A hybrid noise suppression filter for accuracy enhancement of commercial speech recognizers in varying noisy conditions

Commercial speech recognizers have made possible many speech control applications such as wheelchair, tone-phone, multifunctional robotic arms and remote controls, for the disabled and paraplegic. However, they have a limitation in common in that recognition errors are likely to be produced when background noise surrounds the spoken command, thereby creating potential dangers for the disabled if recognition errors exist in the control systems. In this paper, a hybrid noise suppression filter is proposed to inter-face with the commercial speech recognizers in order to enhance the recognition accuracy under variant noisy conditions. It intends to decrease the recognition errors when the commercial speech recognizers are working under a noisy environment. It is based on a sigmoid function which can effectively enhance noisy speech using simple computational operations, while a robust estimator based on an adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system is used to determine the appropriate operational parameters for the sigmoid function in order to produce effective speech enhancement under variant noisy conditions.The proposed hybrid noise suppression filter has the following advantages for commercial speech recognizers: (i) it is not possible to tune the inbuilt parameters on the commercial speech recognizers in order to obtain better accuracy; (ii) existing noise suppression filters are too complicated to be implemented for real-time speech recognition; and (iii) existing sigmoid function based filters can operate only in a single-noisy condition, but not under varying noisy conditions. The performance of the hybrid noise suppression filter was evaluated by interfacing it with a commercial speech recognizer, commonly used in electronic products. Experimental results show that improvement in terms of recognition accuracy and computational time can be achieved by the hybrid noise suppression filter when the commercial recognizer is working under various noisy environments in factories

Segmentation-assisted detection of dirt impairments in archived film sequences

A novel segmentation-assisted method for film dirt detection is proposed. We exploit the fact that film dirt manifests in the spatial domain as a cluster of connected pixels whose intensity differs substantially from that of its neighborhood and we employ a segmentation-based approach to identify this type of structure. A key feature of our approach is the computation of a measure of confidence attached to detected dirt regions which can be utilized for performance fine tuning. Another important feature of our algorithm is the avoidance of the computational complexity associated with motion estimation. Our experimental framework benefits from the availability of manually derived as well as objective ground truth data obtained using infrared scanning. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method compares favorably with standard spatial, temporal and multistage median filtering approaches and provides efficient and robust detection for a wide variety of test material

Detection of dirt impairments from archived film sequences : survey and evaluations

Film dirt is the most commonly encountered artifact in archive restoration applications. Since dirt usually appears as a temporally impulsive event, motion-compensated interframe processing is widely applied for its detection. However, motion-compensated prediction requires a high degree of complexity and can be unreliable when motion estimation fails. Consequently, many techniques using spatial or spatiotemporal filtering without motion were also been proposed as alternatives. A comprehensive survey and evaluation of existing methods is presented, in which both qualitative and quantitative performances are compared in terms of accuracy, robustness, and complexity. After analyzing these algorithms and identifying their limitations, we conclude with guidance in choosing from these algorithms and promising directions for future research

An efficient of estimation stages for segmentation skin lesions based optimization algorithm

Modern dermatology distinguishes premature diagnosis for example an important part in reducing the death percentage and promising less aggressive treatment for patients. The classifications comprise various stages that must be selected suitably using the characteristics of the filter pointing to get a dependable analysis. The dermoscopic images hold challenges to be faced and overcome to enhance the automatic diagnosis of hazardous lesions. It is calculated to survey a different metaheuristic and evolutionary computing working for filter design systems. Approximately general computing techniques are observed to improve features of infect design method. Nevertheless, the median filter (MF) is normally multimodal with respect to the filter factors and so, reliable approaches that can provide optimal solutions are required. The design of MF depends on modern artificial swarm intelligence technique (MASIT) optimization algorithm which has proven to be more effective than other population-based algorithms to improve of estimation stages for segmentation skin lesions. A controlled artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is advanced for solving factors optimization problems and, also the physical-programming-depend on ABC way is applied to proposal median filter, and the outcomes are compared to another approaches

Advanced extravehicular activity systems requirements definition study. Phase 2: Extravehicular activity at a lunar base

The focus is on Extravehicular Activity (EVA) systems requirements definition for an advanced space mission: remote-from-main base EVA on the Moon. The lunar environment, biomedical considerations, appropriate hardware design criteria, hardware and interface requirements, and key technical issues for advanced lunar EVA were examined. Six remote EVA scenarios (three nominal operations and three contingency situations) were developed in considerable detail

Evaluating indoor positioning systems in a shopping mall : the lessons learned from the IPIN 2018 competition

The Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) conference holds an annual competition in which indoor localization systems from different research groups worldwide are evaluated empirically. The objective of this competition is to establish a systematic evaluation methodology with rigorous metrics both for real-time (on-site) and post-processing (off-site) situations, in a realistic environment unfamiliar to the prototype developers. For the IPIN 2018 conference, this competition was held on September 22nd, 2018, in Atlantis, a large shopping mall in Nantes (France). Four competition tracks (two on-site and two off-site) were designed. They consisted of several 1 km routes traversing several floors of the mall. Along these paths, 180 points were topographically surveyed with a 10 cm accuracy, to serve as ground truth landmarks, combining theodolite measurements, differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and 3D scanner systems. 34 teams effectively competed. The accuracy score corresponds to the third quartile (75th percentile) of an error metric that combines the horizontal positioning error and the floor detection. The best results for the on-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 11.70 m (Track 1) and 5.50 m (Track 2), while the best results for the off-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 0.90 m (Track 3) and 1.30 m (Track 4). These results showed that it is possible to obtain high accuracy indoor positioning solutions in large, realistic environments using wearable light-weight sensors without deploying any beacon. This paper describes the organization work of the tracks, analyzes the methodology used to quantify the results, reviews the lessons learned from the competition and discusses its future