetry FIR filter is proposed that employs 2-bit parallel-distributed arithmetic (2-bit PDA). The partial product is pre-calculated and saved into the distributed ROM. This eliminates the large amount of logic needed to compute multiplication results. The proposed architecture consumes less area and offers higher speed operation because the multiplier is omitted.

Image rectification is a method of aligning epipolar lines of image pairs taken from widely variant viewpoints. Using the rectified images, we can easily obtain corresponding points. This paper presents a rectification method for object segmentation. Using the rectified image pairs obtained with the proposed method, we are able to find the reliable disparity and estimate the 3D depth of the pixel that is effective in the object segmentation.

NMAC is a function for message authentication based on cryptographic hash functions such as SHA. It is shown to be a secure message authentication code if its compression function with fixed input length is a secure message authentication code and its iterated hash function with variable input length constructed with the compression function is weakly collision resistant. In this article, two results are shown on the strength of the weak collision resistance of the iterated hash function in NMAC. First, it is shown that the weak collision resistance of the iterated hash function in NMAC is not implied by the pseudorandomness of its compression function even if the MD-strengthening is assumed. Second, the weak collision resistance of the iterated hash function in NMAC implies the collision resistance of its compression function if the compression function is pseudorandom.

A random number generator composed of single electron devices is presented. Due to stochastic behavior of electron tunneling process, single electron devices have intrinsic randomness. Using its randomness, a true random number generator can be implemented. Although fluctuation of device parameters degrades the performance of the proposed circuit, we show that the adjustment of the bias voltages can compensate the fluctuation.

Authentication codes (A-codes, for short) are considered as important building blocks for constructing unconditionally secure authentication schemes. Since in the conventional A-codes, two communicating parties, transmitter and receiver, utilized a common secret key, and such A-codes do not provide non-repudiation. With the aim of enhancing with non-repudiation property, Simmons introduced A2-codes. Later, Johansson formally defined an improved version of A2-codes called, the A3-codes. Unlike A2-codes, A3-codes do not require an arbiter to be fully trusted. In this paper, we clarify the security definition of A3-codes which may be misdefined. We show a concrete attack against an A3-code and conclude that concrete constructions of A3-codes implicitly assumes a trusted arbiter. We also show that there is no significant difference between A2-codes and A3-codes in a practical sense and further argue that it is impossible to construct an "ideal" A3-codes, that is, without any trusted arbiter. Finally, we introduce a novel model of asymmetric A-codes with an arbiter but do not have to be fully trusted, and also show a concrete construction of the asymmetric A-codes for the model. Since our proposed A-code does not require fully trusted arbiters, it is more secure than A2-codes or A3-codes.

This paper proposes the constraint availability and bandwidth shortest path (CABSP) selection algorithm and the extension of the adaptive modulation scheme to the CABSP (CABSP-AM) selection algorithm in the millimeter-wave (MMW) broadband entrance network for wireless heterogeneous systems. The CABSP algorithm considers the availability denoted as the quality of the MMW which is severely affected by the rainfall. The CABSP-AM algorithm, moreover, is proposed to further make more efficient use of bandwidth resources by considering the QoS requirements of each class of service in multimedia communication. As the results, the CABSP algorithm yields higher throughput performance than the conventional constraint shortest path (CSP) selection algorithm, but lower than the CABSP-AM algorithm. The spectrum efficiency improvements of the CABSP-AM over the CABSP are about 1.36 and 1.48 fold in case of error sensitive and non-sensitive classes respectively.

In this paper, an adaptive transmission scheme considering the stay time in a spot mobile access system is proposed. The proposed adaptive transmission scheme selects the modulation format according to the user's stay time in the spot communication zone and the types of data requested by each user. In the proposed system, when the stay time of a user is short, high-speed modulation is selected for this user. When the stay time of a user is long, a more reliable modulation format is selected. The computer simulation results show that the proposed transmission scheme without any channel estimation can achieve the same or better performance than when using the modulation format fixedly when the carrier-to-noise ratio changes rapidly.

The objective of this research is to compare the performance of the Matrix Pencil Method (MPM) and well known root-MUSIC algorithm for high resolution DOA estimation. Performance of each technique in terms of the probability of resolution and SNR in the presence of noise is investigated. Simulation results show that the MPM has a superior resolution to the root-MUSIC algorithm.

Fractional calculus is the generalization of the operators of differential and integration to non-integer order, and a differential equation involving the fractional calculus operators such as d1/2/dt1/2 and d-1/2/dt-1/2 is called the fractional differential equation. They have many applications in science and engineering. But not only its analytical solutions exist only for a limited number of cases, but also, the numerical methods are difficult to solve. In this paper we propose a new numerical method based on the operational matrices of the orthogonal functions for solving the fractional calculus and fractional differential equations. Two classical fractional differential equation examples are included for demonstration. They show that the new approach is simper and more feasible than conventional methods. Advantages of the proposed method include (1) the computation is simple and computer oriented; (2) the scope of application is wide; and (3) the numerically unstable problem never occurs in our method.

We propose a method for reducing the size of a share in visual secret sharing schemes. The proposed method does not cause the leakage and the loss of the original image. The quality of the recovered image is almost same as that of previous schemes.

In this letter, we show that a key agreement and password authentication protocol proposed by Kwon and Song is potentially vulnerable to a reflection attack, and then suggest simple improvements.

In this paper, a simple blind algorithm for a beamforming antenna is proposed. This algorithm exploits the property of cyclostationary signals whose cyclic autocorrelation function depends on delay as well as frequency. The cost function is the mean square error between the delay product of the beamformer output and a complex exponential. Exploiting the delay greatly reduces the possibility of capturing undesired signals. Through analysis of the minima of the non-quadratic cost function, conditions to extract a single signal are derived. Application of this algorithm to code-division multiple-access systems is considered, and it is shown through simulation that the desired signal can be extracted by appropriately choosing the delay as well as the frequency.