This paper presents an analog 2-dimensional discrete cosine transform (2-D DCT) processor for focal-plane image compression. The on-chip analog 2-D DCT processor can process directly the analog signal of the CMOS image sensor. The analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) is preformed after the 2-D DCT, and this leads to efficient AD conversion of video signals. Most of the 2-D DCT coefficients can be digitized by a relatively low-resolution ADC or a zero detector. The quantization process after the 2-D DCT can be realized by the ADC at the same time. The 88-point analog 2-D DCT processor is designed by switched-capacitor (SC) coefficient multipliers and an SC analog memory based on 0.35µm CMOS technology. The 2-D DCT processor has sufficient precision, high processing speed, low power dissipation, and small silicon area. The resulting smart image sensor chips with data compression and digital transmission functions are useful for the high-speed image acquisition devices and portable digital video camera systems.

A simple extension to treat evanescent modal excitation at the aperture of a parallel plane waveguide is shown here by GTD diffracted rays with complex propagation angles. Numerical comparison with other solution confirmed that our simple solution can be used for modal excitation estimation below the cut-off frequency.

A Suitable TFT structure for wide viewingangle displays with in-plane switching mode of nematic LCs has been developed. The structure can be constructed by simplified process reduced the number of electrode layers, suppressing crosstalk generation which is essential for combining the IPS mode with TFTs. A practical aperture ratio was obtained in spite of the existence of interdigital electrodes in a pixel. It has also been adopted into a prototype which have a 10.4 inch diagonal display area with VGA resolution and which display 262,144 colors. This prototype has clarified that these display with the IPS mode have extremely wide viewing-angle characteristic exceeding the polar viewing-angle of 45 degrees satisfying contrast ratio more than 10 without gray-scale inversion in all azimuthal angles. In particular, the color shifting area is very slight in comparison with conventional TFT-LCDs with twisted nematic mode. It has been confirmed that IPS-TFT-LCDs are promising candidates for the next generation LCDs with wide viewing-angles and make it possible to replace CRTS in monitors and televisions.

This paper introduces a new method to recover 3-D road plane from its 2-D monocular perspective image. The research is aimed at the reconstruction of depth information from the 2-D visual input in road following and navigation. Planar road model is considered and the road-centered coordinate system which forms slope and turn angles with camera-centered coordinate system is used to describe boundary points on road plane. We develop approaches to find matching points of boundaries of road and to obtain angular parameters thereafter. A way of finding depth of matching points from the perspective images and angular parameters together is proposed. Therefore the 3-D road reconstruction can be replicated without introducing any parameters of inverse perspective.

The Voronoi diagram is the most fundamental and useful concept in computational geometry. To understand impacts of non-Euclidean geometry on computational geometry, this paper investigates the Voronoi diagram in hyperbolic space. We first present characterizations of this diagram by means of the Enclidean Voronoi diagram, and based on them propose efficient algorithms to construct it. Some applications are also mentioned.

Based on a simple model for the statistical error characteristics of range sensing, a numerical scheme called renormalization is presented for optimally fitting a planar surface to data points obtained by range sensing. The renormalization method has the advantage that not only an optimal fit is computed but also its reliability is automatically evaluated in the form of the covariance matrix. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by numerical simulation. A scheme for visualizing the reliability of computation by means of the primary deviation pair is also presented.

The authors have studied the demagnetization phenomenon which is observed in a conventional CoCrTa/CoZrNb double-layered (DL) perpendicular recording medium. The authors have also investigated the effects of an in-plane hard magnetic layer in a triple-layered (TL) perpendicular recording medium. The in-plane hard magnetic underlayer is made of CoSm or CoCrTa/Cr and is laid under the CoZrNb soft magnetic layer. In the DL medium, a demagnetization phenomenon i.e. decrease of the readback signal, is observed when the CoCrTa layer has a strong perpendicular orientation and the CoZrNb underlayer has a low coercivity. The amount of the signal decrease depends strongly on the accumulated disk revolutions. This demagnetization is considered to be caused by fact that the recorded magnetization in the CoCrTa layer is reduced by the magnetic field generated from the domain walls in the CoZrNb layer, since the CoZrNb layer is very sensitive to a magnetic environment such as geo-magnetism and domain walls move as the disk rotates. On the other hand in the TL medium, the hard magnetic layer has an effect of pinning the magnetic domain in the CoZrNb layer, by which the demagnetization problem is successfully prevented. The hard magnetic layer remarkably reduces the domain walls in the CoZrNb layer and contributes to medium noise reduction. Thus the TL medium presents a higher SN ratio than DL medium.

This paper is concerned with synthesizing VLSI array processors from iterative algorithms. Our primary objective is to obtain the highest processor efficiency but not the shortest completion time. Unlike most of the previous work that assumes the index space of the given iterative algorithm to be boundless, the proposed method takes into account the effects of the boundaries of the index space. Due to this consideration, the pseudo-dependence relations are excluded, and most of the independent computations can therefore be uniformly grouped. With the method described in this paper, the index space is partitioned into equal-size blocks and the corresponding computations are systematically and uniformly mapped into processing elements. The synthesized VLSI array processors possess the attractive feature of very high processor efficiency, which, in general, is superior to what is derived from the conventional linear transformation methods.

This paper studies the problem of reconstructing a planar surface from stereo images of multiple feature points that are known to be coplanar in the scene. We present a direct method by applying maximum likelihood estimation based on a statistical model of image noise. The significant fact about our method is that not only the 3-D position of the surface is reconstructed accurately but its reliability is also computed quantitatively. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by doing numerical simulation.

The antenna factor measurement of the dipole antennas for electromagnetic interference (EMI) measurements is studied theoretically and experimentally. The 3-antenna method is applied to near-field. Near-field transmission characteristics between the transmitting and receiving dipole antennas is obtained by using the electromotive force (EMF) method, where sinusoidal current distributions are assumed. It is shown that the antenna factors can be measured from transmission values between two antennas and near-field correction factors at any height of each antenna.

Electromagnetic plane wave scattering by a loaded trough on a ground plane has been analyzed by Kobayashi and Nomura's method. The field in each region is expressed first in terms of appropriate eigen functions, whose excitation coefficients are determined by the continuity condition across the aperture of the trough. Simple far field expression which is suitable for numerical calculation for small aperture cases has been derived. Scattering far field patterns and radar cross section are calculated and compared with those obtained by other methods. Good agreements have been observed for all incident angles.

Binary decision diagrams (BDD's) are graph representations of Boolean functions, and at the same time they can be regarded as a computational model. In this paper, we discuss relations between BDD's and other computational models and clarify the computational power of BDD's. BDD's have the property that each variable is examined only once according to a total order of the variables. We characterize families of BDD's by on-line deterministic Turing machines and families of permutations. To clarify the computational power of BDD's, we discuss the difference of the computational power with respect to the way of reading inputs. We also show that the language TADGAP (Topologically Arranged Deterministic Graph Accessibility Problem) is simultaneously complete for both of the class U-PolyBDD of languages accepted by uniform families of polynomial-size BDD's and the clas DL of languages accepted by log-space bounded deterministic Turing machines. From the results, we can see that the problem whether U-PolyBDD U-NC1 is equivalent to a famous open problem whether DL U-NC1, where U-NC1 is the class of languages accepted by uniform families of log-depth constant fan-in logic circuits.

The effects of finite ground plane upon the patterns of the GPS patch antennas are analyzed by EEC with modified edge representation (MER). The comparison with UTD and measurements shows that low elevation patterns including axial ratios are successfully predicted.

Distributed algorithms that entail successive rounds of message exchange are called decentralized consensus protocols. Several consensus protocols use a finite projective plane as a communication structure and require 4nn messages in two rounds, where n is the number of nodes. This paper presents an efficient communication structure that uses a finite projective plane with a duality of indices. The communication structure requires 2nn messages in two rounds, and can therefore halve the number of messages. It is shown that a finite projective plane with a duality can be constructed from a difference set, and that the presented communication structure has two kinds of symmetry.

Electromagnetic plane wave scattering by a wide trough on the ground has been analyzed by high frequency asymptotic techniques based on Geometrical Theory of Diffraction. Field in the trough region has been formulated in terms of parallel plane waveguide modes, whose excitation (coupling) coefficients are obtained by ray-mode conversion techniques. Numerical calculation has been done extensively and thus obtained results are then compared with those by other methods. Good agreements have been observed except for oblique incidence case. It is found that first and secondary modal re-radiation fields from the indented trough region play an important role for scattering far field, and primary edge diffracted field contributes mainly to reflection boundary direction.

This letter describes the usefulness of a homogeneous spherical model of the isolated human head in SAR calculation for UHF plane-wave exposure. Comparison is made between this SAR and several results that were computed and measured for the homogeneous but realistic whole-body model of the human by other researchers.

This paper presents an optimal constraint graph generation algorithm for graph-based one-dimensional layout compaction. The first published algorithm for this problem was the shadow-propagation algorithm. However, without sophisticated implementation of a shadow-front, complexity of the algorithm could fall into O(n2), where n is the number of layout objects. Although our algorithm, called the enhanced plane-sweep based graph generation algorithm, is an extension of the shadow-propagation algorithm, such a drawback is resolved by introducing an enhanced plane-sweep technique. The algorithm maintains multiple shadow-fronts simultaneously by storing them in a work-list called previous-boundary. Since a balanced search tree is selected for implementation of the worklist, total complexity of the algorithm is O(n log n) which is optimal. Experimental results show that the enhanced plane-sweep based graph generation algorithm runs in almost linear time with respect to the number of layout objects and is faster than the perpendicular plane-sweep algorithm which is also optimal in terms of time complexity.

Although the perception of gloss is based on human visual perception, some methods for measuring glossiness, in contrast to human ability, have been proposed involving plane surfaces. Glossiness defined in these methods, however, does not correspond with psychological glossiness perceived by the human eye over the wide range from relatively low gloss to high gloss. In addition, the change in the incident angle causes a deviation in the measurement of glossiness. A new method for measuring glossiness is proposed in this study. For the new definition of glossiness Gd, the brightness function is utilized. We also extract the value of smoothness of the object's surfaces for use as a factor of glossiness. The measuring equipment consists of a light source, an optical system and a personal computer. Glossiness Gd of paper and plastics is measured with the use of this equipment. In all samples, a strong correlation, with a correlation coefficient of more than 0.97, has been observed between Gd and psychological glossiness Gph. The variance of measured glossiness due to the change in the incident angle of light is small in comparison with that of conventional methods. Based on these findings, it has been found that this method is useful for measuring glossiness of plane objects in the range from relatively low gloss to high gloss.

Generalized telegraphist's equations for waveguides are frequently used for analyzing fields in tapered rectangular waveguides. However, the telegraphist's equations do not give exact fields in E-plane tapers of the rectangular waveguides. In this letter, the new telegraphist's equations are shown, and the equations give the fields which exactly satisfy Maxwell's equations and the boundary conditions for the E-plane taper of the waveguide.