This paper presents two new types of markers of M-CubITS (M-sequence Multimodal Markers for ITS; M-Cubed for ITS) that is a ground-based positioning system, in order to advance the WYSIWYAS (What You See Is What You Are Suggested) navigation environments providing intuitive guidance. One of the new markers uses warning blocks of textured paving blocks that are often at important points as for pedestrian navigation, for example, the top and bottom of stairs, branch points, and so on. The other uses interlocking blocks that are often at wide spaces, e.g., pavements of plazas, parks, sidewalks and so on. Furthermore, we construct the integrated pedestrian navigation system equipped with the automatic marker-type identification function of the three types of markers (the warning blocks, the interlocking blocks, and the conventional marker using guidance blocks of textured paving blocks) in order to enhance the spatial availability of the whole M-CubITS and the navigation system. Consequently, we show the possibility to advance the WYSIWYAS navigation environments through the performance evaluation and the operation confirmation of the integrated system.

Currently there is not any prospect of realizing quantum computers which can compute prime factorization, which RSA relies on, or discrete logarithms, which ElGamal relies on, of practical size. Additionally the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) is requiring practical public key cryptosystems which do not use exponential operation. Therefore we constituted a cryptosystem relying on the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers, based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem, fully exploiting another strength of MPKC that exponential operation is not necessary. We evaluated its security by performing the Gröbner base attacks with workstations and consequently concluded that it requires computation complexity no less than entirely random quadratic polynomials. Additionally we showed that it is secure against rank attacks since the polynomials of central map are all full rank, assuming the environment of conventional computers.

The phenomenon of stochastic resonance (SR) in a mono-threshold-system-based detector (MTD) with additive background noise and multiplicative external noise is investigated. On the basis of maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) criterion, we deal with the binary signal transmission in four scenarios. The performance of the MTD is characterized by the probability of error detection, and the effects of system threshold and noise intensity on detectability are discussed in this paper. Similar to prior studies that focus on additive noises, along with increases in noise intensity, we also observe a non-monotone phenomenon in the multiplicative ways. However, unlike the case with the additive noise, optimal multiplicative noises all tend toward infinity for fixed additive noise intensities. The results of our model are potentially useful for the design of a sensor network and can help one to understand the biological mechanism of synaptic transmission.

This paper investigates the consensus problem of heterogeneous uncertain multi-agent systems with jointly connected topology, where the considered systems are composed of linear first-order, second-order dynamics and nonlinear Euler-Lagrange (EL) dynamics. The consensus protocol is designed to converge the position and velocity states of the linear and nonlinear heterogeneous multi-agent systems under joint connected topology, and then the adaptive consensus protocol is also proposed for heterogeneous multi-agent systems with unknown parameters in the EL dynamics under jointly connected topology. Stability analysis for piecewise continuous functions induced by the jointly connection is presented based on Lyapunov function and Cauchy's convergence criteria. Finally, some simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

This paper describes a hierarchical and cooperative transport system with demand responsive buses to improve service quality of public transport system in city area and its suburbs. To provide the demand responsive buses generally requires planning route and schedule called dial-a-ride problem. However, the problem complexity increases with the increasing of the number of requests. Therefore, we propose the hierarchical and cooperative transport system. Framework of the system can reduce scale of the problem by grouping customers. We have evaluated the proposed system on a static simulation and a dynamic microscopic simulation. The simulation result has shown the system could improve service quality by reducing customer's load. Moreover, the result of the dynamic simulation have provided the detailed features of the system.

This paper presents a design methodology for positioning sub-platform from the viewpoint of positioning for smartphone-based location-based services (LBS). To achieve this, we analyze a mechanism of positioning error generation including principles of positioning sub-systems and structure of smartphones. Specifically, we carry out the experiments of smartphone positioning performance evaluation by the smartphone basic API (Application Programming Interface) and by the wireless LAN in various environments. Then, we describe the importance of considering three layers as follows: 1) the lower layer that caused by positioning sub-systems, e.g., GPS, wireless LAN, mobile base stations, and so on; 2) the middle layer that caused by functions provided from the platform such as Android and iOS; 3) the upper layer that caused by operation algorithm of applications on the platform.

In PQCrypto 2013, Yasuda, Takagi and Sakurai proposed a new signature scheme as one of multivariate public key cryptosystems (MPKCs). This scheme (called YTS) is based on the fact that there are two isometry classes of non-degenerate quadratic forms on a vector space with a prescribed dimension. The advantage of YTS is its efficiency. In fact, its signature generation is eight or nine times faster than Rainbow of similar size. For the security, it is known that the direct attack, the IP attack and the min-rank attack are applicable on YTS, and the running times are exponential time for the first and the second attacks and sub-exponential time for the third attack. In the present paper, we give a new attack on YTS whose approach is to use the diagonalization of matrices. Our attack works in polynomial time and it actually recovers equivalent secret keys of YTS having 140-bits security against min-rank attack in around fifteen seconds.

Multi-FPGA systems, which consist of multiple FPGAs and a printed circuit board connecting them, are useful and important tools for prototyping large scale circuits, including SoCs. In this paper, we propose a method for optimizing inter-FPGA signal transmission to accelerate the system frequency of multi-FPGA prototyping systems and shorten prototyping time. Compared with the number of I/O pins of an FPGA, the number of I/O signals between FPGAs usually becomes very large. Thus, time-multiplexed I/Os are used to resolve the problem. On the other hand, they introduce large delays to inter-FPGA I/O signals, and much lower the system frequency. To reduce the degradation of the system frequency, we have proposed a method for optimally selecting signals to be time-multiplexed and signals not to be time-multiplexed. However, this method assumes that there exist physical connections (i.e., wires on the printed circuit board) between every pair of FPGAs, and cannot handle I/O signals between a pair of FPGAs that have no physical connections between them. Thus, in this paper, we propose a method for obtaining indirect inter-FPGA routes for such I/O signals, and then combine the indirect routing method and the time-multiplexed signal selection method to realize effective time-multiplexing of inter-FPGA I/O signals on systems with various topologies.

Bugs in industrial financial systems have not been extensively studied. To address this gap, we focused on the empirical study of bugs in three systems, PMS, β-Analyzer, and OrderPro. Results showed the 3 most common types of bugs in industrial financial systems to be internal interface (19.00%), algorithm/method (17.67%), and logic (15.00%).

Microkernel operating systems (OSes) use zero-copy communication to reduce the overhead of copying transfer data, because the communication between OS servers occurs frequently in the case of microkernel OSes. However, when a memory management unit manages the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) using software, TLB misses tend to increase the overhead of interprocess communication (IPC) between OS servers running on a microkernel OS. Thus, improving the control method of a software-managed TLB is important for microkernel OSes. This paper proposes a fast control method of software-managed TLB that manages page attachment in the area used for IPC by using TLB entries, instead of page tables. Consequently, TLB misses can be avoided in the area, and the performance of IPC improves. Thus, taking the SH-4 processor as an example of a processor having a software-managed TLB, this paper describes the design and the implementation of the proposed method for AnT operating system, and reports the evaluation results of the proposed method.

Survivability is the capability of a system to provide its services in a timely manner even after intrusion and compromise occur. In this paper, we focus on the quantitative analysis of survivability of virtual machine (VM) based intrusion tolerant system in the presence of Byzantine failures due to malicious attacks. Intrusion tolerant system has the ability of a system to continuously provide correct services even if the system is intruded. This paper introduces a scheme of the intrusion tolerant system with virtualization, and derives the success probability for one request by a Markov chain under the environment where VMs have been intruded due to a security hole by malicious attacks. Finally, in numerical experiments, we evaluate the performance of VM-based intrusion tolerant system from the viewpoint of survivability.

The amount of seasonings used during food preparation is quite important information for modern people to enable them to cook delicious dishes as well as to take care for their health. In this paper, we propose a near real-time automated system for measuring and recording the amount of seasonings used during food preparation. Our proposed system is equipped with two devices: electronic scales and a camera. Seasoning bottles are basically placed on the electronic scales in the proposed system, and the scales continually measure the total weight of the bottles placed on them. When a chef uses a certain seasoning, he/she first picks up the bottle containing it from the scales, then adds the seasoning to a dish, and then returns the bottle to the scales. In this process, the chef's picking and returning actions are monitored by the camera. The consumed amount of each seasoning is calculated as the difference in weight between before and after it is used. We evaluated the performance of the proposed system with experiments in 301 trials in actual food preparation performed by seven participants. The results revealed that our system successfully measured the consumption of seasonings in 60.1% of all the trials.

Reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment (IQA) algorithm aims to automatically evaluate the distorted image quality with partial reference data. The goal of RR IQA metric is to achieve higher quality prediction accuracy using less reference information. In this paper, we introduce a new RR IQA metric by quantifying the difference of discrete cosine transform (DCT) entropy features between the reference and distorted images. Neurophysiological evidences indicate that the human visual system presents different sensitivities to different frequency bands. Moreover, distortions on different bands result in individual quality degradations. Therefore, we suggest to calculate the information degradation on each band separately for quality assessment. The information degradations are firstly measured by the entropy difference of reorganized DCT coefficients. Then, the entropy differences on all bands are pooled to obtain the quality score. Experimental results on LIVE, CSIQ, TID2008, Toyama and IVC databases show that the proposed method performs highly consistent with human perception with limited reference data (8 values).

We propose a method of enhancing the performance of a cross-talk canceller for a four-speaker system with respect to sweet spot size and ringing effect. For the large sweet spot of a cross-talk canceller, the speaker layout needs to be symmetrical to the listener's position. In addition, a ringing effect of the cross-talk canceller is reduced when many speakers are located close to each other. Based on these properties, the proposed method first selects the two speakers in a four-speaker system that are most symmetrical to the target listener's position and then adds the remaining speakers between these two to the final selection. By operating only these selected speakers, the proposed method enlarges the sweet spot size and reduces the ringing effect. We conducted objective and subjective evaluations and verified that the proposed method improves the performance of the cross-talk canceller compared to the conventional method.

Peer-to-peer (P2P)-Grid systems are being investigated as a platform for converging the Grid and P2P network in the construction of large-scale distributed applications. The highly dynamic nature of P2P-Grid systems greatly affects the execution of the distributed program. Uncertainty caused by arbitrary node failure and departure significantly affects the availability of computing resources and system performance. Checkpoint-and-restart is the most common scheme for fault tolerance because it periodically saves the execution progress onto stable storage. In this paper, we suggest a checkpoint-and-restart mechanism as a fault-tolerant method for applications on P2P-Grid systems. Failure detection mechanism is a necessary prerequisite to fault tolerance and fault recovery in general. Given the highly dynamic nature of nodes within P2P-Grid systems, any failure should be detected to ensure effective task execution. Therefore, failure detection mechanism as an integral part of P2P-Grid systems was studied. We discussed how the design of various failure detection algorithms affects their performance in average failure detection time of nodes. Numerical analysis results and implementation evaluation are also provided to show different average failure detection times in real systems for various failure detection algorithms. The comparison shows the shortest average failure detection time by 8.8s on basis of the WP failure detector. Our lowest mean time to recovery (MTTR) is also proven to have a distinct advantage with a time consumption reduction of about 5.5s over its counterparts.

Appropriate turn-taking is important in spoken dialogue systems as well as generating correct responses. Especially if the dialogue features quick responses, a user utterance is often incorrectly segmented due to short pauses within it by voice activity detection (VAD). Incorrectly segmented utterances cause problems both in the automatic speech recognition (ASR) results and turn-taking: i.e., an incorrect VAD result leads to ASR errors and causes the system to start responding though the user is still speaking. We develop a method that performs a posteriori restoration for incorrectly segmented utterances and implement it as a plug-in for the MMDAgent open-source software. A crucial part of the method is to classify whether the restoration is required or not. We cast it as a binary classification problem of detecting originally single utterances from pairs of utterance fragments. Various features are used representing timing, prosody, and ASR result information. Experiments show that the proposed method outperformed a baseline with manually-selected features by 4.8% and 3.9% in cross-domain evaluations with two domains. More detailed analysis revealed that the dominant and domain-independent features were utterance intervals and results from the Gaussian mixture model (GMM).

New classes of zero-difference balanced (ZDB) functions derived from Fermat quotients are proposed in this letter. Based on the new ZDB functions, some applications, such as the construction of optimal frequency hopping sequences set and perfect difference systems of sets, are introduced.

In many multimedia applications, image encryption has to be conducted prior to image compression. This paper proposes a JPEG-friendly perceptual encryption method, which enables to be conducted prior to JPEG and Motion JPEG compressions. The proposed encryption scheme can provides approximately the same compression performance as that of JPEG compression without any encryption, where both gray scale images and color ones are considered. It is also shown that the proposed scheme consists of four block-based encryption steps, and provide a reasonably high level of security. Most of conventional perceptual encryption schemes have not been designed for international compression standards, but this paper focuses on applying the JPEG and Motion JPEG standards, as one of the most widely used image compression standards. In addition, this paper considers an efficient key management scheme, which enables an encryption with multiple keys to be easy to manage its keys.

A connected-(r,s)-out-of-(m,n): F system is a kind of the connected-X-out-of-(m,n): F system defined by Boehme et al. [2]. A connected-(r,s)-out-of-(m,n): F system consists of m×n components arranged in (m,n)-matrix. This system fails if and only if there exists a grid of size r×s in which all components are failed. When m=r, this system can be regarded as a consecutive-s-out-of-n: F system, and then the optimal arrangement of this system satisfies theorem which stated by Malon [9] in the case of s=2. In this study, we proposed a new algorithm for obtaining optimal arrangement of the connected-(r,2)-out-of-(m,n): F system based on the above mentioned idea. We performed numerical experiments in order to compare the proposed algorithm with the algorithm of enumeration method, and calculated the order of the computation time of these two algorithms. The numerical experiments showed that the proposed algorithm was more efficiently than the algorithm of enumeration method.

This paper considers how to evaluate the resiliency for virtualized system with software rejuvenation. The software rejuvenation is a proactive technique to prevent the failure caused by aging phenomenon such as resource exhaustion. In particular, according to Gohsh et al. (2010), we compute a quantitative criterion to evaluate resiliency of system by using continuous-time Markov chains (CTMC). In addition, in order to convert general state-based models to CTMCs, we employ PH (phase-type) expansion technique. In numerical examples, we investigate the resiliency of virtualized system with software rejuvenation under two different rejuvenation policies.