Towards building a Deep Learning based Automated Indian Classical Music Tutor for the Masses

Music can play an important role in the well-being of the world. Indian classical music is unique in its requirement for rigorous, disciplined, expert-led training that typically goes on for years before the learner can reach a reasonable level of performance. This keeps many, including the first author of this paper, away from mastering the skill. The problem is particularly compounded in rural areas, where the available expertise may be limited and prohibitively expensive, but the interest in learning classical music still prevails, nevertheless. Machine Learning has been complementing, enhancing, and replacing many white-collar jobs and we believe it can help with this problem as well. This paper describes efforts at using Machine Learning techniques, particularly, Long Short-Term Memory for building a system that is a step toward provisioning an Indian Classical Music Tutor for the masses. The system is deployed in the cloud using orchestrated containerization for potential worldwide access, load balancing, and other robust features

Detection of Atrial Fibrillation using Autoregressive modeling

A‎atrial fibrillation (AF) is the arrhythmia that commonly causes death in the adults. We measured AR coefficients using Burg’s method for each 15 second segment of ECG. These features are classified using the different statistical classifiers: kernel SVM and KNN classifier. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated on signals from MIT Physionet database.. The effect of AR model order and data length was tested on the classification results. This method shows better results can be used for practical use in the clinics.

Data-Driven Audio Feature Space Clustering for Automatic Sound Recognition in Radio Broadcast News

This is an Open Access article published by World Scientific Publishing Company. It is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) License. Further distribution of this work is permitted, provided the original work is properly cited. T. Theodorou, I. Mpoas, A. Lazaridis, N. Fakotakis, 'Data-Driven Audio Feature Space Clustering for Automatic Sound Recognition in Radio Broadcast News', International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, Vol. 26 (2), April 2017, 1750005 (13 pages), DOI: 10.1142/S021821301750005. © The Author(s).In this paper we describe an automatic sound recognition scheme for radio broadcast news based on principal component clustering with respect to the discrimination ability of the principal components. Specifically, streams of broadcast news transmissions, labeled based on the audio event, are decomposed using a large set of audio descriptors and project into the principal component space. A data-driven algorithm clusters the relevance of the components. The component subspaces are used by sound type classifier. This methodology showed that the k-nearest neighbor and the artificial intelligent network provide good results. Also, this methodology showed that discarding unnecessary dimension works in favor on the outcome, as it hardly deteriorates the effectiveness of the algorithms.Peer reviewe

Affect Recognition in Human Emotional Speech using Probabilistic Support Vector Machines

The problem of inferring human emotional state automatically from speech has become one of the central problems in Man Machine Interaction (MMI). Though Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were used in several worksfor emotion recognition from speech, the potential of using probabilistic SVMs for this task is not explored. The emphasis of the current work is on how to use probabilistic SVMs for the efficient recognition of emotions from speech. Emotional speech corpuses for two Dravidian languages- Telugu & Tamil- were constructed for assessing the recognition accuracy of Probabilistic SVMs. Recognition accuracy of the proposed model is analyzed using both Telugu and Tamil emotional speech corpuses and compared with three of the existing works. Experimental results indicated that the proposed model is significantly better compared with the existing methods

USING DEEP LEARNING-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR CHILD SPEECH EMOTION RECOGNITION

Biological languages of the body through which human emotion can be detected abound including heart rate, facial expressions, movement of the eyelids and dilation of the eyes, body postures, skin conductance, and even the speech we make. Speech emotion recognition research started some three decades ago, and the popular Interspeech Emotion Challenge has helped to propagate this research area. However, most speech recognition research is focused on adults and there is very little research on child speech. This dissertation is a description of the development and evaluation of a child speech emotion recognition framework. The higher-level components of the framework are designed to sort and separate speech based on the speaker’s age, ensuring that focus is only on speeches made by children. The framework uses Baddeley’s Theory of Working Memory to model a Working Memory Recurrent Network that can process and recognize emotions from speech. Baddeley’s Theory of Working Memory offers one of the best explanations on how the human brain holds and manipulates temporary information which is very crucial in the development of neural networks that learns effectively. Experiments were designed and performed to provide answers to the research questions, evaluate the proposed framework, and benchmark the performance of the framework with other methods. Satisfactory results were obtained from the experiments and in many cases, our framework was able to outperform other popular approaches. This study has implications for various applications of child speech emotion recognition such as child abuse detection and child learning robots

Speech data analysis for semantic indexing of video of simulated medical crises.

The Simulation for Pediatric Assessment, Resuscitation, and Communication (SPARC) group within the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Louisville, was established to enhance the care of children by using simulation based educational methodologies to improve patient safety and strengthen clinician-patient interactions. After each simulation session, the physician must manually review and annotate the recordings and then debrief the trainees. The physician responsible for the simulation has recorded 100s of videos, and is seeking solutions that can automate the process. This dissertation introduces our developed system for efficient segmentation and semantic indexing of videos of medical simulations using machine learning methods. It provides the physician with automated tools to review important sections of the simulation by identifying who spoke, when and what was his/her emotion. Only audio information is extracted and analyzed because the quality of the image recording is low and the visual environment is static for most parts. Our proposed system includes four main components: preprocessing, speaker segmentation, speaker identification, and emotion recognition. The preprocessing consists of first extracting the audio component from the video recording. Then, extracting various low-level audio features to detect and remove silence segments. We investigate and compare two different approaches for this task. The first one is threshold-based and the second one is classification-based. The second main component of the proposed system consists of detecting speaker changing points for the purpose of segmenting the audio stream. We propose two fusion methods for this task. The speaker identification and emotion recognition components of our system are designed to provide users the capability to browse the video and retrieve shots that identify ”who spoke, when, and the speaker’s emotion” for further analysis. For this component, we propose two feature representation methods that map audio segments of arbitary length to a feature vector with fixed dimensions. The first one is based on soft bag-of-word (BoW) feature representations. In particular, we define three types of BoW that are based on crisp, fuzzy, and possibilistic voting. The second feature representation is a generalization of the BoW and is based on Fisher Vector (FV). FV uses the Fisher Kernel principle and combines the benefits of generative and discriminative approaches. The proposed feature representations are used within two learning frameworks. The first one is supervised learning and assumes that a large collection of labeled training data is available. Within this framework, we use standard classifiers including K-nearest neighbor (K-NN), support vector machine (SVM), and Naive Bayes. The second framework is based on semi-supervised learning where only a limited amount of labeled training samples are available. We use an approach that is based on label propagation. Our proposed algorithms were evaluated using 15 medical simulation sessions. The results were analyzed and compared to those obtained using state-of-the-art algorithms. We show that our proposed speech segmentation fusion algorithms and feature mappings outperform existing methods. We also integrated all proposed algorithms and developed a GUI prototype system for subjective evaluation. This prototype processes medical simulation video and provides the user with a visual summary of the different speech segments. It also allows the user to browse videos and retrieve scenes that provide answers to semantic queries such as: who spoke and when; who interrupted who? and what was the emotion of the speaker? The GUI prototype can also provide summary statistics of each simulation video. Examples include: for how long did each person spoke? What is the longest uninterrupted speech segment? Is there an unusual large number of pauses within the speech segment of a given speaker