This paper presents a multi-thread evolutionary programming (MEP) technique that is composed of global, local, and minimal search units. An appropriate search routine is called depending on the current situation and the individuals are updated by using the selected routine. In each search routine, the individuals are updated with a normalized relative fitness function to improve the robustness of the algorithm. The proposed method is applied to the problem of backing up a truck-and-trailer system to a loading dock. A fuzzy logic controller is designed for a truck-and-trailer backer-upper system and the MEP algorithm is used to optimize the representative parameters of the fuzzy logic controller. The simulation results show that the proposed controller performs well even under a large variety of initial positions.

To enhance throughput and reuse bandwidth, clustering techniques can effectively manage nodes in multi-hop wireless networks. However, in such networks, hidden terminal interference degrades the system performance and increases the average packet delay time. Therefore, this work presents novel two-level cluster-based code assignment techniques to resolve the hidden terminal problems. At the low level, five basic and an optimized intra-cluster code assignment schemes are developed to calculate the number of codes used in each cluster. At the high level, two inter-cluster code assignment schemes (coarse-grained and fine-grained controls) are proposed to obtain the minimal number of code sets. The merits of our schemes include low execution time, low probability of code re-assignment, and low overhead. Furthermore, the proposed schemes allow us to regionally update orthogonal codes when the topology varies. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed schemes outperform conventional techniques. Among the five basic intra-cluster code assignment schemes, the ordering criteria of increasing number of one-hop neighbors is the best in terms of the number of orthogonal codes to avoid hidden terminal interference. The optimized intra-cluster code assignment scheme generally obtains fewer orthogonal codes than other schemes. For inter-cluster code assignment schemes, the coarse-grained control has a lower code allocation time. However, the fine-grained control requires fewer orthogonal codes.

A 5.6 GOPS/1.4 GFLOPS 350 MHz, four-way very long instruction word (VLIW) microprocessor is developed for embedded applications in a 0.18 µm five-layer-metal CMOS process. This processor features a two-way integer pipeline and two-way floating/media pipelines. Each floating pipeline and media pipeline has two-parallel and four-parallel single instruction multiple-data (SIMD) mechanisms, respectively. The processor has separate instruction and data caches, each of 16 KB in size and having four-way set associative. The data cache employs a non-blocking technique and can process two load instructions in parallel. The processor had about a 50% clock net power reduction compared with one without power optimization. 6.7 million transistors are integrated in an area of 7.5 mm 7.5 mm. Since all circuit blocks were developed using logic synthesis, the processor is easy to adapt to system-on-a-chip (SoC) applications.

This paper proposes an extended variant of the method by Brickel et al. for multiple scalar multiplication over an elliptic curve. In smartcard environments, the proposed method is superior to conventional methods. In particular, when the typical number of bases t=2, the proposed method is four times faster than the simultaneous multiple exponentiation method, a well known fast method for multiple scalar multiplication. Furthermore, the proposed method can change the amount of time and memory to fit various platform environment (e.g., personal computers as rich ones or mobile devices such as smartcards as poor ones) by adjusting the division bit width (division unit).

Using decision trees to fill the missing values in data has been shown experimentally to be useful in some domains. However, this is not the general case. In other domains, using decision trees for imputing missing attribute values does not outperform other methods. Trying to identify the reasons behind the success or failure of the various methods for filling missing values on different domains can be useful for deciding the technique to be used when learning concepts from a new domain with missing values. This paper presents a technique by which to approach to previous goal and presents the results of applying the technique on predicting the success or failure of a method that uses decision trees to fill the missing values in an ordered manner. Results are encouraging because the obtained decision tree is simple and it can even provide hints for further improvement on the use of decision trees to impute missing attribute values.

This paper proposes a method of supporting behavioral decision-making with a rule-based system to be used for the design stage of service specifications or service scenarios based on a state transition model. We consider telecommunication services as service scenarios of state transitions. A state transition can be described as a transition rule that is represented as the notation of an IF-THEN rule : "if < condition > then < action >. " Thus, behaviors or service scenarios are assumed to be treated as a set of IF-THEN rules in this paper. In general, an "if < condition > then < action >" rule is called a production rule, and production rules are often used to represent knowledge in expert systems. Thus, rules treated in this paper are a kind of production rule. It is still difficult to decide if behaviors are concurrent, cooperative, or exclusive as a whole system when many service scenarios are combined, even if each rule is clearly described and easy to understand. When several service scenarios are combined, it is necessary for the sub-elements of each state transition to cooperate. The method proposed in this paper consists of the following techniques: (1) decompositions of a state transition to sub-elements, (2) rule descriptions for the decomposed sub-elements and the application of rules, (3) use of conflict and cooperation strategies, and (4) support for behavioral decision-making by showing recommendations for cooperative, exclusive, or concurrent behavior. We provide examples of telecommunication services to show the effectiveness of the proposed method in an easy-to-understand manner. We also show cooperative resolution in the interactions among several services.

Message Sequence Chart (MSC) standardized by International Telecommunication Union is a graphical and textual language for specification of concurrent systems. It has been used formally as well as informally to specify behavior of real-time systems, in particular telecommunication switching systems. Formal verification of a system specification is crucial to ensure that implementation of the system works correctly. In particular, verification methods based on finite states have been widely used in telecommunication systems design. The methods determine global system states and transitions between them (i. e. , build a global state transition graph (GSTG)), and verify the system's desired properties, such as safety and liveness, on the GSTG. In this paper, we focus on construction of GSTGs from MSC specifications. We propose action dependency graph as an intuitive description of semantics of MSC specifications and present an algorithm to translate MSC specifications to action dependency graphs as well as an algorithm to construct a global state transition graph from an action dependency graph.

The capability of frequency-swept cross-borehole radar to detect an empty rectangular cylinder embedded in a dielectric medium is simulated numerically by employing the boundary element method. The frequency loci providing the strongest double dips in the received signal pattern are plotted as functions of the observation distance and the cross-sectional width. It is found that, regardless of the shape of the rectangular cross-section, the strongest double dips become double nulls in the near-field region.

Many researchers have used hypercube interconnection networks for their good properties to construct many parallel processing systems. However, as the number of processors increases, the probability of occurrences of faulty nodes also increases. Hence, for hypercube interconnection networks which have faulty nodes, several efficient dynamic routing algorithms have been proposed which allow each node to hold status information of its neighbor nodes. In this paper, we propose an improved version of the algorithm proposed by Chiu and Wu by introducing the notion of full reachability. A fully reachable node is a node that can reach all nonfaulty nodes which have Hamming distance l from the node via paths of length l. In addition, we further improve the algorithm by classifying the possibilities of detours with respect to each Hamming distance between current and target nodes. We propose an initialization procedure which makes use of an equivalent condition to perform this classification efficiently. Moreover, we conduct a simulation to measure the improvement ratio and to compare our algorithms with others. The simulation results show that the algorithms are effective when they are applied to low-dimensional hypercube interconnection networks.

In this paper, we present a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system to automatically detect lung cancer candidates at an early stage using a present and a past helical CT screening. We have developed a slice matching algorithm that can automatically match the slice images of a past CT scan to those of a present CT scan in order to detect changes in the lung fields over time. The slice matching algorithm consists of two main process: the process of extraction of the lungs, heart, and descending aorta and the process of matching slices of the present and past CT images using the information of the lungs, heart, and descending aorta. To evaluate the performance of this algorithm, we applied it to 50 subjects (total of 150 scans) screened between 1993 and 1998. From these scans, we selected 100 pairs for evaluation (each pair consisted of scans for the same subject). The algorithm correctly matched 88 out of the 100 pairs. The slice images for the present and past CT scans are displayed in parallel on the CRT monitor. Feature measurements of the suspicious regions are shown on the relevant images to facilitate identification of changes in size, shape, and intensity. The experimental results indicate that the CAD system can be effectively used in clinical practice to increase the speed and accuracy of routine diagnosis.

This paper proposes an algorithm that adaptively estimates time-varying noise variance used in Kalman filtering for real-time speech signal enhancement. In the speech signal contaminated by white noise, the spectral components except dominant ones in high frequency band are expected to reflect the noise energy. Our approach is first to find the dominant energy bands over speech spectrum using LPC. We then calculate the average value of the actual spectral components over the high frequency region excluding the dominant energy bands and use it as the noise variance. The resulting noise variance estimate is then applied to Kalman filtering to suppress the background noise. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach achieves a significant improvement in terms of speech enhancement over those of the conventional Kalman filtering that uses the average noise power over silence interval only. As a refinement of our results, we employ multiple-Kalman filtering with multiple noise models and improve the intelligibility.

Semistructured data has no a-priori schema information, which causes some problems such as inefficient storage and query execution. To cope with such problems, extracting schema information from semistructured data has been an important issue. However, in most cases optimal schema information cannot be extracted efficiently, and few efficient approximation algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we consider an approximation algorithm for extracting "typical" classes from semistructured data. Intuitively, a class C is said to be typical if the structure of C is "similar" to those of "many" objects. We present the following results. First, we prove that the problem of deciding if a typical class can be extracted from given semistructured data is NP-complete. Second, we present an approximation algorithm for extracting typical classes from given semistructured data, and show a sufficient condition for the approximation algorithm to run in polynomial time. Finally, by using extracted classes obtained by the approximation algorithm, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm for constructing a set R of classes such that R covers all the objects to form a database schema.

In this paper we propose a subsequence matching algorithm that supports moving average transform of arbitrary order in time-series databases. Moving average transform reduces the effect of noise and has been used in many areas such as econometrics since it is useful in finding the overall trends. The proposed algorithm extends the existing subsequence matching algorithm proposed by Faloutsos et al. (SUB94 in short). If we applied the algorithm without any extension, we would have to generate an index for each moving average order and would have serious storage and CPU time overhead. In this paper we tackle the problem using the notion of index interpolation. Index interpolation is defined as a searching method that uses one or more indexes generated for a few selected cases and performs searching for all the cases satisfying some criteria. The proposed algorithm, which is based on index interpolation, can use only one index for a pre-selected moving average order k and performs subsequence matching for arbitrary order m ( k). We prove that the proposed algorithm causes no false dismissal. The proposed algorithm can also use more than one index to improve search performance. The algorithm works better with smaller selectivities. For selectivities less than 10-2, the degradation of search performance compared with the fully-indexed case--which is equivalent to SUB94--is no more than 33.0% when one index is used, and 17.2% when two indexes are used. Since the queries with smaller selectivities are much more frequent in general database applications, the proposed algorithm is suitable for practical situations.

A single-chip MPEG-2 video, audio, and system encoder LSI has been developed. It performs concurrent real-time processing of MPEG-2 422P@ML video encoding, 2-channel Dolby Digital or MPEG-1 audio encoding, and system encoding that generates a multiplexed transport stream (TS) or a program stream (PS). Advanced hybrid architecture, which combines a high performance VLIW media-processor D30V and hardwired video processing circuits, has been adopted to satisfy the demands of both high flexibility and enormous computational capability. A unified control scheme has been newly proposed that hierarchically manages adaptive task priority control over asynchronous video, audio, and system encoding processes in order to achieve real-time concurrent processing using a single D30V. Dual dedicated motion estimation cores consisting of a coarse ME core (CME) for wide range searches and a fine ME core (FME) for precise searches have been integrated to produce high picture quality while using a small amount of hardware. Adopting these features, a single-chip encoder has been fabricated using 0.25-micron 4-layer metal CMOS technology, and integrated into a 14.2 mm 14.2 mm die with 11 million transistors.

This paper describes how the image sequences taken by a stationary video camera may be effectively processed to detect and track moving objects against a stationary background in real-time. Our approach is first to isolate the moving objects in image sequences via a modified adaptive background estimation method and then perform token tracking of multiple objects based on features extracted from the processed image sequences. In feature based multiple object tracking, the most prominent tracking issues are track initialization, data association, occlusions due to traffic congestion, and object maneuvering. While there are limited past works addressing these problems, most relevant tracking systems proposed in the past are independently focused to either "occlusion" or "data association" only. In this paper, we propose the KL-IMMPDA (Kanade Lucas-Interacting Multiple Model Probabilistic Data Association) filtering approach for multiple-object tracking to collectively address the key issues. The proposed method essentially employs optical flow measurements for both detection and track initialization while the KL-IMMPDA filter is used to accept or reject measurements, which belong to other objects. The data association performed by the proposed KL-IMMPDA results in an effective tracking scheme, which is robust to partial occlusions and image clutter of object maneuvering. The simulation results show a significant performance improvement for tracking multi-objects in occlusion and maneuvering, when compared to other conventional trackers such as Kalman filter.

The diffraction problem of a Gaussian beam by finite number of periodic slots in a parallel-plate waveguide filled with a homogeneous dielectric is considered. The integro-differential equation for the unknown equivalent surface magnetic current density over the slots is derived and solved by the method of moments (piecewise sinusoidal Galerkin method). From some theoretical results for the angular diffraction pattern, the present geometry is observed to simulate well the previous rectangular groove geometry from the viewpoint of scattering behaviour. In addition, two types (resonance and non-resonance types) of Bragg blazing phenomena are discussed. Simultaneous Bragg and off-Bragg blazing is also demonstrated.

We formalize a model of "demonstration of program result-correctness," and investigate how to prove this fact against possible adversaries, which naturally extends Blum's theory of program checking by adding zero-knowledge requirements. The zero-knowledge requirements are universal for yes and no instances alike.

A passive branched optical network unified for broadcasting and communication utilizing a set of Fabry-Perot etalons with different cavity lengths is proposed and its basic operation including thermal stability of broadcasting channel is demonstrated. It is confirmed that a high transmission frequency in common for a pair of fiber Fabry-Perot etalons is always found however environmental temperature changes.

The first important step in pre-processing data for 3D virtual colonoscopy requires careful segmentation of a complicated shaped colon. We describe an automatic colon segmentation method with a new patient-friendly bowel preparation scheme. This new bowel preparation makes the segmentation more appropriate for digitally removing undesirable remains in the colon. With the aim of segmenting the colon accurately, we propose two techniques which can solve the partial-volume-effect (PVE) problem on the boundaries between low and high intensity regions. Based on the features of the adverse PVE voxels on the gas and fluid boundary inside the colon, our vertical filter eliminates these PVE voxels. By seriously considering the PVE on the colon boundary, our gradient-magnitude-based region growing algorithm improves the accuracy of the boundary. The result of the automatic colon segmentation method is illustrated with both extracted 2D images from the experimental volumetric abdominal CT datasets and a reconstructed 3D colon model.

The term pilot pollution in IS-95 CDMA systems is used to indicate that a large number of equally strong pilot signals is present. Those pilots compete with each other to become the serving one and this causes a very high rotation of pilot leadership at the mobile station. As a consequence, the signaling rate on the traffic channel increases, thus degrading the call quality. We present a method of alleviating the pilot pollution problem by means of repeaters. Simulation studies have been carried out on an actual CDMA network suffering from pilot pollution and the results have been verified by field trials. They indicate that repeaters can effectively improve call quality by altering the spacial distribution of pilot signal strength.