This paper discusses far-end crosstalk (FEXT) cancellation methods for multicarrier transmission system. A system arrangement and its tap update method are proposed when FEXT cancelers and a frequency-domain equalizer (FEQ) are jointly adapted to combat channel intersymbol interference, FEXT, and other additive noise. We present mathematical formulation of minimum mean-square error (MSE) and the optimum tap coefficients for the FEXT cancelers and the FEQ when FEXT cancellation techniques are introduced for multiuser discrete multitone (DMT) based very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) transmission. It is shown that FEXT cancellation enhances the achievable bit rate in FEXT-limited systems. Computer simulation and analytical results show that the performance of jointly adapted FEXT cancelers and an FEQ is better than that of separately adapted FEXT cancelers and an FEQ.

Faces of a person performing freely in front of the camera can be captured in a sufficient resolution for facial parts recognition by the proposed camera system enhanced with a special PTZ camera. Head region, facial parts regions such as eyes and mouth and the borders of facial parts are extracted hierarchically by being guided by the irises and nostrils preliminarily extracted from the images of PTZ camera. In order to show the effectivity of this system, we proposed a possibility to generate the borders of facial parts of the face for the facial caricaturing and to introduce eye-contacting facial images which can eye-contact bilaterally with each other on the TV conference environment.

Thermal stability of stacked high-κ dielectrics, especially ZrO2, HfO2 and ZrSiO4 /SiO2 layered structures, on silicon has been investigated in terms of ultrahigh vacuum (UHV), 1 Torr N2 and helium (He) gas annealing with controlled oxygen partial pressure (PO2) at 920. Comparison of 2 nm and 20 nm ZrO2 films under UHV annealing revealed that the trigger of silicidation is the contact of ZrO2, SiO and Si accompanying disappearance of interfacial SiO2 layer due to SiO desorption. In the contact position, a small amount of SiO gas can easily change ZrO2 to ZrSi2. This reaction model is also applicable to the silicidation of HfO2 and ZrSiO4, at not only stacked high-κ film/Si substrate interface, but also at gate poly-Si/high-κ film interface. Moreover, comparison of UHV, N2 and He annealing with controlled PO2 revealed that the optimal PO2 ranges in He at which the thermal stability of layered structure can be achieved are wider than those in UHV and N2. This result suggests that He gas physically may obstruct SiO creation due to the quenching of atomic vibration at degradation-prone sites in the SiO2 /Si interface, thus reducing probability of bond breaking process, which is the first step of silicidation.

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.

A polarization switchable slot-coupled microstrip antenna using PIN diodes is proposed and studied. The microstrip feed line installed behind the ground plane is divided into two branches and each tip of the branches is connected to the ground plane through a PIN diode. One of the diodes is oriented from the tip to the ground plane and the other is oriented from the ground to the tip so that a slot in the ground can be selected to feed the patch by switching the dc bias between positive and negative. This selection contributes to switch the polarization between horizontal and vertical. In this paper, the authors investigate the polarization switching antenna theoretically and experimentally and confirmed sufficient differencce of antenna gain between horizontal and vertical polarization.

In this paper, we propose a new method of automatic speech summarization for each utterance, where a set of words that maximizes a summarization score is extracted from automatic speech transcriptions. The summarization score indicates the appropriateness of summarized sentences. This extraction is achieved by using a dynamic programming technique according to a target summarization ratio. This ratio is the number of characters/words in the summarized sentence divided by the number of characters/words in the original sentence. The extracted set of words is then connected to build a summarized sentence. The summarization score consists of a word significance measure, linguistic likelihood, and a confidence measure. This paper also proposes a new method of measuring summarization accuracy based on a word network expressing manual summarization results. The summarization accuracy of each automatic summarization is calculated by comparing it with the most similar word string in the network. Japanese broadcast-news speech, transcribed using a large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition (LVCSR) system, is summarized and evaluated using our proposed method with 20, 40, 60, 70 and 80% summarization ratios. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method can effectively extract relatively important information by removing redundant or irrelevant information.

Determining consistent global checkpoints of a distributed computation has applications in the areas such as rollback recovery, distributed debugging, output commit and others. Netzer and Xu introduced the notion of zigzag paths and presented necessary and sufficient conditions for a set of checkpoints to be part of a consistent global checkpoint. This result also reveals that determining the existence of zigzag paths between checkpoints is crucial for determining consistent global checkpoints. Recent research also reveals that determining zigzag paths on-line is not possible. In this paper, we present an off-line method for determining the existence of zigzag paths between checkpoints.

We propose using SQP (Sequential Quadratic Programming) to directly recover 3D quadratic surface parameters from multiple views. A surface equation is used as a constraint. In addition to the sum of squared reprojection errors defined in the traditional bundle adjustment, a Lagrangian term is added to force recovered points to satisfy the constraint. The minimization is realized by SQP. Our algorithm has three advantages. First, given corresponding features in multiple views, the SQP implementation can directly recover the quadratic surface parameters optimally instead of a collection of isolated 3D points coordinates. Second, the specified constraints are strictly satisfied and the camera parameters and 3D coordinates of points can be determined more accurately than that by unconstrained methods. Third, the recovered quadratic surface model can be represented by a much smaller number of parameters instead of point clouds and triangular patches. Experiments with both synthetic and real images show the power of this approach.

This paper presents a new method for embedding digital watermarks into Bezier polynomial patches. An object surface is supposed to be represented by multiple piecewise Bezier polynomial patches. A Bezier patch passes through its four-corner control points, which are called data points, and does not pass through the other control points. To embed a watermark, a Bezier patch is divided into two patches. Since each subdivided patch shares two data points of the original patch, the subdivision apparently generates two additional data points on the boundaries of the original patch. We can generate the new data points in any position on the boundaries by changing the subdivision parameters. The additional data points can not be removed without knowing some parameters for subdividing and deforming the patch, hence the patch subdivision enables us to embed a watermark into the surface.

This paper presents a novel wavelet compression technique to increase compression of images. Based on zerotree entropy coding method, this technique initially uses only two symbols (significant and zerotree) to compress image data for each level. Additionally, sign bit is used for newly significant coefficients to indicate them being positive or negative. Contrary to isolated zero symbols used in conventional zerotree algorithms, the proposed algorithm changes them to significant coefficients and saves its location, they are then treated just like other significant coefficients. This is done to decrease number of symbols and hence, decrease number of bits to represent the symbols used. In the end, algorithm indicates isolated zero coordinates that are used to change the value back to original during reconstruction. Noticeably high compression ratio is achieved for most of the images, without changing image quality.

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.

Effects of the sample insertion holes of the TM010 mode cylindrical cavity are analyzed on the basis of rigorous analysis by the Ritz-Galerkin method. The measurement accuracy of complex permittivity is examined by comparing the values by the perturbation method with ones by the rigorous analysis. Charts of relative errors Δ ε/εp and Δ tan δ/tan δp are presented, which are useful to measure the complex permittivity accurately by the perturbation method. The present analysis extends the validity of the conventional perturbation method.

This Letter presents a novel VQ-based digital image watermarking method. By modifying the conventional GLA algorithm, a codeword-labeled codebook is first generated. Each input image block is then reconstructed by the nearest codeword whose label is equal to the watermark bit. The watermark extraction can be performed blindly. Simulation results show that the proposed method is robust to JPEG compression, vector quantization (VQ) compression and some spatial-domain processing operations.

Data compression is popularly applied to computer systems and communication systems. Especially, lossless compression is applied to text compression. Since compressed data are very sensitive to errors, several error control methods for data compression using probability model, such as for arithmetic coding, have been proposed. This paper proposes to apply an unequal error protection, or a UEP, scheme to LZ77 coding and LZW coding. This investigates a structure of the compressed data and clarifies a part which is more sensitive to errors than the other by using theoretical analysis and computer simulation. The UEP scheme protects the error-sensitive part from errors more strongly than the others. Computer simulation says that the proposed scheme can recover from errors in the compressed data more effectively than the conventional methods.

The fuzzy set framework can be utilized in several different approaches to modeling the diagnostic process. In this paper, we introduce two main relations between symptoms and diseases where the relations are described by intuitionistic fuzzy set data. Also, we suggest four measures for medical diagnosis. We are dealing with the preliminary diagnosis from the information of interview chart. We quantify the qualitative information based on the interview chart by dual scaling. Prototype of fuzzy diagnostic sets and the linear regression methods are established with these quantified data. These methods can be used to classify new patient's tone of diseases with certain degrees of belief and its concerned symptoms.

We have developed a planarization method applicable to large-scale superconductive Nb device fabrication. A planarized multi-layer wiring structure is obtained independently of the wiring size (width, length, and density) by combining three steps for fabricating an SiO2 insulator layer: bias-sputtering, chemical mechanical polishing, and etching with a reversal mask. Fabricated three-level wiring structures, consisting of 200- or 300-nm-thick Nb and SiO2 layers, had excellent layer flatness, and the leakage current (< 0.1 µA/cm2) between the Nb layers was sufficiently low. Two hundred chains of stepwise and stacked contacts yielded a sufficiently large critical current, typically more than 10 mA at 4.2 K.

In this paper, the method of locating multiple transmission zeros by the tap-coupling technique is described for bandpass filters (BPFs), using short-ended λ/2 resonators and its application to a duplexer. First, the method of locating the transmission zero using the short-ended λ/2 resonators is examined with various excitation methods. We focus on four types of short-ended λ/2 resonators: the end-coupling type, tap-coupling type, capacitive tap-coupling type and inductive tap-coupling type. Secondly, the BPFs based on the basic characteristics of the respective resonators are proposed and designed on the basis of a general filter theory with narrow band approximation. Lastly, we propose and design new duplexers consisting of the proposed BPFs. The results lead to the conclusion that the basic characteristics of the short-ended λ/2 resonators are useful for realizing a BPF with multiple transmission zeros and a high-performance duplexer fabricated without increasing the number of elements.

This paper experimentally investigates the effectiveness of regularly-placed bit-slice layout and transistor-level optimization to datapath circuit performance. We focus on cell-base design flows with transistor-level circuit optimization. We examine the effectiveness through design experiments of 32-bit carry select adder and 16-bit tree-style multiplier in a 0.35 µm technology. From the experimental results, we can scarcely observe that manual cell placement contributes to improve circuit performance. On the other hand, transistor-level circuit optimization is so effective that circuit delay is reduced by 11-20% and power dissipation decreases to 42-62%. We can see that, in the case of cell-base design, transistor-level optimization is also important as well as in the case of custom design, whereas cell-base bit-slice layout has less importance to circuit performance.

Recently, millimeter-wave energy has attracted much attention as a new and novel energy source for materials processing. In the present paper, several unique features of millimeter-wave heating in materials processing are reviewed briefly and development of materials processing machines by mm-wave radiation is also described. In the application of mm-wave heating, sintering of high quality alumina ceramics having a high bending strength of about 800 MPa are first demonstrated and followed by preparation of aluminum nitride with a high thermal conductivity over 200 W/(mK) at a sintering temperature lower by 473-573 K than the conventional method, by which this processing can be expected to be one of the environment-conscious energy saving processes. A newly developed post-annealing process with mm-wave radiation is described, in which crystallization of amorphous perovskite oxide films prepared by plasma sputtering was attained at temperatures lower than that by the conventional heating and the dielectric constant of post-annealed SrTiO3 (STO) films by mm-wave radiation were drastically improved.

In this paper, we propose a compact representation of logic functions using Multi-valued Decision Diagrams (MDDs) called heterogeneous MDDs. In a heterogeneous MDD, each variable may take a different domain. By partitioning binary input variables and representing each partition as a single multi-valued variable, we can produce a heterogeneous MDD with 16% smaller memory size than a Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagram (ROBDD), and with comparable memory size to Free Binary Decision Diagrams (FBDDs). And also, heterogeneous MDDs have shorter Average Path Length (APL) than ROBDDs and FBDDs. We minimized a large number of benchmark functions to show the compactness of heterogeneous MDDs.