In this paper, we investigate Tanner's lower bound for the minimum distance of regular LDPC codes based on combinatorial designs. We first determine Tanner's lower bound for LDPC codes which are defined by modifying bipartite graphs obtained from combinatorial designs known as Steiner systems. Then we show that Tanner's lower bound agrees with or exceeds conventional lower bounds including the BCH bound, and gives the true minimum distance for some EG-LDPC codes.

Richardson and Urbanke developed a powerful method density evolution which determines, for various channels, the capacity of irregular low-density parity-check code ensembles. We develop generalized density evolution for minutely represented ensembles and show it includes conventional representation as a special case. Furthermore, we present an example of code ensembles used over binary erasure channel and binary input additive white Gaussian noise channel which have better thresholds than highly optimized ensembles with conventional representation.

We consider a soft-decision iterative bounded distance decoding algorithm for binary linear block codes. In the decoding algorithm, bounded distance decodings are carried out with respect to successive input words, called the search centers. A search center is the sum of the hard-decision sequence of a received sequence and a sequence in a set of test patterns which are generated beforehand. This set of test patterns has influence on the error performance of the decoding algorithms as simulation results show. In this paper, we propose a construction method of a set of candidate test patterns and a selection method of test patterns based on an introduced measure of effectiveness of test patterns. For several BCH codes of lengths 127, 255 and 511, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method by simulation.

In this paper, an iterative decoding algorithm for channels with additive linear dynamical noise is presented. The proposed algorithm is based on the tightly coupled two inference algorithms: the sum-product algorithm which infers the information symbols of an low density parity check (LDPC) code and the Kalman smoothing algorithm which infers the channel states. The linear dynamical noise are the noise generated from a linear dynamical system. We often encounter such noise (i.e., additive colored noise) in practical communication and storage systems. The conventional iterative decoding algorithms such as the sum-product algorithm cannot derive full potential of turbo codes nor LDPC codes over such a channel because the conventional algorithms are designed under the independence assumption on the noise. Several simulations have been performed to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm. From the simulation results, it can be concluded that the Kalman smoothing algorithm deserves to be implemented in a decoder when the linear dynamical part of the linear dynamical noise is dominant rather than the white Gaussian noise part. In such a case, the performance of the proposed algorithm is far superior to that of the conventional algorithm.

Several reliability based code search algorithms for maximum likelihood decoding have been proposed. These algorithms search the most likely codeword, using the most reliable information set where the leftmost k (the dimension of code) columns of generator matrix are the most reliable and linearly independent. Especially, D. Gazelle and J. Snyders have proposed an efficient decoding algorithm and this algorithm requires small number of candidate codewords to find out the most likely codeword. In this paper, we propose new efficient methods for both generating candidate codewords and computing metrics of candidate codewords to obtain the most likely codeword at the decoder. The candidate codewords constructed by the proposed method are identical those in the decoding algorithm of Gazelle et al. Consequently, the proposed decoding algorithm reduces the time complexity in total, compared to the decoding algorithm of Gazelle et al. without the degradation in error performance.

Given the importance of the traffic on modern communication networks, advanced error correction methods are needed to overcome the changes expected in channel quality. Conventional countermeasures that use high dimensionality parity codes often fail to provide sufficient error correction capability. We propose a parity code with high dimensionality that is iteratively decoded. It provides better error correcting capability than conventional decoding methods. The proposal uses the steepest descent method to increase code bit reliability and the coherency between parities and code bits gradually. Furthermore, the quantization of the decoding algorithm is discussed. It is found that decoding with quantization can keep the error correcting capability high.

A Time Hopping Pulse Spacing Modulation (TH-PSM) system, which combines the pulse position modulation system with code shift keying, is proposed. The following performances are analyzed; (1) data transmission rate, (2) error rate in a single-user case, (3) error rate in a multi-user case, and (4) spectral efficiency. Consequently, the data transmission rate of the proposed system is higher than that of the conventional Spread Spectrum Pulse Position Modulation (SS-PPM) system. The proposed system can improve the probability of block error by increasing the number of information bits per spreading code. Moreover, the spectral efficiency of the proposed system is higher than that of the conventional system. The proposed system is more attractive than the conventional SS-PPM system for optical communications, power-line communications, and UWB communications.

The new frequency bands that will be allocated to W-CDMA cellular networks might open the possibility to use higher bandwidths than the 5 MHz specified in 3GPP. In this paper the temporal channel properties, i.e., power delay profile, in terms of number of Rake receiver fingers and their characteristics, are analyzed for 5, 10, 20, and 30 MHz bandwidths. The lower bandwidth impulse responses are obtained by filtering measurement results obtained with a channel sounder having a bandwidth of 30 MHz.

Beam-space time coding methods are being extensively investigated, since they provide levels of performance appropriate for the next and future generations of wireless communication systems. In this paper, we focus on beam-domain space-time coding, especially considering the case when transmit beams have inter-beam interference (IBI). A new beam-space time coding scheme that takes into account the overlap amount among beams is proposed. We observe that the overlap of beams introduces an amount of correlation to the channels in a similar way to the well-known Partial Response (PR) channel in magnetic recording. Based on that observation, the proposed system can make use of IBI to encode and decode the signals. We evaluate the proposed system both via theoretical upper bound and via computer simulations. The Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of the proposed system using IBI is better than that of the system with no-IBI because the proposed system delivers more coding gain. However, the overlap of beams decreases the diversity gain. The tradeoff relationship between diversity gain and coding gain is investigated.

A source code for N symbols can be represented by a codeword length sequence (₁,₂,,_N). A binary code is compact if it satisfies = 1. Also we may assume that 1 _{1 2 N}. In this paper, we show that these two constraints can be replaced by max _i for 1 i N - 1. Using the latter characterization, we construct a tree T ^N representing all binary compact codes. In fact every leaf of T ^N represents a compact code and vice versa. This technique can also be used to generate all compact codes for a given (₁,₂,,_k), k < N.

Nishiara and Morita defined an i.i.d. word-valued source which is defined as a pair of an i.i.d. source with a countable alphabet and a function which transforms each symbol into a word over finite alphabet. They showed the asymptotic equipartition property (AEP) of the i.i.d. word-valued source and discussed the relation with source coding algorithm based on a string parsing approach. However, their model is restricted in the i.i.d. case and any universal code for a class of word-valued sources isn't discussed. In this paper, we generalize the i.i.d. word-valued source to the ergodic word-valued source which is defined by an ergodic source with a countable alphabet and a function from each symbol to a word. We show existence of entropy rate of the ergodic word-valued source and its formula. Moreover, we show the recurrence time theorem for the ergodic word-valued source with a finite alphabet. This result clarifies that Ziv-Lempel code (ZL77 code) is universal for the ergodic word-valued source.

The video coding standard MPEG-4 is enabling content-based functionalities. It takes advantage of a prior decomposition of sequences into video object planes (VOP's) so that each VOP represents a semantic object. Therefore, the extraction of semantic video objects is crucial initial part. In this paper, we present an efficient region based semi-automatic segmentation system, which combines low level automatic region segmentation with interactive method for defining and tracking high level semantic video objects. The proposed segmentation system extracts accurate object boundaries using gradual region merging and bi-directional temporal boundary refinement. The system comprises of two steps: an initial object extraction step where user input in the starting frame is used to extract a semantic object; and an object tracking step where underlying regions of the semantic object are tracked and grouped through successive frames. Experiments with different types of videos show the efficiency of the proposed system in semantic object extraction.

In this paper, we propose an on-line writer recognition method for Thai numeral. A handwriting process is characterized by a change of numeral's shape, which is represented by two features, a displacement of pen-point position and an area of triangle determined from the two adjacent points of pen-point position and the origin. First, the above two features are expanded into Fourier series. Secondly, in order to describe feature of handwriting, FIR (Finite impulse response) system having the above Fourier coefficients as input and output of the system is introduced. The impulse response of the FIR system is used as the feature of handwriting. Furthermore, K-L expansion of the obtained impulse response is used to recognize writer. Writer recognition experiments are performed by using 3,770 data collected by 54 Thai writers for one year. The average of Type I (false rejection) error rate and Type II (false acceptance) error rate were 2.16% and 1.12%, respectively.

This paper presents two different algorithms for random number generation. One algorithm generates a random sequence with an arbitrary distribution from a sequence of pure random numbers, i.e. a sequence with uniform distribution. The other algorithm generates a sequence of pure random numbers from a sequence of a given i.i.d. source. Both algorithms can be regarded as an implementation of the interval algorithm by using the integer arithmetic with limited precision. We analyze the approximation error measured by the variational distance between probability distributions of the desired random sequence and the output sequence generated by the algorithms. Further, we give bounds on the expected length of input sequence per one output symbol, and compare it with that of the original interval algorithm.

Relative time-stamping schemes prove the chronological sequence of digital documents and their integrity. Since the chronological sequence is verified by tracing the link between two timestamps, it is desirable that the length of the verification path is short. Buldas, Laud, Lipmaa, and Villemson have proposed the relative time-stamping scheme based on the binary link. In this paper, we extend the binary link to the ternary link, and apply it to the relative time-stamping scheme. We show that the maximum length of the verification path of the proposed scheme is shorter than that of the previous scheme. Moreover, we show that the average length of the proposed scheme is shorter than that of the previous scheme. Thus, the proposed time-stamping schemes is more efficient than the previous scheme.

A distributor of digital contents desires to collect users' attributes. On the other hand, the users do not desire to offer the attributes owing to the privacy protection. Previously, an anonymous survey system for attributes statistics is proposed. In this system, asking trusted third parties' helps, a distributor can obtain the correct statistics of users' attributes, such as gender and age, while no information beyond the statistics is revealed. However, the system suffers from the inefficiency of a protocol to generate the statistics, since the cost depends on the number of all the users registering this survey system. This paper proposes an anonymous survey system, where this cost is independent from the number of all the registering users. In this accomplishment, a group signature scheme with attribute tracing is also proposed. A conventional group signature scheme allows a group member to anonymously sign a message on behalf of the group, while only a designated party can identify the signer. The proposed scheme further enables the party to trace signer's attribute.

The application of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem has gained more and more attention. ECC uses smaller key size and lower memory requirement to retain the security level and can be a crucial factor in the smart card system. In this paper, an ECC based implementation of security schemes in smart card system to access control the door of some confidential places is proposed. The confidential place, for example a coffer, a strong room in the bank is used to store treasures as well as cashes, and where the mutual vigilance could be required. For the safety consideration, the going in and out a coffer by a person is not permissive but a group of authorized people. It involves the problem of secret sharing. The adopted solution of sharing secret is threshold scheme. Every participant possesses a secret shadow, which will be saved in the smart card. After correct reconstructing the shared secrets, it is permissible to access the coffer's door. For resisting dishonest participants, cheating detection and cheater identification will be included. The user can change his password of smart card freely and need not memorize his assigned lengthy password and shadow as traditional ID-based schemes makes our implementation much more user friendly.

In this paper, a new method is proposed to construct a visual secret sharing scheme with a general access structure for plural secret images. Although the proposed scheme can be considered as an extension of Droste's method that can encode only black-white images, it can encode plural gray-scale and/or color secret images.

In digital content distribution systems, digital watermarking (fingerprinting) technique provides a good solution to avoid illegal copying and has been studied very actively. c-Secure CRT Code is one of the most practical ID coding schemes for such fingerprinting since it is secure against collusion attacks and also secure even though random errors are furthermore added. But its usefulness is decreased in the case that random errors are added because the code length will be longer. In this paper, a new collusion attack with addition of random errors is introduced and show that c-Secure CRT Code is not sufficiently secure against the attack at first. Next, we analyze the problem and propose a new ID coding scheme, Randomized c-Secure CRT Code which overcomes the problem. As a result, this new scheme improves the error tracing probabilities against the proposed attack drastically. This new scheme has the same code length, so this is one of the most responsible fingerprinting codes for content distribution systems.

In this letter, we propose (1) a new sub-optimum minimum distance search (sub-MDS), whose search complexity is reduced considerably compared with optimum MDSs and (2) a termination criterion, called near optimality condition, to reduce the average number of decoding iterations with little degradation of error performance for the proposed decoding using sub-MDS iteratively. Consequently, the decoding algorithm can be applied to longer codes with feasible complexity. Simulation results for several Reed-Muller (RM) codes of lengths 256 and 512 are given.

In this letter, we show the effectiveness of a double-loop algorithm based on the concave-convex procedure (CCCP) in decoding linear codes. For this purpose, we numerically compare the error performance of CCCP-based decoding algorithm with that of a conventional iterative decoding algorithm based on belief propagation (BP). We also investigate computational complexity and its relation to the error performance.

In this paper, we propose the soft boundary concept achieved by dynamic tilted antenna to solve the issue of traffic congestion occurred in cellular wireless systems. The tilted antenna array can provide the merit of traffic balance and also achieve the optimization of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) at receivers by automatically tilting the antenna and implementing the soft boundary among cells, corresponding to the variation of traffic. According to our results, it is shown that power ratio control do not necessarily improved system performance when there is a large variation in traffic because it only control power levels. Also the properly chosen angle of tilt antenna can relieve the traffic congestion and perform the system performance optimization.

This paper proposes the conditional LZ complexity and analyzes its property. Especially, we show an inequality corresponding to Ziv's inequality concerning a distinct parsing of a pair of sequences. Further, as a byproduct of the result, we show a simple proof of the asymptotical optimality of Ziv's universal source coding algorithm with side information.

Rate control regulates the coded bit stream to satisfy certain given bit rate condition while maintaining the quality of coded video. However, most existing rate control algorithms for low bit rate video can not handle scene change properly, so visual quality is consequently worsened. The test model TMN8 of H.263+ can be forced to skip frames after an abrupt scene change. In this letter, we propose a new frame-layer rate control which allocates bits to frames and controls the frame skipping adaptively based on the pre-analysis of future frames. Experimental results show that the proposed control method provides an effective alternative to existing frame skipping methods causing the motion jerkiness and quality degradation.

This report describes face image recognition by 2-dimensional discrete Walsh transform and multi-layer neural networks. Neural network (NN) is one of the powerful tools for pattern recognition. In the previous researches of face image recognition by NN, the gray levels on each pixel of the face image have been used for input data to NN. However, because the face image has usually too many pixels, a variety of approaches have been required to reduce the number of the input data. In this research, 2-dimensional discrete Walsh transform is used for reduction of input data and the recognition is done by multi-layer neural networks. Finally, the validity of our method is varified.

A new algorithm for texture segmentation, called iterative feature extraction (IFE), is proposed to iteratively search and select for an overcomplete wavelet feature vector based on aspect ratio of extrema number (AREN) with a desired window that provides optimal classification accuracy.

In this paper, we construct a new signature scheme which is provably secure against adaptive chosen message attack in the standard model under the strong RSA assumption. The proposed scheme is different from Cramer-Shoup scheme and Camenisch-Lysyanskaya scheme and is more efficient than them. The tradeoff of the proposed scheme is a slight increase of the secret key.

Knudsen et al. proposed an efficient method based on a tree-search algorithm with recursive process for reconstructing the internal state of RC4 stream cipher. However, the method becomes infeasible for word size n > 5 because its time complexity to reconstruct the internal state is too large. This letter proposes a more efficient method than theirs. Our method can reconstruct the internal state by using the pre-known internal-state entries, which are fewer than their method.

Automatic image inspector inspects the quality of printed circuit boards using image-processing technology. In this study, we change an automatic inspection problem into a problem for detecting the signal singularities. Based on the wavelet theory that the wavelet transform can focus on localized signal structures with a zooming procedure, a novel singularity detection and measurement algorithm is proposed. Singularity positions are detected with the local wavelet transform modulus maximum (WTMM) line, and the Lipschitz exponent is estimated at each singularity from the decay of the wavelet transform amplitude along the WTMM line. According to the theoretical analysis and computer simulation results, the proposed algorithm is shown to be successful for solving the automatic inspection problem and calculating the Lipschitz exponents of signals. These Lipschitz exponents successfully characterize singular behavior of signals at singularities.

Ranking fuzzy numbers is one of very important research topics in fuzzy set theory because it is a base of decision-making in applications. However, fuzzy numbers may not be easily ordered into one sequence according to their magnitudes because they represent uncertain values. When two fuzzy numbers overlap with each other, a fuzzy number may not be considered absolutely larger than the other. That is, even when a fuzzy number may be considered larger than the other, it may also be considered smaller than the other. It means that for a given set of fuzzy numbers, several ranking sequences possibly exist. However, most of the existing ranking methods produce only one ranking sequence. They ignore other possible sequences due to the overlap between fuzzy numbers. We propose a ranking method which generates possible ranking sequences of given fuzzy numbers. Our method takes a viewpoint from users, and uses it for evaluation of fuzzy numbers. Fuzzy numbers will be ranked based on the evaluations and a fuzzy set of sequences of fuzzy numbers will be produced as a ranking results. Numeric examples and comparisons with other methods are also presented.

In this paper an algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization techniques called Ants on a Tree (AOT) is introduced. This algorithm can integrate many algorithms together to solve a single problem. The strength of AOT is demonstrated by solving a High-Level Synthesis problem. A High-Level Synthesis problem consists of many design steps and many algorithms to solve each of them. AOT can easily integrate these algorithms to limit the search space and use them as heuristic weights to guide the search. During the search, AOT generates a dynamic decision tree. A boosting technique similar to branch and bound algorithms is applied to guide the search in the decision tree. The storage explosion problem is eliminated by the evaporation of pheromone trail generated by ants, the inherent property of our search algorithm.

We propose multibits/sequence-period optical code division multiple access (MS-OCDMA) systems with double optical hardlimiters (DHL) in the presence of APD noise, thermal noise, and channel interference. We apply Reed-Solomon (RS) codes to MS-OCDMA to further improve the error rate performance. We show that the MS-OCDMA receiver with DHL improves the bit error probability of MS-OCDMA systems when the received laser power is large. We also show that the performance of RS coded MS-OCDMA system is better than that of on-off keying OCDMA (OOK-OCDMA) system at the same bit rate and at the same chip rate, respectively.

Edge detection has been an essential step in image processing, and there has been much work undertaken to date. This paper inspects a fuzzy mathematical morphology in order to reach a higher-level of edge-image processing. The proposed scheme uses a fuzzy morphological gradient to detect object boundaries, when the boundaries are roughly defined as a curve or a surface separating homogeneous regions. The automatic edge detection algorithm consists of two major steps. First, a new version of anisotropic diffusion is proposed for edge detection and image restoration. All improvements of the new version use fuzzy mathematical morphology to preserve the edge accuracy and to restore the images to homogeneity. Second, the fuzzy morphological gradient operation detects the step edges between the homogeneous regions as object boundaries. This operation uses geometrical characteristics contained in the structuring element in order to extract the edge features in the set of edgeness, a set consisting of the quality values of the edge pixels. This set is prepared with fuzzy logic for decision and selection of authentic edge pixels. For experimental results, the proposed method has been tested successfully with both synthetic and real pictures.

Karhunen-Loeve (KL) transform is optimal for many signal detection, communication and filtering applications. An explicit solution of the KL integral equation for a practical case when the covariance function of a stationary process is exponentially oscillating is proposed.

In this letter, a new output feedback tracking control using a fuzzy disturbance observer (FDO) is proposed and its application to control of a nonlinear system in the presence of the internal parameter perturbation and external disturbance is presented. An FDO using a filtered signal is developed and the high gain observer (HGO) is employed to implement the output feedback tracking control. It is shown in a rigorous manner that all the errors involved can be kept arbitrarily small. Finally, the effectiveness and the feasibility of the suggested method is demonstrated by computer simulation.

This paper investigates the stability problem of singular systems with saturation actuators. A Lyapunov method is employed to give the sufficient conditions for stability of closed-loop systems with saturation actuators. The controller is designed to satisfy the requirement for stability under the nonlinear saturation. In addition, a method is presented for estimating the domain of attraction of the origin.

The center problem of a graph is motivated by a number of facility location problems. In this paper, we propose parallel algorithms for finding the center of interval graphs and circular-arc graphs. Our algorithms run in O(log n) time algorithm using O(n/log n) processors while the intervals and arcs are given in sorted order. Our algorithms are on the EREW PRAM model.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in providing high quality and efficient broadband services over wireless and mobile links. Space-time code is designed to exploit multiple-input multiple-output antenna systems and by doing so an enormous increase in the capacity of wireless systems can be achieved. In this letter, a synchronization technique is proposed to improve the performance of multiple-input multiple-output system. The interpolation method is employed to estimate the coarse and fine frequency offset at the same time without additional complexity.

A novel effective method for detection and removal impulse noise in highly corrupted color images is proposed. This detection-estimation method consists of two steps. Outliers are first detected using spatial relations between the color components. Then the detected noise pixels are replaced with the output of the vector median filter over a local spatially connected area excluding the outliers. Simulation results in a test color image show a superior performance of the proposed filtering algorithm comparing to the conventional vector median filter. The comparisons are made using a mean square error and a mean absolute error criteria.