In this paper, we discuss computational methods for obtaining the bifurcation points and the branch directions at branching points of solution curves for the nonlinear resistive circuits. There are many kinds of the bifurcation points such as limit point, branch point and isolated point. At these points, the Jacobian matrix of circuit equation becomes singular so that we cannot directly apply the usual numerical techniques such as Newton-Raphson method. Therefore, we propose a simple modification technique such that the Newton-Raphson method can be also applied to the modified equations. On the other hand, a curve tracing algorithm can continuously trace the solution curves having the limit points and/or branching points. In this case, we can see whether the curve has passed through a bifurcation point or not by checking the sign of determinant of the Jacobian matrix. We also propose two different methods for calculating the directions of branches at branching point. Combining these algorithms, complicated solution curves will be easily traced by the curve tracing method. We show the example of a Hopfield network in Sect.5.

This paper proposes a technique for estimating the harmonic frequencies based on instantaneous frequency (IF) of speech signals. The main problem is how to decompose the speech signal into the harmonic components. For this purpose, we use a set of bandpass-filters, each of whose center frequencies changes with time in order to track the instantaneous freuency of its output. As a result, the outputs of the band-pass filters become the harmonic components, and the instantaneous frequencies of the harmonics are accurately estimated. To evaluate the effectiveness of the approach, we apply it to pitch determination of speech. Pitch determination is simply accomplished by selecting the correct fundamental frequency out of the harmonic components. It is confirmed that the pitch extraction using the proposed pitch determination algorithm (PDA) is stable and accurate. The most significant feature of the PDA is that the extracted pitch contour is smooth and it requires no post-processing such as nonlinear filtering or any smoothing processes. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the capability of the harmonics estimation technique and the PDA.

A quasi-synchronous (QS) code division multiple access (CDMA) system is proposed for mobile communications. In the proposed method, which uses the time division duplex (TDD) mode of transmission, a mobile receiver can measure propagation delay changes. It then accordingly adjusts its transmission time so its signal can arrive at base station synchronously with other mobile units. A simple control unit is used at the mobile unit in order to reduce any error due to the propagation delay changes. The system operates as follows. At the start of a call, a mobile unit is quasi-synchronised through feedback control from the base station. The mobile unit then maintains synchronous status without any further base station feedback. The degree of the quasi-synchronous accuracy is determined by a clock in mobile units. This paper shows performance results based on using a clock rate of ten times faster than the spreading rate. Orthogonal codes are used for spreading the signals. The results demonstrate that the reverse link CDMA multiuser interference is to a great degree removed.

This paper discusses the performance of non-coherent reception for M-ary spread-spectrum (M-ary/SS) signals in the presence of carrier frequency offset. In general, the M-ary/SS scheme is expected to be of higher spectral efficiency than the conventional DS/SS schemes, but its performance may be degraded by the carrier frequency offset. We, therefore, analyze the effect of carrier frequency offset on the performance of the non-coherent M-ary/SS system with orthogonal modulation using a set of sequences generated by the Hadamard matrix. As a result of the analysis, it has been found that the carrier frequency offset may cause a great deal of degradation in the performance, and that its effect has a distinctive property which is due to the characteristic of Hadamard matrix, at the same time. Making use of this property, we propose two schemes that can mitigate the effect of carrier frequency offset: one is based on choise of the code sequences, the other is on the error correcting code. The effectiveness of the schemes is evaluated in the terms of symbol-error-rates through analysis and computer simulation.

A novel thick ground plane is proposed as a support for a slot-coupled microstrip antenna and as a heat sink for an MMIC installed on the back plane of the active array antenna. A multi-layer structure of ground planes is also studied for the benefit of easy installation of MMICs. The influence of this thick metal ground plane with a mono- and multi-layer has been investigated in detail. Both measured and calculated results of VSWR and calculated results of the back lobe are shown in detail. The calculated results of VSWR agree well with the measurements. It is made clear that the thickness of the ground plane can be extended to twenty times that of the antenna substrate while maintaining the antenna's performance. An LNA composing an MMIC was developed, attached to the back of the antenna, and operated at 23 GHz. The measured results of this active element agree well with calculated ones and confirm the applicability of the novel design.

In case of object recognition using 3-D configuration data, the scale and poses of the object are important factors. If they are not known, we can not compare the object with the models in the database. Hence we propose a strategy for object recognition independently of its scale and poses, which is based on Hopfield neural network. And we also propose a strategy for estimation of the camera motion to reconstruct 3-D configuration of the object. In this strategy, the camera motion is estimated only with the sequential images taken by a moving camera. Consequently, the 3-D configuration of the object is reconstructed only with the sequential images. And we adopt the multiple regression analysis for estimation of the camera motion parameters so as to reduce the errors of them.

The electroretinogram (ERG) is used to diagnose many kinds of eye diseases. Our final purpose in this paper is a detection of diabetic retinopathy by using only ERG. In this paper, we describe a method to examine whether presented ERG data belong to a group of diabetic retinopathy. The ERG mainly consists of the a-wave, the b-wave and the oscillatory potential (op-wave). It was known that the op-wave varies as progress of retinopathy. Thus, we use the latency, the amplitude and the peak frequency of the op-wave. First, we study these features of sample ERG data, statistically. It was clarified that some of these characteristics are significantly different between a normal group and a group of diabetic retinopathy. By using some of these characteristics, we classify unknown ERG data on the basis of the Mahalanobis' generalized distance or the linear discriminant function. The highest accuracy of this method for the unknown data is about 92.73%.

This paper proposes an unsupervised speaker adaptation method using an all-phoneme ergodic Hidden Markov Network" that combines allophonic (context-dependent phone) acoustic models with stochastic language constraints. Hidden Markov Network (HMnet) for allophone modeling and allophonic bigram probabilities derived from a large text database are combined to yield a single large ergodic HMM which represents arbitrary speech signals in a particular language so that the model parameters can be re-estimated using text-unknown speech samples with the Baum-Welch algorithm. When combined with the Vector Field Smoothing (VFS) technique, unsupervised speaker adaptation can be effectively performed. This method experimentally gave better performances compared with our previous unsupervised adaptation method which used conventional phonetic HMMs and phoneme bigram probabilities especially when the amount of training data was small.

In this letter, we introduce a predictor based least square (PLS) algorithm. By involving both order- and time-update recursions, the PLS algorithm is found to have a more stable performance compared with the stable version (Version II) of the RLS algorithm shown in Ref.[1]. Nevertheless, the computational requirement is about 50% of that of the RLS algorithm. As an application, the PLS algorithm can be applied to the fast Newton transversal filters (FNTF). The FNTF algorithms suffer from the numerical instability problem if the quantities used for extending the gain vector are computed by using the fast RLS algorithms. By combing the PLS and the FNTF algorithms, we obtain a much more stable performance and a simple algorithm formulation.

This paper presents a system for recognition of on-line cursive Hangul (Korean characters) by means of DP matching of structural information. The penalty function has the following special features. In order to prevent short spurious strokes from causing large penalties, an input stroke is weighted by its length relative to other input strokes. In order to make use of pen-up and pen-down information, a penalty is incurred when 2 strokes of differing type (i.e. pen-up with pen-down) are matched. Finally, to reduce the chance of obtaining a suboptimal solution which can result from using the greedy algorithm in DP matching, we look-ahead an extra match. In a computer simulation we obtained a recognition rate of 92% for partially cursive characters and 89% for fully cursive characters. Furthermore, for both cases combined the correct character appears 98% of the time in the top 10 candidates. Thus we confirmed that the proposed algorithm is effective in recognizing cursive Hangul.

This paper discusses advanced wireless communication technologies for achieving future high-speed mobile radios. Mainly, five technical fields are considered, that is, multi-level modulation for transmitting high-capacity information signal, advanced adaptive wireless system flexibly changing modulation level, symbol rate and traffic according to fading conditions, adaptive multicarrier system transmitting multimedia signals by changing the number of carrier according to the capacity of the signals, new CDMA techniques for mapping different bit rate services onto the same allocated bandwidth at the same time, and optical-linked microcellular communication system with millimeter wave air interface.

A generalized surface scattering radar equation for a near-nadir-looking pencil beam radar, which covers both beam-limited and pulse-limited regions, is derived. This equation is a generalization of the commonly used nadir-pointing beam-limited radar equation taking both antenna beam and pulse wave form weighting functions into account, and is convenient for the calculation of radar received power and scattering cross-section of the surface.

This paper described discrete time Cellular Neural Networks (DT-CNN) with two types of neuron circuits for image coding from an analog format to a digital format and their VLSI implementations. The image coding methods proposed in this paper have been investigated for a purpose of transmission of a coded image and restoration again without a large loss of an original image information. Each neuron circuti of a network receives one pixel of an input image, and processes it with binary outputs data fed from neighboring neuron circuits. Parallel dynamics quantization methods have been adopted for image coding methods. They are performed in networks to decide an output binary value of each neuron circuit according to output values of neighboring neuron circuits. Delayed binary outputs of neuron circuits in a neighborhood are directly connected to inputs of a current active neuron circuit. Next state of a network is computed form a current state at some neuron circuits in any time interval. Models of two types of neuron circuits and networks are presented and simulated to confirm an ability of proposed methods. Also, physical layout designs of coding chips have been done to show their possibility of VLSI realizations.

This paper describes modifications to a previously proposed 8-kb/s 4-ms-delay CELP speech coding algorithm with a view to improving the speech quality while maintaining low delay and only moderately increasing complexity. The modifications are intended to improve the effectiveness of interframe pitch lag prediction and the sub-optimality level of the excitation coding to the backward adapted synthesis filter by using delayed decision and joint optimization techniques. Results of subjective listening tests using Japanese speech indicate that the coded speech quality is significantly superior to that of the 8-kb/s VSELP coder which has a 20-ms delay. A method that reduces the computational complexity of closed-loop 3-tap pitch prediction with no perceptible degradation in speech quality is proposed, based on representing the pitch-tap vector as the product of a scalar pitch gain and a normalized shape codevector.

A rat-race hybrid-ring which includes a coupled-line called microwave C-section is proposed for size reduction. The perfect input match, isolation, equal power split and certain phase differences between two output ports can be satisfied at center frequency as in a normal hybrid-ring. The size of the proposed circuit becomes smaller than that of a normal rat-race built up with a folded non-coupled 3/4-wavelength transmission line, although the frequency characteristics are slightly damaged by the electromagnetic coupling between two folded strips. Theoretical results based on the even and odd mode decomposition method are in good agreement with those of the experimental circuit fabricated at 1 GHz.

In this paper performance of M-stage detection for DS/CDMA is considered in terms of near-far resistance. Asymptotic multiuser efficiency (AME) of M stage detection over fading multipath channel is calculated and it is shown that even in the fading case the detector is near-far resistant i.e., insensitive to the relative energies of the users. The idea is extended to cellular environment. The effect of power control imperfection is investigated. It is shown that capacity can be increased if near-far resistant technique is employed in conjunction with limited power control.

Data flow is a paradigm for concurrent computations in which a collection of parallel processes communicate asynchronously. For nondeterministic data flow networks many semantic models have been defined, however, it is complex to reason about the semantics of a network. In this paper, we introduce a transformation between data flow networks and the LOTOS specification language to make available theories and tools developed for process algebras for the semantic analysis based on traces of the networks. The transformation does not establish a one-to-one mapping between the traces of a data flow network and the LOTOS specification, but maps each network in a specification which usually contains more traces. The obtained system specification has the same set of traces as the corresponding network if they are finite, otherwise also non fair traces are included. Formal analysis and verification methods can still be applied to prove properties of the original data flow network, allowing in case of networks with finite traces to prove also network equivalence.

This paper presents a theoretically best algorithm within the framework of our image noise model for reconstructing 3-D from two views when all the feature points are on a planar surface. Pointing out that statistical bias is introduced if the least-squares scheme is used in the presence of image noise, we propose a scheme called renormalization, which automatically removes statistical bias. We also present an optimal correction scheme for canceling the effect of image noise in individual feature points. Finally, we show numerical simulation and confirm the effectiveness of our method.

This paper presents an improved neural network for channel assignment problems in cellular mobile communication systems in the new co-channel interference model. Sengoku et al. first proposed the neural network for the same problem, which can find solutions only in small size cellular systems with up to 40 cells in our simulations. For the practical use in the next generation's cellular systems, the performance of our improved neural network is verified by large size cellular systems with up to 500 cells. The newly defined energy function and the motion equation with two heuristics in our neural network achieve the goal of finding optimum or near-optimum solutions in a nearly constant time.

The scattering characteristics of a waveguide T-junction with an inductive post are analyzed by the port reflection coefficient method (PRCM), combined with the mode-matching technique. Variation behaviors of the scattering parameters are provided as a function of the operating frequency and the dimensions of the junction. The results are helpful for the design of power dividers using this type of T-junction configuration.