On preprocessing of speech signals

Preprocessing of speech signals is considered a crucial step in the development of a robust and efficient speech or speaker recognition system. In this paper, we present some popular statistical outlier-detection based strategies to segregate the silence/unvoiced part of the speech signal from the voiced portion. The proposed methods are based on the utilization of the 3 σ edit rule, and the Hampel Identifier which are compared with the conventional techniques: (i) short-time energy (STE) based methods, and (ii) distribution based methods. The results obtained after applying the proposed strategies on some test voice signals are encouragin

CREATION OF LAND MARKETS IN TRANSITION COUNTRIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE INSTITUTIONS OF LAND ADMINISTRATION

This paper describes (1) the processes of privatization of land management in selected transition countries and (2) the post-privatization changes in land administration institutions which are being crafted to establish land markets. It begins with the proposition that there are similar land market institutional problems which most "transition" countries are facing, due largely to common experiences in creating command economies during the past 50-80 years and the almost simultaneous decisions of these countries to move toward market political economies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Each country has had unique historical experiences, but this paper proposes that there is enough similar institutional history among the transition countries to venture into comparative analysis. In this regard, the Albanian experience with land market institutional development is presented as being potentially relevant to experiences in other transition countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union. The broad question is: How can countries construct the institutions of immovable property markets once they have made the political-economic decision to "go market"?Land use--Government policy--Europe, Eastern, Land use--Economic aspects--Europe, Eastern, Land tenure--Government policy--Europe, Eastern, Land administration--Europe, Eastern, Land administration--Albania, Land markets--Europe, Eastern, Land markets--Albania, Privatization--Europe, Eastern, Post-communism, Land Economics/Use,

Point and shoot microvibrometry for biological applications

The capabilities of an experimental setup combining the functions of a conventional microscope with a custom built self-mixing interferometer to characterize the contractile motion of living cells in both the transversal and longitudinal directions were explored. The use of discrete wavelets to denoise experimental signals combined with the application of a Hampel filter was shown to outperform standard denoising methods found in the self-mixing literature. Furthermore, an efficient iterative method to reliably estimate the optical feedback level and the linewidth enhancement factor was developed. Experimental displacements of microspheres, used as phantoms for living cells, were reconstructed with a resolution better than 0.15 lambda using the proposed reconstruction method. These results substantiate the claim that the proposed reconstruction method will enable the measurement of the contractile motion of individual cardiomyocytes with a resolution approaching 100 nm

Pricing average price advertising options when underlying spot market prices are discontinuous

Advertising options have been recently studied as a special type of guaranteed contracts in online advertising, which are an alternative sales mechanism to real-time auctions. An advertising option is a contract which gives its buyer a right but not obligation to enter into transactions to purchase page views or link clicks at one or multiple pre-specified prices in a specific future period. Different from typical guaranteed contracts, the option buyer pays a lower upfront fee but can have greater flexibility and more control of advertising. Many studies on advertising options so far have been restricted to the situations where the option payoff is determined by the underlying spot market price at a specific time point and the price evolution over time is assumed to be continuous. The former leads to a biased calculation of option payoff and the latter is invalid empirically for many online advertising slots. This paper addresses these two limitations by proposing a new advertising option pricing framework. First, the option payoff is calculated based on an average price over a specific future period. Therefore, the option becomes path-dependent. The average price is measured by the power mean, which contains several existing option payoff functions as its special cases. Second, jump-diffusion stochastic models are used to describe the movement of the underlying spot market price, which incorporate several important statistical properties including jumps and spikes, non-normality, and absence of autocorrelations. A general option pricing algorithm is obtained based on Monte Carlo simulation. In addition, an explicit pricing formula is derived for the case when the option payoff is based on the geometric mean. This pricing formula is also a generalized version of several other option pricing models discussed in related studies.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 201

Suggested Lines of Advance in English Vital Statistics

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