A drift-correlated ground motion intensity measure: application to steel frame buildings

Estimations of seismic risk in urban areas should include quantifications of the expected damage to civil structures subjected to earthquakes. In buildings, this quantification depends on the maximum inter-story drift (MIDR), among other aspects. In this study, the correlation between several intensity measures (IMs) and the maximum inter-story drift of steel structures was investigated. Three steel frame buildings of 3, 7 and 13 stories were used as a testbed. These buildings were modelled as 2D framed structures. For the seismic hazard, forty strong ground motion pairs were selected (80 individual horizontal components) from the Italian database. These records were scaled to a specific peak ground acceleration (PGA) and matched to a design spectrum from Eurocode 8. Nonlinear dynamic analysis was used to estimate the seismic response of the structures. Thus, 720 nonlinear dynamic analyses (NLDA) were performed [3 structures × (80 as recorded accelerograms + 80 scaled records + 80 matched records)]. Preliminary results indicate that PGA and MIDR show the worst correlation. A higher correlation was observed for peak ground velocity, root-mean-square velocity and specific energy density intensity-based measures. Finally, a new IM, which is highly correlated with MIDR, is proposed. This IM is called IΔ-PGV and considers both the PGV and the significant duration.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Speech Recognition

Chapters in the first part of the book cover all the essential speech processing techniques for building robust, automatic speech recognition systems: the representation for speech signals and the methods for speech-features extraction, acoustic and language modeling, efficient algorithms for searching the hypothesis space, and multimodal approaches to speech recognition. The last part of the book is devoted to other speech processing applications that can use the information from automatic speech recognition for speaker identification and tracking, for prosody modeling in emotion-detection systems and in other speech processing applications that are able to operate in real-world environments, like mobile communication services and smart homes

Multimodal Adversarial Learning

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have proven to be an exceptional tool for object recognition, generative modelling, and multi-modal learning in various computer vision applications. However, recent findings have shown that such state-of-the-art models can be easily deceived by inserting slight imperceptible perturbations to key pixels in the input. A good target detection systems can accurately identify targets by localizing their coordinates on the input image of interest. This is ideally achieved by labeling each pixel in an image as a background or a potential target pixel. However, prior research still confirms that such state of the art targets models are susceptible to adversarial attacks. In the case of generative models, facial sketches drawn by artists mostly used by law enforcement agencies depend on the ability of the artist to clearly replicate all the key facial features that aid in capturing the true identity of a subject. Recent works have attempted to synthesize these sketches into plausible visual images to improve visual recognition and identification. However, synthesizing photo-realistic images from sketches proves to be an even more challenging task, especially for sensitive applications such as suspect identification. However, the incorporation of hybrid discriminators, which perform attribute classification of multiple target attributes, a quality guided encoder that minimizes the perceptual dissimilarity of the latent space embedding of the synthesized and real image at different layers in the network have shown to be powerful tools towards better multi modal learning techniques. In general, our overall approach was aimed at improving target detection systems and the visual appeal of synthesized images while incorporating multiple attribute assignment to the generator without compromising the identity of the synthesized image. We synthesized sketches using XDOG filter for the CelebA, Multi-modal and CelebA-HQ datasets and from an auxiliary generator trained on sketches from CUHK, IIT-D and FERET datasets. Our results overall for different model applications are impressive compared to current state of the art

Discriminative connectionist approaches for automatic speech recognition in cars

The first part of this thesis is devoted to the evaluation of approaches which exploit the inherent redundancy of the speech signal to improve the noise robustness. On the basis of this evaluation on the AURORA 2000 database, we further study in detail two of the evaluated approaches. The first of these approaches is the hybrid RBF/HMM approach, which is an attempt to combine the superior classification performance of radial basis functions (RBFs) with the ability of HMMs to model time variation. The second approach is using neural networks to non-linearly reduce the dimensionality of large feature vectors including context frames. We propose the use of different MLP topologies for that purpose. Experiments on the AURORA 2000 database reveal that the performance of the first approach is similar to the performance of systems based on SCHMMs. The second approach cannot outperform the performance of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) on a database recorded in real car environments, but it is on average significantly better than LDA on the AURORA 2000 database.Im ersten Teil dieser Arbeit werden bestehende Verfahren zur Erhöhung der Robustheit von Spracherkennungssystemen in lauten Umgebungen evaluiert, die auf der Ausnutzung der Redundanz im Sprachsignal basieren. Auf der Grundlage dieser Evaluation auf der AURORA 2000 Datenbank werden zwei spezielle Ansätze weiter ausgearbeitet und detalliert analysiert. Der erste dieser Ansätze verbindet die herausragende Klassifikationsleistung von neuronalen Netzen mit radialen Basisfunktionen (RBF) mit der Fähigkeit von Hidden-Markov-Modellen (HMM), Zeitveränderlichkeiten zu modellieren. In einem zweiten Ansatz werden NN zur nichtlinearen Dimensionsreduktion hochdimensionaler Kontextvektoren in unterschiedlichen Netzwerk-Topologien untersucht. In Experimenten konnte gezeigt werden, dass der erste dieser Ansätze für die AURORA-Datenbank eine ähnliche Leistungsfähigkeit wie semikontinuierliche HMM (SCHMM) aufweist. Der zweite Ansatz erzielt auf einer im Kraftfahrzeug aufgenommenen Datenbank keine Verbesserung gegenüber den klassischen linearen Ansätzen zu Dimensionsreduktion (LDA), erweist sich aber auf der AURORA-Datenbank als signifikan