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.

Peyravian and Zunic (2000) presented two schemes for protecting password transmission and password change respectively. Like the traditional authentication scheme using passwords, the two new schemes are also vulnerable to attacks like guessing attacks, server spoofing, and server data eavesdropping. This paper will give demonstrations on what have caused to these drawbacks, and more of that, two improved schemes are also proposed which are free from worries of those possible attacks.

We have developed a distributed optical fiber strain sensor for detecting the collapse of river embankments. The sensor uses a Brillouin optical time domain reflectometer (BOTDR) and consists of an optical fiber cable and pieces of nonwoven cloth. Pieces of cloth are fixed to the cable at 1.5-meter intervals and it is then embedded in a U-shaped configuration in a river embankment. The pieces of cloth are displaced when there is movement of the soil in which they are embedded. If one of two adjacent pieces of cloth remains stationary while the other moves, the optical fiber between the two pieces is stretched. The collapse of an embankment can be detected by using a BOTDR to monitor any such stretching in the 1.5-m lengths of fiber. The developed sensor operates at a sensitivity of 0.025%/kgf, which is equivalent to 0.067%/mm, and is thus capable of detecting soil movements of a few mm in river embankments. The sensor is also able to provide effective advance warning of the collapse of a river embankment resulting from water penetration. We subjected the sensor system to field tests that demonstrated the effectiveness of its construction and its long-term stability. The developed sensor system is an effective tool for use in river management systems of the very near future.

In this letter, a two-dimensional pilot-symbol aided (2-D PSA) channel estimation technique for coherent orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with transmitter diversity is proposed. The 2-D PSA channel estimator and the corresponding orthogonality condition between the sets of pilot symbols are derived under minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion for OFDM systems with transmitter diversity. The proposed estimator is shown to be accurate and effective for tracking variations of channels between multiple transmitter antennas and receiver antennas.

For the purpose of applying to 50 GHz channel spacing 10 Gb/s DWDM systems, the dispersion reduced fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) is demonstrated. This new FBG is designed by applying in optimized cosine expansion series to the refractive index profile. The 10 π-phase shifts in the refractive index profile realize both square filtering characteristics and linear phase responses resulting in reducing group delay variation in the reflective bandwidth. The FBG, fabricated according to the new design, is tested and shows more than 30 dB isolation for the adjacent channel and less than 10 psec group delay variation in the reflective bandwidth. This small dispersion leads to vast improvement of 10 Gb/s transmission performance. The power penalty of the new FBG is suppressed to 1/6 of that of conventional FBG. Furthermore, the symmetrical refractive index profile, realized by applying a cosine expansion series, shows that these optical characteristics have no dependence of the light launching direction. From these results, this new design offers an FBG suitable for the ADM used in 10 Gb/s DWDM systems.

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.

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.

Integration of spot-size converters (SSCs) with semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) that improves chip-fiber optical coupling is inevitable for realizing high performance SOA modules. In this paper SSCs that can be easily integrated with SOAs and have little influence on the polarization sensitivity have been studied. We found that polarization insensitive active width-tapered SSCs can be realized by an optimum waveguide design of tensile-strained bulk structures. The SOA module exhibited large fiber-to-fiber gain (> 19 dB), small polarization sensitivity (< 0.4 dB), high fiber-coupled saturation output power (> +11.7 dBm) and record low module noise figure (< 6.3 dB) for the signal wavelength range of 1530-1560 nm.

In this paper, a novel method to reduce additive time-varying noise is proposed. Unlike the previous methods, the proposed method requires neither the assumption about noise nor the estimate of the noise statistics from any pause regions. The enhancement is performed on a band-by-band basis for each time frame. Based on both the decision on whether a particular band in a frame is speech or noise dominant and the masking property of the human auditory system, an appropriate amount of noise is reduced in time-frequency domain using modified spectral subtraction. The proposed method was tested on various noisy conditions: car noise, F16 noise, white Gaussian noise, pink noise, tank noise and babble noise. On the basis of segmental SNR, inspection of spectrograms and MOS tests, the proposed method was found to be more effective than spectral subtraction with and without pause detection in reducing noise while minimizing distortion to speech.

The urgent tasks of MOSFET modeling for circuit simulation are easy adaptation to new physical phenomena arising for advancing technologies, and, of course, sufficient simulation accuracy. Approaches currently being pursued for developing such MOSFET models are summarized. Their capabilities for accomplishing these tasks as well as the important remaining problems are discussed. Main focus is given on the model HiSIM, the first commonly available model based on the drift-diffusion approximation developed for 0.10 µm MOSFET technology node.

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.

The detection of timing constraint violation is crucial in reactive systems. A method of detecting deadline violation based on Floyd-Warshall shortest path algorithm has been proposed by Chodrow et al. We extend this method to detect the violation of minimum delay time in reactive systems where the repetition of event sequences frequently occurs.

Network traffic characteristics impacts directly network performance, and resource allocation policies. In this work, we introduce a multi-agent system, that manages the performance of web servers with minimal cost of mirroring. In our proposed system each web server is viewed as a software agent that perceives its environment by monitoring its traffic. The goal of the agent is to manage the performance, using cooperative mirror servers, while minimizing the cost of mirroring. Communication between the agents enables each web server to decide about its future actions, which is whether to share its load with the cooperative mirror servers, and how much load to assign to them. The architecture of a software agent that is intended to manage the performance of a web server, is elaborated and its different modules are described. Also a set of cooperative agents is defined, that form a multi-agent system and is intended to assure maintaining the performance with minimal cost of mirroring. The experimental results presented in this article illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed system.

This paper presents the concepts and methodology of knowledge-based information modeling based on Cognitive Science for realizing the autonomous humanoid service robotic arm and hand system HARIS. The HARIS robotic system consists of model-based 3D vision, intelligent scheduler, computerized arm/hand controller, humanoid HARIS arm/hand unit and human interface, and aims to serve the aged and disabled on desk-top object manipulations. The world model, i.e., a shared knowledge base, is introduced to work as a communication channel among the software modules. The task scheduling as well as the 3D-vision is based on Cognitive Science, i.e., a human's way of vision and scheduling is considered in designing the knowledge-based software system. The key idea is to use "words" in describing a scene, scheduling tasks, controlling an arm and hand, and interacting with a human. The world model plays a key role in fusing a variety of distributed functions. The generalized frame-based knowledge engineering environment ZERO++ has been effectively used as a software platform in implementing the system. The experimental system is working within a limited situation successfully. Through the introduction of Cognitive Science-based information modeling we have learned useful hints for realizing human-robot symbiosis, that is our long term goal of the project.

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.

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.

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.

In reuse of the VLSI layout design when technology migration takes place, the information to be abstracted from the original design and the data structure to store the information shall be specified. In this paper, they are assumed as the seg-based 4-direction and the parametric BSG, respectively. The parametric BSG is a BSG whose segs are generalized to take any number of units of length. The seg-based 4-direction is the right-of, left-of, above, and below relations between two rooms in accordance with the segs between them. An elegant procedure is given to map the floorplan of the model into a parametric BSG of the minimum size, keeping the abstracted seg-based 4-direction. Merits of the PBSG are discussed and a way of reuse is suggested by illustrative instances. Finally, a superior potential of the parametric BSG as the data structure is discussed empirically.

In computer-aided drafting and design, interactive graphics is used to design components, systems, layouts, and structures. There are several approaches for using automated graphical layout tools currently. Our approach employs a genetic algorithm to implement a tool for automated 3D graphical layout design and presentation. The effective use of a genetic algorithm in automated graphical layout design relies on defining a fitness function that reflects user preferences. In this paper, we describe a method to define fitness functions and chromosome structures of selected objects. A learning mechanism is employed to adjust the fitness values of the objects in the selected layout chosen by the user. In our approach, the fitness functions can be changed adaptively reflecting user preferences. Experimental results revealed good performance of the adaptive fitness functions in our proposed mechanism.

The effectiveness and possible applications of all-optical wavelength conversion using optical fibers are described. Several types of ultra-broad and ultra-fast wavelength conversion using highly-nonlinear fiber are shown. Over 70 nm conversion band by four-wave mixing, 500-fs pulse trains conversion by cross-phase-modulation-based nonlinear optical loop mirror and time-based optical add-drop multiplexing for 160 Gbit/s signal using wavelength conversion by supercontinuum are successfully demonstrated.