This paper presents Dynamic Attention Map by Ising model for face detection. In general, a face detector can not know where faces there are and how many faces there are in advance. Therefore, the face detector must search the whole regions on the image and requires much computational time. To speed up the search, the information obtained at previous search points should be used effectively. In order to use the likelihood of face obtained at previous search points effectively, Ising model is adopted to face detection. Ising model has the two-state spins; "up" and "down". The state of a spin is updated by depending on the neighboring spins and an external magnetic field. Ising spins are assigned to "face" and "non-face" states of face detection. In addition, the measured likelihood of face is integrated into the energy function of Ising model as the external magnetic field. It is confirmed that face candidates would be reduced effectively by spin flip dynamics. To improve the search performance further, the single level Ising search method is extended to the multilevel Ising search. The interactions between two layers which are characterized by the renormalization group method is used to reduce the face candidates. The effectiveness of the multilevel Ising search method is also confirmed by the comparison with the single level Ising search method.

The reliability-based heuristic search methods for maximum likelihood decoding (MLD) generate test error patterns (or, equivalently, candidate codewords) according to their heuristic values. Test error patterns are stored in lists and its space complexity is crucially large for MLD of long block codes. Based on the decoding algorithms both of Battail and Fang and of its generalized version suggested by Valembois and Fossorier, we propose a new method for reducing the space complexity of the heuristic search methods for MLD including the well-known decoding algorithm of Han et al. If the heuristic function satisfies a certain condition, the proposed method guarantees to reduce the space complexity of both the Battail-Fang and Han et al. decoding algorithms. Simulation results show the high efficiency of the proposed method.

Grid computing is a state-of-the-art parallel computing technology which enables worldwide computers to dynamically share their computing powers and resource to each other. The grid takes advantage of Internet as a universal communication platform to carry messages. Basically, Internet doesn't guarantee loss-free and ordered transmission, hence, the grid should keep the cause and effect of events by itself to ensure the correct ordering of command invocations at the remote hosts. The ordering issue arises when the messages travel across the networks with unpredictable delay. Recent research has studied the security and resource control issues, but failed to address the requirements of transport layer on the grid communication platform. In this paper, we propose the Causal Ordered Grid (COG) architecture and implement it to study the transport performance issues when the grid is built over worldwide networks. The COG provides a novel service model to the applications with time-sensitive and causal-ordered transportation. From our experiments, the design of the grid middleware should use a causal-ordered, time-sensitive transportation rather than TCP. Our research will be beneficial to the improvement of the grid computing and can provide wealthy empirical results for the designer.

A fast encoding technique is described for vector quantization (VQ) of line spectral frequency parameters. A reduction in VQ encoding complexity is achieved by using a preliminary test that reduces the necessary codebook search range. The test is performed based on two criteria. One criterion uses the distance between a specific single element of the input vector and the corresponding element of the codevectors in the codebook. The other criterion makes use of the ordering property of LSF parameters. The fast encoding technique is implemented in the enhanced variable rate codec (EVRC) encoding algorithm. Simulation results show that the average searching range of the codebook can be reduced by 44.50% for the EVRC without degradation of spectral distortion (SD).

The encoding process of vector quantization (VQ) is a time bottleneck preventing its practical applications. In order to speed up VQ encoding, it is very effective to use lower dimensional features of a vector to estimate how large the Euclidean distance between the input vector and a candidate codeword could be so as to reject most unlikely codewords. The three popular statistical features of the average or the mean, the variance, and L2 norm of a vector have already been adopted in the previous works individually. Recently, these three statistical features were combined together to derive a sequential EEENNS search method in [6], which is very efficient but still has obvious computational redundancy. This Letter aims at giving a mathematical analysis on the results of EEENNS method further and pointing out that it is actually unnecessary to use L2 norm feature anymore in fast VQ encoding if the mean and the variance are used simultaneously as proposed in IEENNS method. In other words, L2 norm feature is redundant for a rejection test in fast VQ encoding. Experimental results demonstrated an approximate 10-20% reduction of the total computational cost for various detailed images in the case of not using L2 norm feature so that it confirmed the correctness of the mathematical analysis.

AgCdO12wt% contacts mounted on electrical relays were tested in a dc 14 V-21 A or 42 V-8.4 A resistive circuit as make-only contacts. In this experiment, we took photograph records and measured arc duration and number of bounces. A transferred pip was grown on the cathode surface, and its height H grew H/Ga>0.5, where where H is height of pip, Ga is the contact separation, sticking occurred easily. Neither the rapidity of growth or the shape of the transferred pip influenced circuit conditions, but there were differences observed for the each sample. Since the arc discharge of switching operations at make-only contacts occurs during a rebound, the arc duration, as well as the number of bounces fluctuates.

Short gap arc V-I characteristics are essential to discussions on behavior of contact arc at opening and closing. From this point of view, some conventional arc V-I characteristics were reviewed and inconvenient points of them for practical use were pointed out: (1) not a few electrode-material-dependent constants needed in the equation of V-I relation, (2) difficulty in the prediction of real arc extinction phenomena. In order to overcome these inconveniences, the author measured short gap arc V-I characteristics originally, and tried to formulate them into a simple form on the assumption that the arc column V-I characteristics are little dependent on electrode materials but the unstable arc region is strongly dependent on electrode materials. Measured arc column voltage was directly proportional to the square root of gap length and inversely proportional to the cube root of arc current. Arc became unstable when arc current decreased near to the value generally known as the minimum arc current. It was not necessarily the case that the arc extinguished completely at the minimum arc current, but, depending on the circuit conditions, the arc often existed discontinuously below the so-called minimum arc current. Simple empirical V-I characteristics were proposed for practical use, together with the unstable arc region as the information for arc extinction phenomena.

This paper proposes hardware-efficient VLSI architectures for 2-channel signal word decomposed filters (2-ch SWDFs) and their design method in consideration of the implemented circuit size. By consideration of the circuit size in design method, 2-ch SWDFs with a minimum output error among SWDFs whose size is equal to or smaller than a specification can be designed. Canonical Signed Digit expressions are used to effectively represent the filter coefficients of the SWDFs in order to make its circuit size small. Through precise analysis of the internal structures, circuit size can be accurately estimated. Some design examples show that the proposed method can design filters whose output error is about -12 dB lower than that of the linear FIR filters. Compared to an exhaustive search method, our method is much faster and can design filters whose output errors are only about 2 dB more.

Recently, Lin, Hwang, and Li proposed an efficient remote authentication scheme using smart cards for multi-server architecture based on the geometric property of the Euclidean plane. Herein, we show that their scheme is vulnerable to two forgery attacks and a password-guessing attack, and is not easily repairable. Furthermore, their scheme lacks a proper user eviction mechanism.

General exercise approaches are not convenient for some people in undertaking appropriate exercise due to the limited variety of present programs at existing exercise machines. Moreover, continuous support by one sports doctor is only available for a limited number of users. In this paper, therefore, we propose an Internet-based technical framework, which is designed on multi-tiered client/server architecture, for integrating and easily upgrading exercise programs. By applying the technical framework, a cycle ergometer health promotion system was developed for providing personally fitted. We also presented some facilities to assist sports doctors in quickly designing and remotely improving individual exercise protocols against cycle ergometer exercise based on a history database. Then we evaluated the Internet-based cycle ergometer system during two months of feasibility experiments for six elderly persons in terms of usability. As a result, the Internet-based cycle ergometer system was effective for continuously supporting the personal fitting procedure.

This paper proposes a "structuring search space" (SSS) method aimed to accelerate recognition of large character sets. We divide the feature space of character categories into smaller clusters and derive the centroid of each cluster as a pivot. Given an input pattern, it is compared with all the pivots and only a limited number of clusters whose pivots have higher similarity (or smaller distance) to the input pattern are searched in, thus accelerating the recognition speed. This is based on the assumption that the search space is a distance space. We also consider two ways of candidate selection and finally combine them the method has been applied to a practical off-line Japanese character recognizer with the result that the coarse classification time is reduced to 56% and the whole recognition time is reduced to 52% while keeping its recognition rate as the original.

JPEG2000 image compression standard is designed to cater the needs of a large span of applications including numerous consumer products. However, its use is restricted due to the high hardware cost involved in its implementation. Bit Plane Coder (BPC) is the main resource intensive component of JPEG2000. Its throughput plays a key role in deciding the overall throughput of a JPEG2000 encoder. In this paper we present the algorithm and parallel pipelined VLSI architecture for BPC which processes a complete stripe-column concurrently during every pass. The hardware requirements and the critical path delay of the proposed technique are compared with the existing solutions. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture has 2.6 times greater throughput than existing architectures, with a comparatively small increase in hardware cost.

We propose a new electric contact device for arc discharge suppression. The functions of conventional electric contacts are categorized into energizing switch contacts and transient current switch contacts. A capacitor is connected in series to a transient current switch. Suppression of power consumption and arc discharge at breaking contacts are proposed, experimentally measured, and theoretically analyzed. The transient V-I characteristics at breaking contacts are controlled by the transient current switch and the capacitor. The transient responses at contacts were numerically derived by SPICE, and the energizing switch contacts voltage could be controlled to less than the minimum arc voltage. Using 2 conventional relays, no arc ignition at breaking contacts was confirmed for 50 V/25 A.

We proposed a new electric contact device that suppresses the arc phenomena. The functions of electric contacts are divided into energizing and switching for arc suppression. Switching contacts consist of multielectrodes and each electrode current is suppressed by the series resistance. For realization of multicontacting, cantilever beam array electrodes were formed on a silicon substrate using micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. The finite element method was used to optimize the structure. The fabrication process of the cantilever was examined. Au-Au contact current of 0.97 A was broken without arc ignition.

Arc duration of breaking arcs is investigated in order to obtain an experimental equation for the dependence of the arc duration on supply voltage in DC resistive circuit in air at atmospheric pressure. Materials of the contact pairs are Au, Ag, Cu, Ni, Pt and Pd. The interrupted current is ranging from 6 A to 10 A and the supply voltage is 30 V, 42 V and 54 V. Sato's experimental equation for the arc length is modified to obtain more appropriate experimental equation for our experimental results. The arc termination current It and minimum arc voltage Vm that are obtained with the experimental results are used as parameters of the experimental equation for each contact material. And characteristic coefficients C for each contact material in the experimental equation are obtained. As results, the experimental equation for each contact material well agrees with the experimental results. The experimental equation for several contact materials is presented.

Arc occurrence rates are measured for Ag and Pd contacts operated in a DC resistive load circuit. Based on the obtained results, it is confirmed that arc certainly occurs at current levels lower than the conventional minimum arc current value for each of the tested contact materials. Arc occurrence rate in general comes close to 100% at the conventional minimum arc current level. Accordingly, careful attention should be paid to use of the term "minimum arc current" in order to avoid misinterpretation thereof.

Wireless Internet technologies have been developing and users are now able to access more information anywhere through small screen mobile devices. However, due to the limits of cost, bandwidth and screen size in a wireless environment, it is important to minimize interactions between a mobile user and his handheld device, as well as the amount of data transmitted. In this paper we present an interactive evolutionary approach for user-oriented Web search by using mobile devices. To verify this approach, a series of experiments has been conducted. The results show that our approach can allocate the information a user needs within only a few user-system interactions. It substantially reduces the number of retrieved pages a user has to visit. This is especially an important benefit to mobile users.

This paper is devoted to simulate the arc movement in the quenching chamber of the low-voltage circuit breaker. Based on a group of governing equations, a three-dimensional (3-D) arc model is built and solved by a modified commercial code. According to the simulated results, some phenomena such as a 'bulge' in front of the arc column, a tail in the rear of the arc column, arc shrinkage near the electrodes and arc movement characteristics versus different chamber configuration and external magnetic field are found, and the mechanism of the above phenomena is described in detail. Finally, in order to verify the simulation results, arc movement is investigated by hi-spec motion analyzer experimentally.

In each contact material (Ag, Cu, Ni, and Fe), the breaking arcs occurring between an electrical contact pair in a resistive circuit of DC42 V/10.5 A were observed with a high-speed camera (1000 frames/s). Arc voltage and arc current were also measured simultaneously. By analyzing cathode and anode bright spots in the photographs, the positions of cathode and anode bright spots on contact surfaces were plotted on the graph. As a result, cathode and anode bright spots were found to express the characteristic motion in each material. Moreover, by comparing those results with the photograph of contact surface after all operations.

The motion of arc spots of breaking arc is investigated for Ag electrical contacts in DC 42 V/10 A resistive circuit using a high-speed camera. Also, the eroded contact surfaces are observed with a microscope after each breaking operation. As results, some kinds of different films and eroded regions are distinguished. Diameters of these regions are corresponding to the widths of the cathode and anode spot regions that are obtained by using the high-speed camera. It is found that the films and eroded regions on the electrical contacts are generated at different stages of the breaking arc.