Superconducting Transition edge sensor (TES) coupled with a heavy metal absorber is a promising microcalorimeter for Gamma-ray (γ-ray) spectroscopy with ultra-high energy resolution and high detection efficiency. It is very useful for the non-destructed inspection of the nuclide materials. High resolving power of γ-ray peaks can precisely identify multiple nuclides such as Plutonium (Pu) and Actinides with high efficiency and safety. For this purpose, we have developed the TES coupled with a tin absorber. We suggest the new device structure using the gold bump post which connects a tin absorber to the thermometer of the superconducting Ir/Au bilayer. High thermal conductivity of the gold bump post realized strong thermal coupling between the thermometer and the γ-ray absorber, and it brought the benefit of large pulse height and fast decay time. Our TES achieved the good energy resolution of 84 eV FWHM at 59.5 keV. Using this TES device, we also succeeded to demonstrate the nuclear material measurements. In the measurement of a Pu sample, we detected the sharp γ-ray peaks from 239Pu and 240Pu, and of a Fission Products (FP) sample, we observed fluorescence X-ray peaks emitted by the elements contained in FP. The TES could resolve the fine structures of each fluorescence X-ray line like Kα1 and Kα2. In addition to that, we developed the TES coupled with tantalum absorber, which is expected to have higher absorption efficiency for γ-rays. This device reported the best energy resolution of 465 eV at 662 keV.

This letter proposes a cooperative communication scheme with pre-coding in order to improve a performance in a wireless communication system. In a conventional scheme, a performance of the system is degraded due to the signal attenuation by the path loss and inter-cell interference (ICI). The proposed scheme uses two relays in order to obtain a diversity gain. Additionally, the proposed scheme uses a constructive spatial phase coding (SPC) using the phase relation of the channels in order to obtain an improved diversity gain. Therefore, the proposed scheme can prevent the performance degradation caused by the path loss. When a mobile is located in the cell edge, the signal suffers from the ICI by the other signals transmitted from a neighboring base station. In the proposed scheme, the other signals broadcast from neighboring base station are destructively superimposed by using the destructive SPC scheme. And then the power of the destructively superimposed signal is reduced. Therefore, the proposed scheme can reduce the ICI effect in the cell edge. Also, the destructively superimposed signal does not cause the performance degradation of other mobiles in the neighboring cell. The simulation results show that the bit error performance of the proposed scheme is better than the conventional scheme.

We propose a digital image watermarking method satisfying information hiding criteria (IHC) for robustness against JPEG compression, cropping, scaling, and rotation. When a stego-image is cropped, the marking positions of watermarks are unclear. To detect the position in a cropped stego-image, a marker or synchronization code is embedded with the watermarks in a lattice pattern. Attacks by JPEG compression, scaling, and rotation cause errors in extracted watermarks. Against such errors, the same watermarks are repeatedly embedded in several areas. The number of errors in the extracted watermarks can be reduced by using a weighted majority voting (WMV) algorithm. To correct residual errors in output of the WMV algorithm, we use a high-performance error-correcting code: a low-density parity-check (LDPC) code constructed by progressive edge-growth (PEG). In computer simulations using the IHC ver. 4 the proposed method could a bit error rate of 0, the average PSNR was 41.136 dB, and the computational time for synchronization recovery was less than 10 seconds. The proposed method can thus provide high image quality and fast synchronization recovery.

We propose an edge-preserving multiscale image decomposition method using filters for non-equispaced signals. It is inspired by the domain transform, which is a high-speed edge-preserving smoothing method, and it can be used in many image processing applications. One of the disadvantages of the domain transform is sensitivity to noise. Even though the proposed method is based on non-equispaced filters similar to the domain transform, it is robust to noise since it employs a multiscale decomposition. It uses the Laplacian pyramid scheme to decompose an input signal into the piecewise-smooth components and detail components. We design the filters by using an optimization based on edge-preserving smoothing with a conversion of signal distances and filters taking into account the distances between signal intervals. In addition, we also propose construction methods of filters for non-equispaced signals by using arbitrary continuous filters or graph spectral filters in order that various filters can be accommodated by the proposed method. As expected, we find that, similar to state-of-the-art edge-preserving smoothing techniques, including the domain transform, our approach can be used in many applications. We evaluated its effectiveness in edge-preserving smoothing of noise-free and noisy images, detail enhancement, pencil drawing, and stylization.

A virtual network edge using live migration of virtualized network functions (VNFs) can be expected to reduce computation time and save resources instead of conventional network edge routers that have complex functions. Wavelength-division-multiplexing/time-division-multiplexing (WDM/TDM) photonic switching technology for metro ring networks is proposed to provide fast bandwidth resource allocation for rapidly changing service-flow demand. However, there are no reports on the coexistence of high-speed path switching for live migration with fast bandwidth resource allocation, as far as we know. We propose an architecture that achieves both high-speed path switching and fast dynamic bandwidth allocation control for service flows with in-service live migration. The feature of this architecture is that the VNF for the virtual edge corresponds to each 10-gigabit Ethernet-passive optical network (10G-EPON) and fast route change can be achieved with a simple point-to-point path between VNFs and optical line terminals (OLTs). The second feature is that the live migration of a VNF is limited to a part of it that contains a larger number of subscribers. Owing to the reduction in the number of total paths, fast resource allocation can be provided.

This paper presents a novel defense scheme for DDoS attacks that uses an image processing method. This scheme especially focused on the prevalence of adjacent neighbor spoofing, called subnet spoofing. It is rarely studied and there is few or no feasible approaches than other spoofing attacks. The key idea is that a “DDoS attack with IP spoofing” is represented as a specific pattern such as a “line” on the spatial image planes, which can be recognized through an image processing technique. Applying the clustering technique to the lines makes it possible to identify multiple attack source networks simultaneously. For the identified networks in which the zombie hosts reside, we then employ a signature-based pattern extraction algorithm, called a pivoted movement, and the DDoS attacks are filtered by correlating the IP and media access control pairing signature. As a result, this proposed scheme filters attacks without disturbing legitimate traffic. Unlike previous IP traceback schemes such as packet marking and path fingerprinting, which try to diagnose the entire attack path, our proposed scheme focuses on identifying only the attack source. Our approach can achieve an adaptive response to DDoS attacks, thereby mitigating them at the source, while minimizing the disruption of legitimate traffic. The proposed scheme is analyzed and evaluated on the IPv4 and IPv6 network topology from CAIDA, the results of which show its effectiveness.

The 60 GHz band compact-range communication is very promising for short-time, short distance communication. Unfortunately, due to the short wavelengths in this frequency band the shadowing effects caused by human bodies, furniture, etc are severe and need to be modeled properly. The numerical methods like the finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD), the finite-element method (FEM), the method of moments (MoM) are unable to compute the field scattered by large objects due to their excessive time and memory requirements. Ray-based approaches like the geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD), uniform geometrical theory of diffraction (UTD), uniform asymptotic theory of diffraction (UAT) are effective and popular solutions but suffer from computation of corner-diffracted field, field at the caustics. Fresnel zone number (FZN) adopted modified edge representation (MER) equivalent edge current (EEC) is an accurate and fast high frequency diffraction technique which expresses the fields in terms of line integration. It adopts distances, rather than the angles used in GTD, UTD or UAT but still provides uniform and highly accurate fields everywhere including geometrical boundaries. Previous work verified this method for planar scatterers. In this work, FZN MER EEC is used to compute field distribution in the millimeter-wave compact range communication in the presence of three dimensional scatterers, where shadowing effects rather than multi-path dominate the radio environments. First, circular cylinder is disintegrated into rectangular plate and circular disks and then FZN MER is applied along with geodesic path loss. The dipole wave scattering from perfectly conducting circular cylinder is discussed as numerical examples.

A generalized covariance matrix taper (GCMT) model is proposed to enhance the performance of knowledge-aided space-time adaptive processing (KA-STAP) under sea clutter environments. In KA-STAP, improving the accuracy degree of the a priori clutter covariance matrix is a fundamental issue. As a crucial component in the a priori clutter covariance matrix, the taper matrix is employed to describe the internal clutter motion (ICM) or other subspace leakage effects, and commonly constructed by the classical covariance matrix taper (CMT) model. This work extents the CMT model into a generalized CMT (GCMT) model with a greater degree of freedom. Comparing it with the CMT model, the proposed GCMT model is more suitable for sea clutter background applications for its improved flexibility. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency of the GCMT model under different sea clutter environments.

This paper proposes the proportional static-phase-error reduction (SPER) for the frequency-multiplier-based delay-locked-loop (DLL) architecture. The frequency multiplier (FM) can synthesize a combined clock to solve the high operational frequency of DLL. However, FM is sensitive to the static phase error of DLL. A SPER loop adopts a timing amplifier and a coarse-fine tuning technique to enhance the deterministic jitter of FM. The SPER loop proportionally reduces the static phase error and can extend the operating range of FM.

This paper introduces low-power and small area injection-locking clock and data recovery circuit (CDR) for the wireline and wireless proximity link. By using signal conversion from differential input to common-mode output, the newly proposed edge detector can eliminate the usually used delay line and XOR-based edge detector, and provided low power operation and a small circuit area. The CDR test chip fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process consumes 30mW from a 1.2- V supply at 12.5Gbps. The fabricated CDR achieved a BER lower than 10-12 and the recovered clock had an rms jitter of 0.87ps. The CDR area is 0.165mm2.

Recently, object-proposal methods have attracted more and more attention of scholars and researchers for its utility in avoiding exhaustive sliding window search in an image. Object-proposal method is inspired by a concept that objects share a common feature. There exist many object-proposal methods which are either in segmentation fashion or engineering categories depending on low-level feature. Among those object-proposal methods, Edge Boxes, which is based on the number of contours that a bounding box wholly contains, has the state of art performance. Since Edge Boxes sometimes misses proposing some obvious objects in some images, we propose an appropriate version of it based on our two observations. We call the appropriate version as Improved Edge Boxes. The first of our observations is that objects have a property which can help us distinguish them from the background. It is called object saliency. An appropriate way we employ to calculate object saliency can help to retrieve some objects. The second of our observations is that objects ‘prefer’ to appear at the center part of images. For this reason, a bounding box that appears at the center part of the image is likely to contain an object. These two observations are going to help us retrieve more objects while promoting the recall performance. Finally, our results show that given just 5000 proposals we achieve over 89% object recall but 87% in Edge Boxes at the challenging overlap threshold of 0.7. Further, we compare our approach to some state-of-the-art approaches to show that our results are more accurate and faster than those approaches. In the end, some comparative pictures are shown to indicate intuitively that our approach can find more objects and more accurate objects than Edge Boxes.

Personal e-healthcare service is growing significantly. A large number of personal e-health measuring and monitoring devices are now in the market. However, to achieve better health outcome, various devices or services need to work together. This coordination among services remains challenge, due to their variations and complexities. To address this issue, we have proposed an ontology-based framework for interactive self-assessment of RESTful e-health services. Unlike existing e-health service frameworks where they had tightly coupling between services, as well as their data schemas were difficult to change and extend in the future. In our work, the loosely coupling among services and flexibility of each service are achieved through the design and implementation based on HYDRA vocabulary and REST principles. We have implemented clinical knowledge through the combination of OWL-DL and SPARQL rules. All of these services evolve independently; their interfaces are based on REST principles, especially HATEOAS constraints. We have demonstrated how to apply our framework for interactive self-assessment in e-health applications. We have shown that it allows the medical knowledge to drive the system workflow according to the event-driven principles. New data schema can be maintained during run-time. This is the essential feature to support arriving of IoT (Internet of Things) based medical devices, which have their own data schema and evolve overtime.

The objective of this paper is to recognize and classify the poses of idols in still images on the web. The poses found in Japanese idol photos are often complicated and their classification is highly challenging. Although advances in computer vision research have made huge contributions to image recognition, it is not enough to estimate human poses accurately. We thus propose a method that refines result of human pose estimation by Pose Guide Ontology (PGO) and a set of energy functions. PGO, which we introduce in this paper, contains useful background knowledge, such as semantic hierarchies and constraints related to the positional relationship between body parts. Energy functions compute the right positions of body parts based on knowledge of the human body. Through experiments, we also refine PGO iteratively for further improvement of classification accuracy. We demonstrate pose classification into 8 classes on a dataset containing 400 idol images on the web. Result of experiments shows the efficiency of PGO and the energy functions; the F-measure of classification is 15% higher than the non-refined results. In addition to this, we confirm the validity of the energy functions.

The primitive called public key encryption with non-interactive opening (PKENO) is a class of public key encryption (PKE) with additional functionality. By using this, a receiver of a ciphertext can prove that the ciphertext is an encryption of a specified message in a publicly verifiable manner. In some situation that a receiver needs to claim that a ciphertext is NOT decrypted to a specified message, if he/she proves the fact by using PKENO straightforwardly, the real message of the ciphertext is revealed and a verifier checks that it is different from the specified message about which the receiver wants to prove. However, this naive solution is problematic in terms of privacy. Inspired by this problem, we propose the notion of disavowable public key encryption with non-interactive opening (disavowable PKENO) where, with respect to a ciphertext and a message, the receiver of the ciphertext can issue a proof that the plaintext of the ciphertext is NOT the message. Also, we give a concrete construction. Specifically, a disavowal proof in our scheme consists of 61 group elements. The proposed disavowable PKENO scheme is provably secure in the standard model under the decisional linear assumption and strong unforgeability of the underlying one-time signature scheme.

This study improves the compression efficiency of Lee's colorization-based coding framework by introducing a novel colorization matrix construction and an adaptive color conversion. Colorization-based coding methods reconstruct color components in the decoder by colorization, which adds color to a base component (a grayscale image) using scant color information. The colorization process can be expressed as a linear combination of a few column vectors of a colorization matrix. Thus it is important for colorization-based coding to make a colorization matrix whose column vectors effectively approximate color components. To make a colorization matrix, Lee's colorization-based coding framework first obtains a base and color components by RGB-YCbCr color conversion, and then performs a segmentation method on the base component. Finally, the entries of a colorization matrix are created using the segmentation results. To improve compression efficiency on this framework, we construct a colorization matrix based on a correlation of base-color components. Furthermore, we embed an edge-preserving smoothing filtering process into the colorization matrix to reduce artifacts. To achieve more improvement, our method uses adaptive color conversion instead of RGB-YCbCr color conversion. Our proposed color conversion maximizes the sum of the local variance of a base component, which resulted in increment of the difference of intensities at region boundaries. Since segmentation methods partition images based on the difference, our adaptive color conversion leads to better segmentation results. Experiments showed that our method has higher compression efficiency compared with the conventional method.

Code-based public-key encryption schemes (PKE) are the candidates for post-quantum cryptography, since they are believed to resist the attacks using quantum algorithms. The most famous such schemes are the McEliece encryption and the Niederreiter encryption. In this paper, we present the zero-knowledge (ZK) proof systems for proving statements about data encrypted using these schemes. Specifically, we present a proof of plaintext knowledge for both PKE's, and also a verifiable McEliece PKE. The main ingredients of our constructions are the ZK identification schemes by Stern from Crypto'93 and by Jain, Krenn, Pietrzak, and Tentes from Asiacrypt'12.

Radio channel modeling is fundamental for designing wireless communication systems. In millimeter or sub-millimeter wave short range communication, shadowing effect by electrically-large objects is one of the most important factors determining the field strength and thus the coverage. Unfortunately, numerical methods like MoM, FDTD, FEM are unable to compute the field scattered by large objects due to their excessive time and memory requirements. Ray theory like geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD) by Keller is an effective and popular solution but suffers various kinds of singularities at geometrical boundaries such as incidence shadow boundary (ISB) or reflection shadow boundary (RSB). Modified edge representation (MER) equivalent edge current (EEC) is an accurate and a fast high frequency diffraction technique which expresses the fields in terms of line integration. It adopts classical Keller-type knife-edge diffraction coefficients and still provides uniform and highly accurate fields everywhere including geometrical boundaries. MER is used here to compute the millimeter-wave field distribution in compact range communication systems where shadowing effects rather than multi-path ones dominate the radio environments. For further simplicity, trigonometric functions in Keller's diffraction coefficients are replaced by the path lengths of source to the observer via the edge point of integration of the scatterers in the form of Fresnel zone number (FZN). Complexity, Computation time and the memory were reduced drastically without degrading the accuracy. The dipole wave scattering from flat rectangular plates is discussed with numerical examples.

The MQ problem, which consists of solving a system of multivariate quadratic polynomials over a finite field, has attracted the attention of researchers for the development of public-key cryptosystems because (1) it is NP-complete, (2) there is no known polynomial-time algorithm for its solution, even in the quantum computational model, and (3) it enables cryptographic primitives of practical interest. In 2011, Sakumoto, Shirai and Hiwatari presented two new zero-knowledge identification protocols based exclusively on the MQ problem. The 3-pass identification protocol of Sakumoto et al. has impersonation probability 2/3. In this paper, we propose an improvement that reduces the impersonation probability to 1/2. The result is a protocol that reduces the total computation time, the total communication needed and requires a smaller number of rounds for the same security level. We also present a new extension that achieves an additional communication reduction with the use of some smaller hash commitments, but maintaining the same security level.

Generally, in order to extend the cell coverage of a mobile station, relay stations are used at a cell edge in a cellular system. But, received signals in a relay station of a cell edge have a large error because a neighboring cell transmits the signals for other users. Since the transmitted signals for other users are interference for received signals in the relay station of the cell edge, the relay station has a negative effect on the bit error ratio performance. The cell coverage can not be extended stably. In order to expand the cell coverage stably, the inter-cell interference has to cancel. Thus, in this paper, the technique that the inter-cell interference (ICI) is canceled by cooperative relays is proposed. Also, diversity gain is obtained by cooperative relays.

In this letter, we propose a new intra-field deinterlacing algorithm based on an edge dependent weighted filter (EDWF). The proposed algorithm consists of three steps: 1) calculating the gradients of three directions (45°, 90°, and 135°) in the local working window; 2) achieving the weights of the neighboring pixels by exploiting the edge information in the pixel gradients; 3) interpolating the missing pixel using the proposed EDWF interpolator. Compared with existing deinterlacing methods on different images and video sequences, the proposed algorithm improves the peak signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) while achieving better subjective quality.