IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics 

Abstract: A joint ISO/CCITT committee known as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) has been working to establish the first international compression standard for continuous-tone still images, both grayscale and color. JPEG's proposed standard aims to be generic, to support a wide variety of applications for continuous-tone images. To meet the differing needs of many applications, the JPEG standard includes two basic compression methods, each with various modes of operation. A DCT (discrete cosine transform)-based method is specified for 'lossy' compression, and a predictive method for 'lossless' compression. JPEG features a simple lossy technique known as the Baseline method, a subset of the other DCT-based modes of operation. The Baseline method has been by far the most widely implemented JPEG method to date, and is sufficient in its own right for a large number of applications. The author provides an overview of the JPEG standard, and focuses in detail on the Baseline method. >

Abstract: White LED offers advantageous properties such as high brightness, reliability, lower power consumption and long lifetime. White LEDs are expected to serve in the next generation of lamps. An indoor visible-light communication system utilizing white LED lights has been proposed from our laboratory. In the proposed system, these devices are used not only for illuminating rooms but also for an optical wireless communication system. Generally, plural lights are installed in our room. So, their optical path difference must be considered. In this paper, we discuss about the influence of interference and reflection. Based on numerical analyses, we show that the system is expected to be the indoor communication of the next generation.

Abstract: With the increasing use of multimedia technologies, image compression requires higher performance as well as new features. To address this need in the specific area of still image encoding, a new standard is currently being developed, the JPEG2000. It is not only intended to provide rate-distortion and subjective image quality performance superior to existing standards, but also to provide features and functionalities that current standards can either not address efficiently or in many cases cannot address at all. Lossless and lossy compression, embedded lossy to lossless coding, progressive transmission by pixel accuracy and by resolution, robustness to the presence of bit-errors and region-of-interest coding, are some representative features. It is interesting to note that JPEG2000 is being designed to address the requirements of a diversity of applications, e.g. Internet, color facsimile, printing, scanning, digital photography, remote sensing, mobile applications, medical imagery, digital library and E-commerce.

Abstract: Histogram equalization is widely used for contrast enhancement in a variety of applications due to its simple function and effectiveness. Examples include medical image processing and radar signal processing. One drawback of the histogram equalization can be found on the fact that the brightness of an image can be changed after the histogram equalization, which is mainly due to the flattening property of the histogram equalization. Thus, it is rarely utilized in consumer electronic products such as TV where preserving the original input brightness may be necessary in order not to introduce unnecessary visual deterioration. This paper proposes a novel extension of histogram equalization to overcome such a drawback of histogram equalization. The essence of the proposed algorithm is to utilize independent histogram equalizations separately over two subimages obtained by decomposing the input image based on its mean with a constraint that the resulting equalized subimages are bounded by each other around the input mean. It is shown mathematically that the proposed algorithm preserves the mean brightness of a given image significantly well compared to typical histogram equalization while enhancing the contrast and, thus, provides a natural enhancement that can be utilized in consumer electronic products.

Abstract: Flash memory is becoming increasingly important as nonvolatile storage for mobile consumer electronics due to its low power consumption and shock resistance. However, it imposes technical challenges in that a write should be preceded by an erase operation, and that this erase operation can be performed only in a unit much larger than the write unit. To address these technical hurdles, an intermediate software layer called a flash translation layer (FTL) is generally employed to redirect logical addresses from the host system to physical addresses in flash memory. Previous approaches have performed this address translation at the granularity of either a write unit (page) or an erase unit (block). We propose a novel FTL design that combines the two different granularities in address translation. This is motivated by the idea that coarse grain address translation lowers the resources required to maintain translation information, which is crucial in mobile consumer products for cost and power consumption reasons, while fine grain address translation is efficient in handling small size writes. Performance evaluation based on trace-driven simulation shows that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms previously proposed approaches.