Simple and quick tests at medical clinics have become increasingly important. Magnetic sensing techniques have been developed to detect biomarkers using magnetic nanoparticles in liquid-phase assays. We developed a biomarker assay that involves using an alternating current (AC) susceptibility measurement system that uses functional magnetic particles and magnetic sensing technology. We also developed compact biomarker measuring equipment to enable quick testing. Our assay is a one-step homogeneous assay that involves simply mixing a sample with a reagent, shortening testing time and simplifying processing. Using our compact measuring equipment, which includes anisotropic magneto resistance (AMR) sensors, we conducted high-sensitivity measurements of extremely small amounts of two biomarkers (C-reactive protein, CRP and α-Fetoprotein, AFP) used for diagnosing arteriosclerosis and malignant tumors. The results indicate that an extremely small amount of CRP and AFP could be detected within 15 min, which demonstrated the possibility of a simple and quick high-sensitivity immunoassay that involves using an AC-susceptibility measurement system.

Liquid crystal director distributions between strong and weak polar anchoring surfaces in hybrid aligned cells are numerically analyzed. When the anchoring is a critical one, homogeneously or homeotropicly liquid crystal alignment can be obtained. Such cells have no threshold voltage and a driving voltage can be reduced less than 0.5 volt.

To solve the problem of nonhomogeneous clutter suppression for moving target detection in High Frequency Surface Wave Radar (HFSWR), a novel nonhomogeneous clutter detector (NHD) is present in this paper. This novel NHD makes an analysis for the clutter constituents with single snapshot based on the over-determined linear equations in space-time adaptive processing (STAP) and distinguish the nonhomogeneous secondary data from the whole secondary data set through calculating the correlation coefficients of the secondary data.

We have proposed a new method for the scattering of electromagnetic waves by inhomogeneous dielectric gratings loaded with parallel perfectly conducting strips using the combination of improved Fourier series expansion method and point matching method. Numerical results aregiven for the transmission and scattering characteristics for TE and TM cases.

In this letter, we propose a novel technique to increase the visibility of the hazy image. Benefiting from the atmospheric scattering model and the invariance principle for scene structure, we formulate structure constraint equations that derive from two simulated inputs by performing gamma correction on the input image. Relying on the inherent boundary constraint of the scattering function, the expected scene albedo can be well restored via these constraint equations. Extensive experimental results verify the power of the proposed dehazing technique.

Hotspots occur frequently in 3D multi-core processors (3D-MCPs), and they may adversely impact both the reliability and lifetime of a system. We present a new thermally constrained task scheduler based on a thermal-pattern-aware voltage assignment (TPAVA) to reduce hotspots in and optimize the performance of 3D-MCPs. By analyzing temperature profiles of different voltage assignments, TPAVA pre-emptively assigns different initial operating-voltage levels to cores for reducing temperature increase in 3D-MCPs. The proposed task scheduler consists of an on-line allocation strategy and a new voltage-scaling strategy. In particular, the proposed on-line allocation strategy uses the temperature-variation rates of the cores and takes into two important thermal behaviors of 3D-MCPs that can effectively minimize occurrences of hotspots in both thermally homogeneous and heterogeneous 3D-MCPs. Furthermore, a new vertical-grouping voltage scaling (VGVS) strategy that considers thermal correlation in 3D-MCPs is used to handle thermal emergencies. Experimental results indicate that, when compared to a previous online thermally constrained task scheduler, the proposed task scheduler can reduce hotspot occurrences by approximately 66% (71%) and improve throughput by approximately 8% (2%) in thermally homogeneous (heterogeneous) 3D-MCPs. These results indicate that the proposed task scheduler is an effective technique for suppressing hotspot occurrences and optimizing throughput for 3D-MCPs subject to thermal constraints.

We realize homogenous luminance of the directional backlight for the time-division multiplexing autostereoscopic display using a convex lens array with the elemental lenses whose phase of placement in each row differs from one another. The validity of the proposed optical design is confirmed by a prototype system.

In this paper we consider two non-parametric estimation methods for software reliability assessment without specifying the fault-detection time distribution, where the underlying stochastic process to describe software fault-counts in the system testing is given by a non-homogeneous Poisson process. The resulting data-driven methodologies can give the useful probabilistic information on the software reliability assessment under the incomplete knowledge on fault-detection time distribution. Throughout examples with real software fault data, it is shown that the proposed methods provide more accurate estimation results than the common parametric approach.

In this letter we develop a software reliability modeling framework by introducing the Burr XII distributions to software fault-detection time. An extension to deal with software metrics data characterizing the product size, program complexity or testing expenditure is also proposed. Finally, we investigate the goodness-of-fit performance and compare our new models with the existing ones through real data analyses.

Recently, the wavelet-based estimation method has gradually been becoming popular as a new tool for software reliability assessment. The wavelet transform possesses both spatial and temporal resolution which makes the wavelet-based estimation method powerful in extracting necessary information from observed software fault data, in global and local points of view at the same time. This enables us to estimate the software reliability measures in higher accuracy. However, in the existing works, only the point estimation of the wavelet-based approach was focused, where the underlying stochastic process to describe the software-fault detection phenomena was modeled by a non-homogeneous Poisson process. In this paper, we propose an interval estimation method for the wavelet-based approach, aiming at taking account of uncertainty which was left out of consideration in point estimation. More specifically, we employ the simulation-based bootstrap method, and derive the confidence intervals of software reliability measures such as the software intensity function and the expected cumulative number of software faults. To this end, we extend the well-known thinning algorithm for the purpose of generating multiple sample data from one set of software-fault count data. The results of numerical analysis with real software fault data make it clear that, our proposal is a decision support method which enables the practitioners to do flexible decision making in software development project management.

Generally, a programmable LSI such as an FPGA is difficult to test compared to an ASIC. There are two major reasons for this. The first is that an automatic test pattern generator (ATPG) cannot be used because of the programmability of the FPGA. The other reason is that the FPGA architecture is very complex. In this paper, we propose a new FPGA architecture that will simplify the testing of the device. The base of our architecture is general island-style FPGA architecture, but it consists of a few types of circuit blocks and orderly wire connections. This paper also presents efficient test configurations for our proposed architecture. We evaluated our architecture and test configurations using a prototype chip. As a result, the chip was fully tested using our configurations in a short test time. Moreover, our architecture can provide comparable performance to a conventional FPGA architecture.

In this paper, we apply an improved method for the guiding problem of dielectric waveguide with arbitrary inhomogeneous media along the middle layer introduced the defect layers, and analyzed the propagation characteristics of dielectric waveguide composed of dielectric circular cylinders and the arbitrary inhomogeneous media in the middle layer by using a combination of the improved Fourier series expansion method and multilayer method. Numerical results are given for the propagation constants in the first stop band regions, and the distribution of energy flow for both TE0 and TM0 modes. The influence of permittivity and the shape variation of arbitrary inhomogeneous media are discussed in the first stop band regions.

Multi-core processors have been attracting a great deal of attention. In the domain of signal processing for communications, the current trends toward rapidly evolving standards and formats, and toward algorithms adaptive to dynamic factors in the environment, require programmable solutions that possess both algorithm flexibility and low implementation complexity. Reconfigurable architectures have demonstrated better tradeoffs between algorithm flexibility, implementation complexity, and energy efficiency. This paper presents a reconfigurable homogeneous memory-based FFT processor (MBFFT) architecture integrated in a single chip to provide hybrid SISO/MIMO OFDM wireless communication systems. For example, a reconfigurable MBFFT processor with eight processing elements (PEs) can be configured for one DVB-T/H with N=8192 and two 802.11n with N=128. The reconfigurable processors can perfectly fit the applications of Software Defined Radio (SDR) which requires more hardware flexibility.

In this paper, a Stochastic Non-Homogeneous ARnoldi (SNHAR) method is proposed for the analysis of the on-chip power grid networks in the presence of process variations. In SNHAR method, the polynomial chaos based stochastic method is employed to handle the variations of power grids. Different from the existing StoEKS method which uses extended Krylov Subspace (EKS) method to compute the coefficients of the polynomial chaos, a computation-efficient and numerically stable Non-Homogeneous ARnoldi (NHAR) method is employed in SNHAR method to compute the coefficients of the polynomial chaos. Compared with EKS method, NHAR method has superior numerical stability and can achieve remarkably higher accuracy with even lower computational cost. As a result, SNHAR can capture the stochastic characteristics of the on-chip power grid networks with higher accuracy, but even lower computational cost than StoEKS.

The Green's function of free space for the fast inhomogeneous plane wave algorithm is represented by an integration in the complex plane. The error in the computational process is determined by the number of sampling points, the truncation of the integration path, and the extrapolation. Therefore, the error control method is different from that for the fast multipole method. We will discuss the worst-case interactions of the fast inhomogeneous plane wave algorithm for the box implementation and define the upper and lower bounds of the computational error.

A new unsupervised classification method is proposed for polarimetric SAR images to keep the spatial coherence of pixels and edges of different kinds of targets simultaneously. We consider the label scale variability of images by combining Inhomogeneous Markov Random Field (MRF) and Bayes' theorem. After minimizing an energy function using an expansion algorithm based on Graph Cuts, we can obtain classification results that are discontinuity preserving. Using a NASA/JPL AIRSAR image, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, a novel user scheduling algorithm for maximizing the sum-rate capacity of inhomogeneous network is investigated. In order to extract the multi-user diversity order and reduce the feedback quantity, selective feedback scheme is adopted. An algorithm of key parameter, the prescribed threshold, is proposed. Numerical simulations show that when adopted the proposed threshold in the inhomogeneous networks, selective feedback scheme can still preserve the majority of the sum-rate capacity of the full back scheme, while the feedback load is significantly reduced.

In this paper, we propose a new technique for the scattering problems of multilayered inhomogeneous columnar dielectric gratings loaded rectangular dielectric constant both TM and TE waves using the combination of improved Fourier series expansion method, the multilayer method, and the eigenvalue matrix method. Numerical results are given for the power transmission coefficients in the parameters ε 3 /ε 0 , c/p, and b/d of rectangular cylinders to obtain the basic characteristic of the power transmission coefficients and reflection coefficients switching or frequency selective devices for both TM and TE waves. The influence of the incident angle and frequency of the transmitted power are also discussed in the connection with the propagation constant β in the free mode.

A new fast and reliable image objective quality evaluation technique is presented in this paper. The proposed method takes image structure into account and uses a low complexity homogeneity measure to evaluate the intensity uniformity of a local region based on high-pass operators. We experimented with monochrome images under different types of distortions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides better consistency with the perceived image quality. It is suitable for real applications to control the processed image quality.

Geometrical properties of the lifting-up technique in support vector machines (SVMs) are discussed here. In many applications, an SVM finds the optimal inhomogeneous separating hyperplane in terms of margins while some of the theoretical analyses on SVMs have treated only homogeneous hyperplanes for simplicity. Although they seem equivalent due to the so-called lifting-up technique, they differ in fact and the solution of the homogeneous SVM with lifting-up strongly depends on the parameter of lifting-up. It is also shown that the solution approaches that of the inhomogeneous SVM in the asymptotic case that the parameter goes to infinity.