The remaining issues in optical transmission technology are the degradation of optical signal to noise power ratio due to amplifier noise and the distortions due to optical nonlinear effects in a fiber. Therefore in addition to the Shannon limit, practical channel capacity is believed to be restricted by the nonlinear Shannon limit. The nonlinear Shannon limit has been derived under the assumption that the received signal points on the constellation map deviated by optical amplifier noise and nonlinear interference noise are symmetrically distributed around the ideal signal point and the sum of the noises are regarded as white Gaussian noise. The nonlinear Shannon limit is considered as a kind of theoretical limitation. However it is doubtful that its derivation process and applicable range have been understood well. In this paper, some fundamental papers on the nonlinear Shannon limit are reviewed to better understanding its meaning and applicable range.

Wireless body area networks (BANs) are attracting much attention due to their suitable for healthcare and medical applications. Unfortunately, electrostatic discharge (ESD) is a major electromagnetic (EM) noise source that can degrade wireless communication performance. In this study, we measure EM noise power in the 2.4GHz and 30MHz bands for indirect ESD testing specified in IEC 61000-4-2 standard, and derived a statistical ESD noise model from the measurement results. The ESD noise power was found to follow a lognormal distribution in both 2.4GHz and 30MHz bands. We use this ESD noise model to conduct bit error rate (BER) simulations in a communication channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) plus ESD noise at 2.4GHz and 30MHz bands. The result is that the BER performance is virtually the same in both bands, and decreases with the signal to noise power ratio (SNR). It is also shown that an error floor exists in the BER performances at both frequencies, which, if the ESD noise power is larger than the Gaussian noise, cannot be improved by increasing the SNR. Although the ESD noise power at 2.4GHz band is nearly 30dB smaller than that at 30MHz band, the signal attenuation along the human body at 2.4GHz band is much larger compared to 30MHz band. This may yield a similar SNR level at 30MHz and 2.4GHz bands in an ESD-dominated environment, so that the 2.4GHz band does not have an obvious merit for BAN applications. Since there are so many in-band interference sources at 2.4GHz band, the 30MHz band seems more promising for vital data transmission in a BAN scenario even in an ESD-dominated environment.

Tonal signals are shown as spectral peaks in the frequency domain. When the number of spectral peaks is small and the spectral signal is sparse, Compressive Sensing (CS) can be adopted to locate the peaks with a low-cost sensing system. In the CS scheme, a time domain signal is modelled as $oldsymbol{y}=Phi F^{-1}oldsymbol{s}$, where y and s are signal vectors in the time and frequency domains. In addition, F-1 and $Phi$ are an inverse DFT matrix and a random-sampling matrix, respectively. For a given y and $Phi$, the CS method attempts to estimate s with l0 or l1 optimization. To generate the peak candidates, we adopt the frequency-domain information of $ esmile{oldsymbol{s}}$ = $oldsymbol{F} esmile{oldsymbol{y}}$, where $ esmile{y}$ is the extended version of y and $ esmile{oldsymbol{y}}left(oldsymbol{n} ight)$ is zero when n is not elements of CS time instances. In this paper, we develop Gaussian statistics of $ esmile{oldsymbol{s}}$. That is, the variance and the mean values of $ esmile{oldsymbol{s}}left(oldsymbol{k} ight)$ are examined.

The noise in digital images acquired by image sensors has complex characteristics due to the variety of noise sources. However, most noise reduction methods assume that an image has additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with a constant standard deviation, and thus such methods are not effective for use with image signal processors (ISPs). To efficiently reduce the noise in an ISP, we estimate a unified noise model for an image sensor that can handle shot noise, dark-current noise, and fixed-pattern noise (FPN) together, and then we adaptively reduce the image noise using an adaptive Smallest Univalue Segment Assimilating Nucleus ( SUSAN ) filter based on the unified noise model. Since our noise model is affected only by image sensor gain, the parameters for our noise model do not need to be re-configured depending on the contents of image. Therefore, the proposed noise model is suitable for use in an ISP. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method reduces image sensor noise efficiently.

The precise noise modeling of complementary metal oxide semiconductor image sensor (CMOS image sensor: CIS) is a significant key in understanding the noise source mechanisms, optimizing sensor design, designing noise reduction circuit, and enhancing image quality. Therefore, this paper presents an accurate random telegraph signal (RTS) noise analysis model and a novel quantitative evaluation method in motion picture for the visual sensory evaluation of CIS. In this paper, two main works will be introduced. One is that the exposure process of a video camera is simulated, in which a Gaussian noise and an RTS noise in pinned-photodiode CMOS pixels are modeled in time domain and spatial domain; the other is that a new video quality evaluation method for RTS noise is proposed. Simulation results obtained reveal that the proposed noise modeling for CIS can approximate its physical process and the proposed video quality evaluation method for RTS noise performs effectively as compared to other evaluation methods. Based on the experimental results, conclusions on how the spatial distribution of an RTS noise affects the quality of motion picture are carried out.

For the purpose of analyzing noise characteristics of a very low-level dc current amplifier using a high-ohmage resistor negative feedback circuit, we made some noise sources in the form of the electronic circuit simulation program PSpice with the C language program and simulated transient analyses of the very low-level dc current amplifier using the PSpice. As a result, it was observed that in terms of rise time and increases in the amplitudes of the noise voltage with or without positive feedback circuit, the behavior of output waveform of the simulated equivalent circuit was similar to that of the experimental circuit.

Crosstalk from digital to analog circuits can be causative of operation fails in analog-digital mixed LSIs. This paper describes modeling techniques and simulation strategies of the substrate coupling noise. A macroscopic substrate noise model that expresses the noise as a function of logic state transition frequencies among digital blocks is proposed. A simulation system based on the model is implemented in the mixed signal simulation environment, where performance degradation of the 2nd order ΔΣADC coupled to digital noise sources is clearly simulated. These results indicate that the proposed behavioral modeling approach allows practicable full chip substrate noise simulation measures.

The uncertainty involved in the gradient constraint for optical flow detection is often modeled as constant Gaussian noise added to the time-derivative of the image intensity. In this paper, we examine this modeling closely and investigate the error behavior by experiments. Our result indicates that the error depends on both the spatial derivatives and the image motion. We propose alternative uncertainty models based on our experiments. It is shown that the optical flow computation algorithms based on them can detect more accurate optical flow than the conventional least-squares method.

Most conventional methods used in character recognition extract geometrical features, such as stroke direction and connectivity, and compare them with reference patterns in a stored dictionary. Unfortunately, geometrical features are easily degraded by blurs and stains, and by the graphical designs such as used in Japanese newspaper headlines. This noise must be removed before recognition commences, but no preprocessing method is perfectly accurate. This paper proposes a method for recognizing degraded characters as well as characters printed on graphical designs. This method extracts features from binary images, and a new similarity measure, the complementary similarity measure, is used as a discriminant function; it compares the similarity and dissimilarity of binary patterns with reference dictionary patterns. Experiments are conducted using the standard character database ETL-2, which consists of machine-printed Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, alphanumeric, and special characters. The results show that our method is much more robust against noise than the conventional geometrical-feature method. It also achieves high recognition rates of over 97% for characters with textured foregrounds, over 99% for characters with textured backgrounds, over 98% for outline fonts and over 99% for reverse contrast characters. The experiments for recognizing both the fontstyles and character category show that it also achieves high recognition rates against noise.