IEEJ Transactions on Electronics, Information and Systems
Online ISSN : 1348-8155
Print ISSN : 0385-4221
ISSN-L : 0385-4221
Volume 132, Issue 11
Displaying 1-29 of 29 articles from this issue
Special Issue on “The 2012 Kansai-Section Joint Convention of Institute of Electrical Engineering Japan”
Preface
Special Issue Paper
<Electronic Materials and Devices>
  • Daisuke Ito, Katsumi Kotani, Tomoki Miyake, Hiroaki Nishikawa, Shigeki ...
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1722-1726
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    We studied a method to obtain superconductivity even in very thin films of YBa2Cu3Oy (YBCO). These thinner YBCO films will be able to be applied to optics/superconductivity (opt/super) converters with high optical sensitivity. Opt/super converters composed of YBCO nano-bridges or nano-wires require a low critical current that is determined by the film thickness. According to X-ray diffraction, critical temperature (Tc) and residual resistivity ratio for the substrates of MgO (100), SrTiO3 (100) and NdGaO3 (110), superconducting features are influenced by the lattice mismatching layer in YBCO closing to a hetero-epitaxy interface between YBCO and single crystal substrate. YBCO films with different thicknesses varying from 80 to 10nm were prepared on SrTiO3, using a suitable temperature. The values of Tc slightly decreased when reducing YBCO thickness from 80 to 20 nm, and then declined sharply at less than 20nm. It is considered that a layer in the beginning of deposition less than 20nm causes stress in the crystal lattice. The Tc of 20 nm YBCO film on SrTiO3 was 80.8 K. It can work above liquid N2 temperature.
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  • Tetsuya Masuda, Tetsuro Hori, Takeshi Hayashi, Kaoru Fukumura, Dao Qua ...
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1727-1732
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Dependence of photovoltaic properties in bulk heterojunction organic thin film solar cells utilizing soluble phthalocyanine derivative, 1,4,8,11,15,18,22,25-octahexylphthalocyanine (C6PcH2) on acceptor materials have been investigated. As acceptor materials, we have adopted four fullerene derivatives, such as, 1-(3-methoxy-carbonyl)-propyl-1-1-phenyl-(6,6)C61 (PCBM), 1-[3-(methoxycarbonyl)propyl]-1-phenyl)-[6.6]C62 (bis[60]PCBM), Indene-C60 Bisadduct (ICBA), and 1-(3-methoxycabonyl)-propyl-1-1-phenyl-(6,6)C71 ([70]PCBM), which possess different LUMO or HOMO levels in their electric energy structures. The open circuit voltage (Voc) of the solar cells was strongly dependent on the acceptor materials, and high Voc of 0.97V could be achieved by using bis[60]PCBM. The photovoltaic properties, such as, Voc, of the solar cells with the bulk heterojunction of C6PcH2 and fullerene derivatives have been discussed by taking the energy diagrams of the materials used in this study into consideration.
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<Electrical and Electronic Circuit, LSI>
  • Hajime Sawano, Nobuyuki Araki, Takashi Kambe
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1733-1740
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Reconfigurable Computing (RC) has been proposed as a new paradigm to address the conflicting design requirements of high performance and area efficiency. Coarse-grained architecture RC (CGA-RC) operates at the word level of granularity and exhibits better power and performance features than fine-grained architectures. However, in a CGA-RC system, the processing elements (PE) implement several types of multiple arithmetic operations and the routing between them has a fixed architecture. To achieve both good performance and high PE utilization for all applications, we propose PE based pipeline design method, apply it to JPEG encoder, and evaluate its performance.
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<Biomedical Engineering>
  • Tetsuya Asakawa, Takuto Hayashi, Yuko Mizuno-Matsumoto
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1741-1748
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The objective of this research is to abstract the differences of the brain functional reaction in the mental states using coherence analysis in electroencephalography (EEG). Twenty-two healthy subjects were assessed for their psychosomatic states using Cornell Medical Index (CMI) and divided into two groups: normal (I) and pre-neurotic (II-IV) groups. EEG was measured under emotional tasks (relaxed, pleasant, and unpleasant sessions) using audio-visual stimuli and analyzed using coherence analysis. The coherence values of pre-neurotic group in θ band in 120-150 seconds of the pleasant and unpleasant sessions and in β band in the relaxed session were significantly larger than values of normal group. The coherence values of normal and pre-neurotic groups in α2 band in 30-60 seconds and 90-120 seconds in the unpleasant sessions were significantly larger than the values in the relaxed session, respectively. Increase in θ activity means the intuitive and irrational response would appear to the emotional situation, and β activity means the attention would be paid to more the external than internal situations in pre-neurotic group. Alpha activity shows mentally internal response to the unpleasant situation would be prompt in normal group, in contrast to the response would be delayed in pre-neurotic group. These events suggest that the information processes concerning about the emotional stimuli in the brain would be different based on the mental state.
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<Systems, Instrument, Control>
  • Noboru Nakasako, Toshihiro Shinohara, Keiji Kawanishi, Tetsuji Uebo
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1749-1755
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    In many engineering fields, distance to target is very important information. Typical distance measurement methods use time delay between transmitted and reflected waves, but it is difficult to estimate short distance. On the other hand, a method for measuring short distances using a standing wave, which is generated by phase interference of transmitted and reflected waves, is known in the field of microwave radar. This method is given in a very simple form such that the distance between microphone and target is estimated as a peak value of the range spectrum, which can be obtained by Fourier transform of the power spectrum of the observed wave. However, since the minimum measurable distance depends on the bandwidth of the transmitted wave, the shorter distance measurement requires the wider bandwidth of the transmitted wave. This paper describes a new distance estimation method measurable from 0m based on the phase interference of transmitted and reflected audible sound. More concretely, we introduce an analytic signal instead of the power spectrum and examine the validity and effectiveness of our method by applying it to an actual sound field.
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<Media Information, User Interface>
  • Masaya Ohta, Masataka Motokurumada, Ryuta Yokomichi, Takahiro Yoshimi, ...
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1756-1761
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The ARToolkit is the most well-known open source library for developing AR (Augmented Reality) applications that can recognize a printed marker by a camera, estimate position and pose of it, and draw 3DCG contents on the display (3DCG rendering part). Although a content creator can develop a new AR application by modifying only the 3DCG rendering part, a compiler for C or Java programming language is required. A user who plays various AR applications has to download and install each application separately. Also content of the ARToolkit is allowed to contain only 3DCG drawn by the OpenGL library. In this paper, we propose a novel AR system that can display 3DCG and various Web contents written in HTML5/JavaScript used in Web page design, and dose not require any compiler.
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<Speech and Image Processing, Recognition>
  • Yuta Tsuchida, Michifumi Yoshioka
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1762-1767
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Recently, the technology called GPGPU which treats not only graphic processing but also the general purpose calculation by using GPU is researched because the GPU is higher performance than CPU for the development of the 3DCG or the movie processing. GPU is the dedicated circuit to draw the graphics, so it has a characteristic that the many simple arithmetic circuits are implemented. This characteristic is hoped to apply not only graphic processing but also the massive parallelism. In this research, we apply the technology to the neural network learning, one of the intelligent signal processing. As the conventional research, we proposed the three methods to speed up the neural network learning. One of the method, the parallelization for the processing of the patterns, has the point that should be improved. In this paper, it is described that the update of the weight coefficient in the neurons is processed in the same time by changing the calculation of the patterns order. The proposed calculation method is evaluated with some test data sets. We confirmed that proposed method converge similarly to conventional method. Then, we proposed the optimal implementation method for the GPU. As the result, this proposed method is 3 to 6 times faster than the conventional method.
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  • Kazuki Taniguchi, Xian-Hua Han, Motonori Ohashi, Yutaro Iwamoto, So Sa ...
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1768-1773
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper presents a new method for single-frame Super-Resolution (SR), by combining Example-based SR and neighbor embedding based SR (NE-based SR). Example-based SR attempts to generate High-Resolution (HR) image through estimating the High-Frequency (HF) components that are lost in the input Low-Resolution (LR) image. This method usually can achieve acceptable HR images if enough amounts of similar training samples are prepared. However, the HF component is approximated by only one training sample, which easily produces noise and artifacts. On the other hand, NE-based SR recovers HR image using manifold learning - Locally Linear Embedding, which represents any LR input and its corresponding HR one by a weighted linear combination of several training patches. The NE-based SR need to prepare large-scale training database with both intensity and structure variation, which will lead to high computation. This study combines these two methods to only estimate the HF components using several training samples. Moreover, we extend the proposed method to a fast version by processing only the patches with large variance. Experimental results show that the reconstructed HR images by our proposed approach are much better than those by conventional methods and interpolation techniques, and at the same time the computation is much faster.
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Special Issue Letter
<Systems, Instrument, Control>
Paper
<Information and Communication Technology>
<Biomedical Engineering>
  • Ikuhiro Yamaguchi, Yutaro Ogawa, Hiroya Nakao, Yasuhiko Jimbo, Kiyoshi ...
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1787-1797
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The corticothalamic Compact Model with time delay proposed by Kim and Robinson is analyzed focusing on the resting EEG, which can be described by the linear version of the model with white-noise input, under assumption of spatial homogeneity and temporal steadiness. After discussing availability and restriction of the model by comparing to the original Pre-Compact model, a data analysis method for the resting EEG using the model is presented. The experimental results analyzed by the method suggest that Eye-Closed state compared to Eye-Open state would be characterized by enhanced corticothalamic feedback and depressed cortical excitation. Validity of Reduced Equations derived in our previous paper is also investigated for the resting EEG, concluding that Reduced Equations would be available with some restriction for the resting EEG, although the center manifold theory on which Reduced Equations are based is justified at the edge of linear stability in principle.
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  • Yosuke Honda, Junichi Hori
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1798-1805
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficient stroke patterns of manual wheelchair propulsion in the repetition operation. The state of the muscle fatigue was evaluated using the averaged rectified value and the mean power frequency of 5-channel surface electromyograms of the upper arm and the chest. In addition, the propulsion efficiency of was estimated from the driving torque and total muscle activities. Four different stroke patterns of arcing, semicircular, single looping over propulsion, and double looping over propulsion were examined by 6 healthy male subjects. The experimental results of the subjects with muscle fatigue tendency suggested that the stroke pattern of the semicircular which draws locus an oval was the most effective in four stroke patterns because of low muscle fatigue and high proportion efficiency.
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<Systems, Instrument, Control>
  • Masayoshi Nakamoto, Ken-ichiro Tanaka, Shuichi Ohno
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1806-1812
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    In this paper, we consider a design problem of two-dimensional (2-D) error feedback (EF) circuit for reduction of a roundoff noise in 2-D infinite impulse response (IIR) digital filters. Though the EF is effective for reduction of the roundoff noise, the number of shifters in the EF circuit should be small for the fast arithmetic and low-cost realization. Canonical signed digit (CSD) number is efficient to represent the EF coefficients with finite word-length because it can be represented with less non-zero bits (shifters) than the one with the generally used binary number. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to optimize the EF coefficients with CSD coefficients. The proposed algorithm is based on the branch and bound method by estimating the lower bound of the optimal solution. The good point of the proposed method is that the optimality of the obtained solution can be guaranteed. Finally, we give a numerical example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the EF with CSD coefficients. Also, we show that the number of shifters can be efficiently reduced by using the CSD coefficients.
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  • Yuta Mitanda, Masaru Katayama, Toru Yamamoto
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1813-1818
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    In this paper, a data-driven PID(DD-PID) control scheme with a self-organizing map(SOM) is newly proposed. According to the conventional DD-PID control scheme, the control performance strongly depends on the extraction method of data. The key idea which is discussed in this paper is realizing effective data extraction by introducing the SOM. It becomes possible to obtain thereby better control performance. The effectiveness of proposed control scheme is verified by a numerical simulation example.
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  • Lutao Wang, Shingo Mabu, Kotaro Hirasawa
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1819-1828
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Multi-agent control in non-Markov environments is difficult because the environment information is partially observable. Agents suffer from the perceptual aliasing problem and couldn't take proper actions. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a rule-based model named “multi-order rule accumulation” to guide agent's actions in non-Markov environments. The advantages are, firstly, each multi-order rule memorizes the past environment information and agent's actions, which serves as the additional information to distinguish the aliasing situations, secondly, multi-order rules are very general, so that they are competent for guiding agents' actions in Partial Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), thirdly, multi-order rules are accumulated throughout the generations, which could cover many situations experienced in different generations. This also helps agents to take proper actions. Simulations on the tile-world problem prove that this rule-based model outperforms the conventional methods and the previous research.
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  • Lutao Wang, Shingo Mabu, Wei Xu, Kotaro Hirasawa
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1829-1839
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Genetic Network Programming(GNP) is a new evolutionary computation method which is competent for many agent control problems. However, some redundant nodes exist in the program of GNP, which can easily cause the over-fitting problem and decrease its performance. In order to prune these nodes, a new method named “Credit GNP” is proposed in this paper. The novelties are, firstly, Credit GNP has a unique structure, where each node has an additional “credit branch” which can skip the redundant nodes. Secondly, Credit GNP combines evolution and reinforcement learning, i.e., off-line evolution and on-line learning to prune the redundant nodes. Which node to prune and how many nodes to prune are determined automatically considering different environments. Simulation results on the Tile-world problem show that Credit GNP could generate not only better programs, but also more general rules for agent control. The superiority of the proposed method over the conventional GNP, GP and standard reinforcement learning is proved.
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<Media Information, User Interface>
  • Yasunori Koyama, Toshiaki Matsumoto, Yoshiaki Shirai, Nobutaka Shimada ...
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1840-1846
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    We propose a novel method of extracting a human silhouette from a golf swing movie taken by a mobile phone camera for automatic golf swing diagnosis. The difficulties of the task are that we cannot use the background subtraction method and that the camera is not fixed. First we correct small camera movements during a swing sequence by tracking features in the obvious background. Based on the fact that the histogram of the pixel value (hue and brightness) at the background pixel distributes in a narrow interval, we classify each pixel into three categories: background pixel, human pixel, and mixture pixel. We propagate pixel values of the background from the background pixels to the mixture ones. Finally we apply a graph cut method to extract the human silhouette at each image. Experimental results showed that the proposed method is promising.
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<Speech and Image Processing, Recognition>
  • Weihan Sun, Koichi Kise
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1847-1854
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Comic books are a kind of serial narrative artwork made up of comic pages. As an essential part of comics, cartoon characters appear throughout the whole series. Therefore, the recognition of cartoon characters is useful for many applications of comics. Normally, images of the same character are similar but with different representations in different scenes, such as facial expressions, poses, and viewpoints, which make them difficult to be recognized. In contrast to human being, besides face regions, there are many other parts offering the identification features for cartoon characters. In this paper, we focus on cartoon character recognition and propose Concentric Multi-Region model to explore the significant features from the parts around face regions. Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) is utilized for the description of regions, and the AdaBoost algorithm is applied to obtain a new descriptor named Concentric Multi-Region Histograms of Oriented Gradients (CMR-HOG). In the experiments, 17 labeled cartoon characters are applied. Compared to other face and object recognition methods only based on face regions, the proposed method shows better performance. In addition, we proved its scalability for cartoon character recognition.
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<Information System, Electronic Commerce>
<Information Processing, Software>
  • Toru Watanabe, Hisao Koizumi
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1860-1872
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    This paper proposes a CTI client/server coordination system exclusively for use with a smart phone. The system makes use of a CTI client, performing combined functions of a SIP phone and a Web browser. The proposed CTI client/server coordination system comprises SIP servers and Web servers, both of which are installed in enterprises, and CTI clients that run on smart phones in a mobile environment. Furthermore, the CTI clients perform the function of SIP phone by communicating with SIP servers. In addition, CTI clients can display telephone directories and logging of phone calls stored in Web servers. They can display screens of ordinary Web browsers. Here, one might switch between a SIP phone function and screen of Web communication with merely a single touch of the tab key. Consequently, smart phones in the mobile environment enable a person to conduct telephone meetings while browsing with a Web screen.
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Technical Note
<Optics, Quantum Electronics>
  • Hiroyasu Sone, Yasuhiro Harada, Shinki Nakamura, Dai Yoshitomi, Hideyu ...
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1873-1879
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Recently, optical pulses propagating through a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) of a special design were reported to yield a broad and flat supercontinuum (SC) spectrum around 1000nm because the fiber dispersion characteristics are of low dispersion around 1000nm. This study was undertaken to investigate spectral characteristics of SC pulses generated in two low dispersion PCFs which are a highly nonlinear PCF with group velocity dispersion (GVD) having an extremum value at zero dispersion and a lowly nonlinear PCF with GVD crossing zero dispersion. The influence of incident light pulse parameters (power, pulse width and chirp) and fiber length on SC spectra was also examined using those PCFs. Results show that highly nonlinear PCF with GVD distributions having an extremum value and zero dispersion around 1000nm is useful.
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Letter
<Electronic Materials and Devices>
<Electrical and Electronic Circuit, LSI>
<Systems, Instrument, Control>
<Softcomputing, Learning>
  • Hiroyuki Asahara, Takuji Kousaka
    2012 Volume 132 Issue 11 Pages 1886-1887
    Published: November 01, 2012
    Released on J-STAGE: November 01, 2012
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    The size of spike noise may not be a constant value in the DC/DC converters, and therefore it is valuable to investigate the characteristics of the interrupted electric circuit with perturbed spike noise. In this paper, we change the size of spike noise using a pseudo random number, and investigate the characteristics of the circuit. First, we show the circuit model and following that we explain behavior of the waveform. Next, we define the return map and derive the bifurcation diagrams. Finally, we discuss the characteristics of the circuit with perturbed spike noise. We will show that perturbation of the spike noise does not affect period-doubling bifurcation but it affects the border-collision bifurcation.
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