12,668 research outputs found
Ad Hoc Microphone Array Calibration: Euclidean Distance Matrix Completion Algorithm and Theoretical Guarantees
This paper addresses the problem of ad hoc microphone array calibration where
only partial information about the distances between microphones is available.
We construct a matrix consisting of the pairwise distances and propose to
estimate the missing entries based on a novel Euclidean distance matrix
completion algorithm by alternative low-rank matrix completion and projection
onto the Euclidean distance space. This approach confines the recovered matrix
to the EDM cone at each iteration of the matrix completion algorithm. The
theoretical guarantees of the calibration performance are obtained considering
the random and locally structured missing entries as well as the measurement
noise on the known distances. This study elucidates the links between the
calibration error and the number of microphones along with the noise level and
the ratio of missing distances. Thorough experiments on real data recordings
and simulated setups are conducted to demonstrate these theoretical insights. A
significant improvement is achieved by the proposed Euclidean distance matrix
completion algorithm over the state-of-the-art techniques for ad hoc microphone
array calibration.Comment: In Press, available online, August 1, 2014.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165168414003508, Signal
Processing, 201
I hear you eat and speak: automatic recognition of eating condition and food type, use-cases, and impact on ASR performance
We propose a new recognition task in the area of computational paralinguistics: automatic recognition of eating conditions in speech, i. e., whether people are eating while speaking, and what they are eating. To this end, we introduce the audio-visual iHEARu-EAT database featuring 1.6 k utterances of 30 subjects (mean age: 26.1 years, standard deviation: 2.66 years, gender balanced, German speakers), six types of food (Apple, Nectarine, Banana, Haribo Smurfs, Biscuit, and Crisps), and read as well as spontaneous speech, which is made publicly available for research purposes. We start with demonstrating that for automatic speech recognition (ASR), it pays off to know whether speakers are eating or not. We also propose automatic classification both by brute-forcing of low-level acoustic features as well as higher-level features related to intelligibility, obtained from an Automatic Speech Recogniser. Prediction of the eating condition was performed with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier employed in a leave-one-speaker-out evaluation framework. Results show that the binary prediction of eating condition (i. e., eating or not eating) can be easily solved independently of the speaking condition; the obtained average recalls are all above 90%. Low-level acoustic features provide the best performance on spontaneous speech, which reaches up to 62.3% average recall for multi-way classification of the eating condition, i. e., discriminating the six types of food, as well as not eating. The early fusion of features related to intelligibility with the brute-forced acoustic feature set improves the performance on read speech, reaching a 66.4% average recall for the multi-way classification task. Analysing features and classifier errors leads to a suitable ordinal scale for eating conditions, on which automatic regression can be performed with up to 56.2% determination coefficient
Curved Gabor Filters for Fingerprint Image Enhancement
Gabor filters play an important role in many application areas for the
enhancement of various types of images and the extraction of Gabor features.
For the purpose of enhancing curved structures in noisy images, we introduce
curved Gabor filters which locally adapt their shape to the direction of flow.
These curved Gabor filters enable the choice of filter parameters which
increase the smoothing power without creating artifacts in the enhanced image.
In this paper, curved Gabor filters are applied to the curved ridge and valley
structure of low-quality fingerprint images. First, we combine two orientation
field estimation methods in order to obtain a more robust estimation for very
noisy images. Next, curved regions are constructed by following the respective
local orientation and they are used for estimating the local ridge frequency.
Lastly, curved Gabor filters are defined based on curved regions and they are
applied for the enhancement of low-quality fingerprint images. Experimental
results on the FVC2004 databases show improvements of this approach in
comparison to state-of-the-art enhancement methods
Large Scale Question Paraphrase Retrieval with Smoothed Deep Metric Learning
The goal of a Question Paraphrase Retrieval (QPR) system is to retrieve
equivalent questions that result in the same answer as the original question.
Such a system can be used to understand and answer rare and noisy
reformulations of common questions by mapping them to a set of canonical forms.
This has large-scale applications for community Question Answering (cQA) and
open-domain spoken language question answering systems. In this paper we
describe a new QPR system implemented as a Neural Information Retrieval (NIR)
system consisting of a neural network sentence encoder and an approximate
k-Nearest Neighbour index for efficient vector retrieval. We also describe our
mechanism to generate an annotated dataset for question paraphrase retrieval
experiments automatically from question-answer logs via distant supervision. We
show that the standard loss function in NIR, triplet loss, does not perform
well with noisy labels. We propose smoothed deep metric loss (SDML) and with
our experiments on two QPR datasets we show that it significantly outperforms
triplet loss in the noisy label setting
ModDrop: adaptive multi-modal gesture recognition
We present a method for gesture detection and localisation based on
multi-scale and multi-modal deep learning. Each visual modality captures
spatial information at a particular spatial scale (such as motion of the upper
body or a hand), and the whole system operates at three temporal scales. Key to
our technique is a training strategy which exploits: i) careful initialization
of individual modalities; and ii) gradual fusion involving random dropping of
separate channels (dubbed ModDrop) for learning cross-modality correlations
while preserving uniqueness of each modality-specific representation. We
present experiments on the ChaLearn 2014 Looking at People Challenge gesture
recognition track, in which we placed first out of 17 teams. Fusing multiple
modalities at several spatial and temporal scales leads to a significant
increase in recognition rates, allowing the model to compensate for errors of
the individual classifiers as well as noise in the separate channels.
Futhermore, the proposed ModDrop training technique ensures robustness of the
classifier to missing signals in one or several channels to produce meaningful
predictions from any number of available modalities. In addition, we
demonstrate the applicability of the proposed fusion scheme to modalities of
arbitrary nature by experiments on the same dataset augmented with audio.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure
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