A multiple signature scheme proposed in [1] is proved to be insecure.

This letter proposes a Perfect-Reconstruction (PR) encryption scheme based on a PR QMF bank. Using the proposed scheme, signals can be encrypted and reconstructed perfectly by using two Periodically Time-Varying (PTV) digital filters respectively. Also we find that the proposed scheme has a "good" encryption effect and compares favorably with frequency scramble in the aspects of computation complexity, PR property, and degree of security.

The Non-stop Service-Enhanceable Software (NOSES) platform was developed as part of our overall plan to establish a communications software platform that can be customized for use by various communications systems, such as STM, ATM and IN. The developed NOSES techniques are call-recovery restart, system file update, and on-line partial file modification, so called "Plug-in"; they were achieved by using dynamic program modification. A system-file update inevitably affects calls in service, despite efforts to save in-service calls by copying the call data from the old file to the new one. We therefore developed a different approach: Plug-in modification. This paper evaluates the applicability of the plug-in mechanism of the NOSES platform. Plug-in is a dynamic partial-file modification technique that does not affect calls in service in a communication switching system. In order to apply plug-in program modification widely, the static and dynamic properties of the modified software must be considered. Therefore, an applicability judgement matrix is introduced. The evaluated applicability of plug-in based on case studies and field data was about 60% for service feature additions and modifications. Thus, plug-in is effective for file maintenance of switching systems from the viewpoint of quick provisioning of new service features and bug fixes.

We analyze M,MMPP/G/1 finite queues with queue-length-threshold (QLT) scheduling policy and Bernoulli schedule where the arrival of type-1 customers (nonreal-time traffic) is Poisson and the arrival of type-2 customers (real-time traffic) is a Markov-modulated Poisson process (MMPP). The next customer to be served is determined by the queue length in the buffer of type-1 customers. We obtain the joint queue length distribution for customers of both types at departure epochs by using the embedded Markov chain method, and then obtain the queue length distribution at an arbitrary time by using the supplementary variable method. From these results, we obtain the loss probabilities and the mean waiting times for customers of each type. The numerical examples show the effects of the QLT scheduling policy on performance measures of the nonreal-time traffic and the bursty real-time traffic in ATM networks.

This paper proposes a new method for estimating route outage probability in non-regenerative repeater digital microwave radio systems. In this method, the route outage probability is estimated by various means, including path correlation of fading occurrence and C/N degradation corresponding to the number of non-regenerative repeater stations with and without demodulator devices. In the conventional method, the path correlation is treated as 0 and the C/N degradation is taken as a constant value on each path. To confirm the proposed method's effectiveness, a field test is carried out in which 16QAM signals pass through two non-regenerative repeater stations. The results obtained are in good agreement with the estimated outage probability.

Parallelism on heterogeneous machines brings cost effectiveness, but also raises a new set of complex and challenging problems. This paper addresses the problem of estimating the minimum time taken to execute a program on a fine-grained parallel machine composed of different types of processors. In an earlier publication, we took the first step in this direction by presenting a graph-construction method which partitions a given program into several homogeneous parts and incorporates timing constraints due to heterogeneous parallelism into each part. In this paper, to make the method easier to be applied in a scheduling framework and to demonstrate its practical utility, we present an efficient implementation method and compare the results of its use to the optimal schedule lengths obtained by enumerating all possible solutions. Experimental results for several different machine models indicate that this method can be effectively used to estimate a program's minimum execution time.

We have studied the methods to operate single electron circuits with high reliability at room temperature. By simulation, we have numerically analyzed the error mechanisms of the room-temperature operation of a 2-gate electron pump as a fundamental single electron element circuit. We have found from the results that under the room temperature condition where the ratio of the electrostatic energy to the thermal energy for a transition electron is not so large, the minimum operation error probability is obtained at the specific gate sweep time when the circuit is operated with ramp-waveform control voltages. The analyses indicate that in the shorter sweep time range, the error probability increases because the gate voltage has changed before the significant electron transition occurs, and that in the longer sweep time range, the error probability also increases due to undesired-single-transition events. The optimum sweep time is estimated statically with the relationship between desired- and undesired-single-transition rates as a function of control gate voltages. Using the optimum condition, the operation reliability is expected to be improved by a factor of 100. This estimation method has been also confirmed by the time-dependent Monte-Carlo simulation.

Detection of facial emotions are mainly addressed by computer vision researchers based on facial display. Also detection of vocal expressions of emotions is found in research work done by acoustic researchers. Most of these research paradigms are devoted purely to visual or purely to auditory human emotion detection. However we found that it is very interesting to consider both of these auditory and visual informations together, for processing, since we hope this kind of multimodal information processing will become a datum of information processing in future multimedia era. By several intensive subjective evaluation studies we found that human beings recognize Anger, happiness, Surprise and Dislike by their visual appearance, compared to voice only detection. When the audio track of each emotion clip is dubbed with a different type of auditory emotional expression, still Anger, Happiness and Surprise were video dominant. However Dislike emotion gave mixed responses to different speakers. In both studies we found that Sadness and Fear emotions were audio dominant. As a conclusion to the paper we propose a method of facial emotion detection by using a hybrid approach, which uses multimodal informations for facial emotion recognition.

A deterministic pushdown automaton (dpda) having just one stack symbol is called a deterministic restricted one-counter automaton (droca). A deterministic one-counter automaton (doca) is a dpda having only one stack symbol, with the exception of a bottom-of-stack marker. The class of languages accepted by droca's which accept by final state is a proper subclass of the class of languages accepted by doca's. Valiant has proved the decidability of the equivalence problem for doca's and the undecidability of the inclusion problem for doca's. Thus the decidability of the equivalence problem for droca's is obvious. In this paper, we evaluate the upper bound of the length of the shortest input string (shortest witness) that disproves the inclusion for a pair of real-time droca's which accept by accept mode, and present a direct branching algorithm for checking the inclusion for a pair of languages accepted by these droca's. Then we show that the worst-case time complexity of our algorithm is polynomial in the size of these droca's.

Though causal order of message delivery simplifies the design and development of distributed applications, the overhead of enforcing it is not negligible. We claim that a causal order algorithm which does not send any redundant information is efficient in the sense of communication overhead. We characterize and classify the redundant information into four categories: information regarding just delivered, already delivered, just replaced, and already replaced messages. We propose an efficient causal multicast algorithm which prevents propagation of these redundant information. Our algorithm sends less amount of control information needed to ensure causal order than other existing algorithms and can also be applied to systems whose communication channels are not FIFO. Since our algorithm's communication overhead increases relatively slowly as the number of processes increases, it shows good scalability feature. The potential of our algorithm is shown by simulation study.

This paper proposes a design method of feature spaces in a two-stage image recognition method that improves the recognition accuracy and efficiency in statistical image recognition. The two stages are (1) image screening and (2) image recognition. Statistical image recognition methods require a lot of calculations for spatially matching between subimages and reference patterns of the specified objects to be detected in input images. Our image screening method is effective in lowering the calculation load and improving recognition accuracy. This method selects a candidate set of subimages similar to those in the object class by using a lower dimensional feature vector, while rejecting the rest. Since a set of selected subimages is recognized by using a higher dimensional feature vector, overall recognition efficiency is improved. The classifier for recognition is designed from the selected subimages and also improves recognition accuracy, since the selected subimages are less contaminated than the originals. Even when conventional recognition methods based on linear transformation algorithms, i. e. principal component analysis (PCA) and projection pursuit (PP), are applied to the recognition stage in our method, recognition accuracy and efficiency may be improved. A new criterion, called a screening criterion, for measuring overall efficiency and accuracy of image recognition is introduced to efficiently design the feature spaces of image screening and recognition. The feature space for image screening are empirically designed subject to taking the lower number of dimensions for the feature space referred to as LS and the larger value of the screening criterion. Then, the recognition feature space which number of dimensions is referred to as LR is designed under the condition LSLR. The two detection tasks were conducted in order to examine the performance of image screening. One task is to detect the eye- and-mouth-areas in a face image and the other is to detect the text-area in a document image. The experimental results demonstrate that image screening for these two tasks improves both recognition accuracy and throughput when compared to the conventional one-stage recognition method.

The act of finding or constructing a model for a portion of a given polynomial or Bezier parametric surface from the whole original one is an encountered problem in surface modeling. A new method is described for constructing polynomial or Bezier piecewise model from an original one. It is based on the "Parametric Piecewise Model," abbreviated to PPM, of curve representation. The PPM representation is given by explicit expressions in terms of only control points or polynomial coefficients. The generated piecewise model behaves completely as a normal, polynomial or Bezier model in the same way as the original one for the piece of region considered. Also it has all characteristics, i. e, order and number of control points as the original one, and satisfies at the boundaries all order continuities. The PPM representation permits normalization, piecewise modeling, PPM reduction and systematic processes.

In this paper, a dynamic constructive algorithm for fault tolerant feedforward neural network, called DCFTA, is proposed. The algorithm starts with a network with single hidden neuron, and a new hidden unit is added dynamically to the network whenever it fails to converge. Before inserting the new hidden neuron into the network, only the weights connecting the new hidden neuron to the other neurons are trained (i. e. , updated) until there is no significant reduction of the output error. To generate a fault tolerant network, the relevance of each synaptic weight is estimated in each cycle, and only the weights which have their relevance less than a specified threshold are updated in that cycle. The loss of a connections between neurons (which are equivalent to stuck-at-0 faults) are assumed. The simulation results indicate that the network constructed by DCFTA has a significant fault tolerance ability.

In order to investigate the nonlinearity and color responses of visual evoked potentials (VEPs), which have been useful in objectively detecting human color vision characteristics, a nonlinear system identification method was applied to VEPs elicited by isoluminant color stimuli, and the relationship between color stimuli and VEPs was examined. VEPs of normal subjects elicited by chromatically modulated stimuli were measured, and their binary kernels were estimated. Results showed that a system with chromatically modulated stimuli and VEP responses can be expressed by binary kernels up to the second order and that first- and second-order binary kernels depended on the color of the stimulus. The characteristics of second-order kernels reflected the difference between two chromatic channels. Opponent-color responses were included in first-order binary kernels, suggesting that they could be used as an index to test human color vision.

We present a new scheduling policy named Value-based Processor Allocation (VPA-k) for scheduling value-based transactions in a multiprocessor real-time database system. The value of a transaction represents the profit the transaction contributes to the system if it is completed before its deadline. Using VPA-k policy, the transactions with higher values are given higher priorities to execute first, while at most k percentage of the total processors are allocated to the urgent transactions dynamically. Through simulation experiments, VPA-k policy is shown to outperform other scheduling policies substantially in both maximizing the totally obtained values and minimizing the number of missed transactions.

In this paper, a design concept that offers ATM-VP connections with different protection levels is presented. The users have the choice to select the protection level they wish, the network transport service they need, and the worst cell loss they can tolerate at call set up time, and pay accordingly. Besides, an advanced adaptive traffic control scheme that simplifies call and cell processing is also presented. Many important functions such as call admission, VC-bandwidth reservation, cell-level congestion control, etc. are efficiently performed at the boundary of the backbone network. In this way is given a suitable answer to the important question: "How can future telecommunication networks based on ATM provide services with customized availability ?" A platform that outlines the potential interaction between restoration methods and congestion avoidance schemes is also obtained.

Considering the pattern classification/recognition tasks, the influence of the activation function on fault tolerance property of feedforward neural networks is empirically investigated. The simulation results show that the activation function largely influences the fault tolerance and the generalization property of neural networks. It is found that, neural networks with symmetric sigmoid activation function are largely fault tolerant than the networks with asymmetric sigmoid function. However the close relation between the fault tolerance and the generalization property was not observed and the networks with asymmetric activation function slightly generalize better than the networks with the symmetric activation function. First, the influence of the activation function on fault tolerance property of neural networks is investigated on the XOR problem, then the results are generalized by evaluating the fault tolerance property of different NNs implementing different benchmark problems.

In this paper, we propose a new type of authentication system, one-time zero-knowledge authentication system. Informally speaking, in this authentication system, double usage of the same authentication is prevented. Based on these one-time zero-knowledge authentication systems, we propose a new untraceable electronic cash scheme satisfying both untraceability and unreusablity. This scheme overcomes the problems of the previous scheme proposed by Chaum, Fiat and Naor through its greater efficiency and provable security under reasonable cryptographic assumptions. We also propose a scheme, transferable untraceable electronic cash scheme, satisfying transferability as well as the above two criteria. Moreover, we also propose a new type of electronic cash, untraceable electronic coupon ticket, in which the value of one piece of the electronic cash can be subdivided into many pieces.

This paper proposes a secure electronic sealed-bid auction protocol (SEAP) that provides an auction service on the Internet by combining three providers: an auction service provider, a key service provider, and a time service provider. The SEAP uses public key cryptography and the concept of a time-key certificate. The most important property of this protocol is that time-dependent security requirements can be strictly satisfied. The SEAP satisfies the following nine security requirements: (a) no one can deny having made a bid; (b) the protocol should be secure against malicious acts; (c) no bidder can act for another bidder; (d) no one can know who else is bidding until the time comes for the bids to be opened; (e) no one can discover the contents of any of the bids until the time comes for the bids to be opened; (f) the successful bid must have been submitted before the bidding deadline; (g) all bidders can verify that the auction policy has been correctly implemented; (h) the successful bidder can be identified without being required to make himself or herself known; and (i) the bidding contents cannot be altered. The protocol consists of three subprotocols: the Registration Subprotocol, the Bidding Subprotocol, and the Auction Subprotocol. The protocol parameters and algorithm are described in detail.

A group-oriented cipher communication method is developed and implemented on a WWW-based (World Wide Web) network system. In this method, a group key common to all entities of the group is generated based on the group name or the identities of entities belonging to the group. The group key, in turn, is used for encrypting the data being shared among the group via the WWW server. The data theft at the WWW cache sites on the intermediate communication line is prevented, establishing a unified feature of the good WWW cache performance and security. A prototype of our method proved the feasibility and the efficiency.