IEICE ESS Fundamentals Review

It is known that VHF- and UHF-band radio waves propagate over a longer distance than usual, when subjected to atmospheric ducting, which occurs under certain weather conditions. Anomalous overreach propagation causes co-channel interference in wireless systems such as terrestrial digital TV broadcasting systems. For digital TV systems, it has been difficult to take countermeasures against overreach interference since it is difficult to identify sources of interference. This review explains the anomalous propagation caused by atmospheric ducting and describes new countermeasures employed in digital TV systems.

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A strength of Japan is that high-quality safety management and production technologies have been implemented at worksites by workers, managers and production engineers. If European technologies and social systems ensuring the safety of machinery are appropriately implemented on the basis of these“ onsite capabilities”, a new technology and system framework based on Japan’s onsite capabilities may be created. This study examines the laws, regulations, and social systems that ensure the safety of machinery in Japan.

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This paper presents basic methods of victim identification applied in the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on March 11, 2011. It was proved in this disaster that human identification using dental treatment records is particularly effective compared with other forensic human identification techniques including those using faces, fingerprints, palmprints, and DNA. However, a major problem at the time of the disaster was that the Japanese police agency did not have sufficient expertise in dental identification, especially in mass fatality situations. In April 2011, the authors’ group joined the victim identification team of Miyagi Prefectural Police to introduce advanced dental identification techniques with the necessary ICT support. We designed and implemented the overall workflow of dental identification in collaboration with Miyagi Dental Association. The main objective of this paper is to share the lessons learned from the disaster. We also review a recent project conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) for disaster preparedness; the project is to define a standard data set for forensic dentistry in order to achieve rapid human identification.

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Vehicle self-localization is an important and challenging issue in current driving assistance and autonomous driving research activities. This paper mainly investigates two kinds of methods for vehicle self-localization: active sensor based and passive sensor based. Active sensor based localization was firstly proposed for robot localization, and was introduced into autonomous driving recently. The Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques is the representative in active sensor based localization. The passive sensor based localization technologies are categorized and explained based on the type of sensors, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), inertial sensors and cameras. In this paper, researches utilizing active sensors and passive sensors for autonomous vehicles are reviewed extensively. Finally, our challenges on self-localization in urban canyon by the system integration of passive sensors is introduced. GNSS error has been improved for the purpose of the self-localization in urban canyon. The performance of the proposed method would suggest possible solution autonomous vehicles which makes use of passive sensors more.

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