Recent new technologies of electro-mechanical conversion devices have been reviewed. Especially, the electrochemical properties of anisotropic actuators using polypyrrole have been reviewed in detailed and the realization of the bimorph (or bending beam) structure without artificial adhesive agent is introduced.

This paper discusses performance issues for a sensor network. It describes the unique features of the sensor network and discusses studies on its protocols. Performance measures for the sensor network are investigated and studies related to them are surveyed. As an example of performance measures, this paper analyzes a sensor network's availability, which is the probability that all the sensor nodes are working without any of them having run out of energy. An explicit formula for the sensor network availability is derived, and the optimal placement of sensor nodes is investigated.

We have developed an algorithm called the "spectral-domain-to-real-space approach" (SDRSA) to analytically calculate radiation from the two-dimensional current density distribution in microstrip line configurations where the microstrip lines are represented in the form of a three-dimensional inhomogeneous structure. The algorithm is based on the spectral-domain approach used to estimate radiation from microstrip line configurations. Calculation results obtained by using the SDRSA and the current density distribution from a quasi-TEM mode model of microstrip lines agree well with the corresponding estimations obtained by using the equivalent electric current source method and the magnetic current source method, and with the experimental results obtained in the frequency band of up to 1 GHz.

In this paper, we present a flexible distributed computing system in which it is very easy to add required computing components at any time. The system is an Internet-based solution, and mainly developed by Java and XML. Moreover, by implementing a new configuration of computing information that is setting up Public Information and Private Information, the system can accommodate various computing requests, and facilitate a flexible design. Additionally, to show the practical merit, as an example of signal processing, we presented how to apply our proposed system to selection of a suitable artificial neural network.

This paper describes a novel method of shape matching by means of unification and expansion of local correspondences on the feature points. The method has the ability to simultaneously locate plural similar parts of two-dimensional objects under affine transformation. Furthermore, the method is applicable to the objects partially occluded. Experimental results show that the method yields results that are satisfactory, even for the cases with additions, deletions and local deviations of some feature points.

Adaptive background techniques are useful for a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from security surveillance, traffic monitoring to medical and space imaging. With a properly estimated background, moving or new objects can be easily detected and tracked. Existing techniques are not suitable for real-world implementation, either because they are slow or because they do not perform well in the presence of frequent outliers or camera motion. We address the issue by computing a learning rate for each pixel, a function of a local confidence value that estimates whether a pixel is (or not) an outlier, and a global correlation value that detects camera motion. After discussing the role of each parameter, we report experimental results, showing that our technique is fast but efficient, even in a real-world situation. Furthermore, we show that the same method applies equally well to a 3-camera stereoscopic system for depth perception.

Digital signatures whose security does not rely on any unproven computational assumption have recently received considerable attention. While these unconditionally secure digital signatures provide a foundation for long term integrity and non-repudiation of data, currently known schemes generally require a far greater amount of memory space for the storage of secret and public keys than a traditional digital signature. The focus of this paper is on methods for reducing memory requirements of unconditionally secure digital signatures. A major contribution of this paper is to propose two novel unconditionally secure digital signature schemes, one called a symmetric construction and other an asymmetric construction, which require a significantly smaller amount of memory. As a specific example, with a typical parameter setting the required memory size for a user is reduced to be approximately of that in a previously known scheme. Another contribution of the paper is to show an attack on a multireceiver authentication code which was proposed by Safavi-Naini and Wang. A simple method to fix the problem of the multireceiver authentication code is also proposed.

Multiple antenna systems are promising architectures for overcoming the effects of multi-path interference and increasing the spectrum efficiency. In order to be able to investigate these systems, in this article, we derive generalized spatial correlation equations of a circular antenna array for two typical angular energy distributions: a Gaussian angle distribution and uniform angular distribution. The generalized spatial correlation equations are investigated carefully by exact and approximate analyses.

This paper presents practical modeling procedure of feed patterns, bond wires, and interconnects for microwave bare-chip devices. Dedicated test structures have been designed for the process. Modeling accuracy of BJTs and diodes has been unprecedentedly improved up to 30 GHz with this procedure despite popular SPICE models were used.

A new robust extended Kalman filter is proposed for the discrete-time nonlinear systems with norm-bounded parameter uncertainties. After linearization of the nonlinear systems, the uncertainties described by the energy bounded constraint can be converted into an indefinite quadratic cost function to be minimized. The solution to the minimization problem is given by the extended Kalman filter derived in a Krein space, which leads to a robust version of the extended Kalman filter. Since the resulting robust filter has the same structure as a standard extended Kalman filter, the proposed filter can be readily designed by simply including the uncertainty terms in its formulas. The results of simulations are presented to demonstrate that the proposed filter achieves the robustness against parameter variation and performs better than the standard extended Kalman filter.

Extensive studies have been made of the public key cryptosystems based on multivariate polynomials. However most of the proposed public key cryptosystems of rate 1.0 based on multivariate polynomials, are proved not secure. In this paper, we propose several types of new constructions of public key cryptosystems based on two classes of randomly generated simultaneous equations, namely, a class based on bijective transformation and another class based on random transformation. One of the features of the proposed cryptosystems is that the sets of random simultaneous equations significantly improve the utilization factor of the transformation. We show an example of the proposed cryptosystem whose size of the ciphertext is only 100 bits.

This paper proposes a robust method for estimating the fundamental frequency (F0) in real environments. It is assumed that the spectral structure of real environmental noise varies momentarily and its energy does not distribute evenly in the time-frequency domain. Therefore, segmenting a spectrogram of speech mixed with environmental noise into narrow time-frequency regions will produce low-noise regions in which the signal-to-noise ratio is high. The proposed method estimates F0 from the periodic and harmonic features that are clearly observed in the low-noise regions. It first uses two kinds of spectrogram, one with high frequency resolution and another with high temporal resolution, to represent the periodic and harmonic features corresponding to F0. Next, the method segments these two kinds of feature plane into narrow time-frequency regions, and calculates the probability function of F0 for each region. It then utilizes the entropy of the probability function as weight to emphasize the probability function in the low-noise region and to enhance noise robustness. Finally, the probability functions are grouped in each time, and F0 is obtained as the frequency with the highest probability of the function. The experimental results showed that, in comparison with other approaches such as the cepstrum method and the autocorrelation method, the developed method can more robustly estimate F0s from speech in the presence of band-limited noise and car noise.

Discrete wavelet transform has been successfully used in many image processing applications. In this paper, we present an efficient VLSI architecture for 2-D 3-level lifting-based discrete wavelet transform using the (5, 3) filter. All three-level coefficients are computed interlacingly and periodically to achieve higher hardware utilization and better throughput. In comparison with other VLSI architectures, our architecture requires less size of storage and faster computation speed.

Distributed signcryption is specifically designed for distributing a signcrypted message to a designated group. As such, it can not be used in anonymous communication. Accordingly, the current study adds an anonymity property to distributed signcryption that results in almost the same computational load as regards the modular arithmetic. Therefore, the new scheme is more efficient than the expansion for anonymity in, and has potential applications in electronic commerce.

We propose a new method to precisely detect pupil contours in face images. Pupil contour detection is necessary for various applications using face images. It is, however, difficult to detect pupils precisely because of their weak edges or lack of edges. The proposed method is based on minimizing the energy of pattern and edge. The basic idea of this method is that the energy, which consists of the pattern and the edge energy, has to be minimized. An efficient search method is also introduced to overcome the underlying problem of efficiency in energy minimization methods. "Guide patterns" are introduced for this purpose. Moreover, to detect pupils more precisely we use an ellipse model as pupil shape in this paper. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper shows an improvement of square hash function family proposed by Etzel et al. In the new variants, the size of keys is much shorter while the collision probability is slightly larger. Most of the main techniques used to optimize the original square hash functions work on our variants as well. The proposed algorithms are applicable to fast and secure message authentication.

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and measurement of a multiple U-shaped slot antenna for Hiper-LAN. The prototype consists of a U-shaped slot and two inverted U-shaped slot. To obtain sufficient bandwidth, a foam layer is inserted between the ground plane and substrate. A measured bandwidth of approximately 7.6% (VSWR 1.5) and gain of 2.9-5.3 dBi are obtained. The experimental far-field patterns are shown to be stable across the pass band, with the 3 dB beam width in azimuth and elevation at 50and 62, respectively.

We present a new keystream generator (KSG) MUGI, which is a variant of PANAMA proposed at FSE '98. MUGI has a 128-bit secret key and a 128-bit initial vector as parameters and generates a 64-bit string per round. The design is particularly suited for efficient hardware implementations, but the software performance of MUGI is excellent as well. A speed optimized implementation in hardware achieves about 3 Gbps with 26 Kgates, which is several times faster than AES. On the other hand, the security of MUGI has been evaluated by analyzing the applicability of re-synchronization attacks, related-key attacks, and attacks that exploit the linear correlation of an output sequence. Our analysis confirms that MUGI is a secure KSG.

The side channel attack (SCA) is a serious attack on wearable devices that have scarce computational resources. Cryptographic algorithms on them should be efficient using small memory--we have to make efforts to optimize the trade-off between efficiency and memory. In this paper we present efficient SCA-resistant scalar multiplications based on window method. Moller proposed an SPA-resistant window method based on 2w-ary window method, which replaces w-consecutive zeros to 1 plus w-consecutive and it requires 2w points of table (or 2w-1 + 1 points if the signed 2w-ary is used). The most efficient window method with small memory is the width-w NAF, which requires 2w-2 points of table. In this paper we convert the width-w NAF to an SPA-resistant addition chain. Indeed we generate a scalar sequence with the fixed pattern, e.g. |00x|00x||00x|, where x is positive odd points < 2w. Thus the size of the table is 2w-1, which is optimal in the construction of the SPA-resistant chain based on width-w NAF. The table sizes of the proposed scheme are 6% to 50% smaller than those of Moller's scheme for w = 2,3,4,5, which are relevant choices in the sense of efficiency for 160-bit ECC.

In this paper, we describe the implementation and the test results of a Bluetooth baseband module we have developed. For small chip size, we eliminate FIFOs for data buffering between hardware functional units and data buffers for bit streaming among channel coding blocks. Furthermore, we carefully consider hardware and software partitioning. We implement complex control tasks of the Bluetooth baseband layer protocols in software running on an embedded microcontroller. Hardware-efficient functions, such as low-level bitstream link control; host controller interfaces (HCIs), such as universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (UART) and universal serial bus (USB) interfaces; and audio CODEC are performed by dedicated hardware blocks. In addition, the bitstream data path block of the link controller constructing the baseband module has been designed by considering low power. The design of the baseband module is done using fully synthesizable Verilog HDL to enhance the portability between process technologies. A field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of the module was tested for functional verification and real time operation of file and bitstream transfer between PCs. The module was also fabricated in a 0.25 µm CMOS technology, the core size of which is only 2.792.80 mm2.