48,800 research outputs found
Speech Transmission Index from running speech : a neural network approach
Speech Transmission Index (STI) is an important objective parameter concerning speech intelligibility for sound transmission channels. It is normally measured with specific test signals to ensure high accuracy and good repeatability. Measurement with running speech was previously proposed, but accuracy is compromised and hence applications limited. A new approach that uses artificial neural networks to accurately extract the STI from received running speech is developed in this paper. Neural networks are trained on a large set of transmitted speech examples with prior knowledge of the transmission channels' STIs. The networks perform complicated nonlinear function mappings and spectral feature memorization to enable accurate objective parameter extraction from transmitted speech. Validations via simulations demonstrate the feasibility of this new method on a one-net-one-speech extract basis. In this case, accuracy is comparable with normal measurement methods. This provides an alternative to standard measurement techniques, and it is intended that the neural network method can facilitate occupied room acoustic measurements
A Wikipedia Literature Review
This paper was originally designed as a literature review for a doctoral
dissertation focusing on Wikipedia. This exposition gives the structure of
Wikipedia and the latest trends in Wikipedia research
Exploiting Nonlinear Recurrence and Fractal Scaling Properties for Voice Disorder Detection
Background: Voice disorders affect patients profoundly, and acoustic tools can potentially measure voice function objectively. Disordered sustained vowels exhibit wide-ranging phenomena, from nearly periodic to highly complex, aperiodic vibrations, and increased "breathiness". Modelling and surrogate data studies have shown significant nonlinear and non-Gaussian random properties in these sounds. Nonetheless, existing tools are limited to analysing voices displaying near periodicity, and do not account for this inherent biophysical nonlinearity and non-Gaussian randomness, often using linear signal processing methods insensitive to these properties. They do not directly measure the two main biophysical symptoms of disorder: complex nonlinear aperiodicity, and turbulent, aeroacoustic, non-Gaussian randomness. Often these tools cannot be applied to more severe disordered voices, limiting their clinical usefulness.

Methods: This paper introduces two new tools to speech analysis: recurrence and fractal scaling, which overcome the range limitations of existing tools by addressing directly these two symptoms of disorder, together reproducing a "hoarseness" diagram. A simple bootstrapped classifier then uses these two features to distinguish normal from disordered voices.

Results: On a large database of subjects with a wide variety of voice disorders, these new techniques can distinguish normal from disordered cases, using quadratic discriminant analysis, to overall correct classification performance of 91.8% plus or minus 2.0%. The true positive classification performance is 95.4% plus or minus 3.2%, and the true negative performance is 91.5% plus or minus 2.3% (95% confidence). This is shown to outperform all combinations of the most popular classical tools.

Conclusions: Given the very large number of arbitrary parameters and computational complexity of existing techniques, these new techniques are far simpler and yet achieve clinically useful classification performance using only a basic classification technique. They do so by exploiting the inherent nonlinearity and turbulent randomness in disordered voice signals. They are widely applicable to the whole range of disordered voice phenomena by design. These new measures could therefore be used for a variety of practical clinical purposes.

Simultaneous Matrix Diagonalization for Structural Brain Networks Classification
This paper considers the problem of brain disease classification based on
connectome data. A connectome is a network representation of a human brain. The
typical connectome classification problem is very challenging because of the
small sample size and high dimensionality of the data. We propose to use
simultaneous approximate diagonalization of adjacency matrices in order to
compute their eigenstructures in more stable way. The obtained approximate
eigenvalues are further used as features for classification. The proposed
approach is demonstrated to be efficient for detection of Alzheimer's disease,
outperforming simple baselines and competing with state-of-the-art approaches
to brain disease classification
Robot Swarms in an Uncertain World: Controllable Adaptability
There is a belief that complexity and chaos are essential for adaptability.
But life deals with complexity every moment, without the chaos that engineers
fear so, by invoking goal-directed behaviour. Goals can be programmed. That is
why living organisms give us hope to achieve adaptability in robots. In this
paper a method for the description of a goal-directed, or programmed,
behaviour, interacting with uncertainty of environment, is described. We
suggest reducing the structural (goals, intentions) and stochastic components
(probability to realise the goal) of individual behaviour to random variables
with nominal values to apply probabilistic approach. This allowed us to use a
Normalized Entropy Index to detect the system state by estimating the
contribution of each agent to the group behaviour. The number of possible group
states is 27. We argue that adaptation has a limited number of possible paths
between these 27 states. Paths and states can be programmed so that after
adjustment to any particular case of task and conditions, adaptability will
never involve chaos. We suggest the application of the model to operation of
robots or other devices in remote and/or dangerous places.Comment: Journal web page & a lot of robotic related papers
www.ars-journal.co
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