Mechanical and durability performance of lightweight concrete brick with palm oil fuel ash (POFA)

Lightweight building materials such as precast roof and wall panel has been widely used in the construction industries. This is because lightweight materials could benefits the economy and society in terms of manufacturing, transportation and handling cost. One of the most preferable lightweight material is Expanded Polystyrene (EPS). EPS consist of 98% of air and 2% of polystyrene. Therefore, EPS is very low in density which could contribute in the reduction of building materials mass. Abundance of studies has shown that EPS has significantly contribute to the reduction of brick density. EPS has been used as the aggregates replacement in concrete. However, the existing of EPS in the concrete has reduce the strength performance of the concrete. Due to this, researchers have extend their research in improvising the EPS concrete and brick strength with the addition of pozzolanic materials such as fly ash, rice husk ask, silica fume and etc [1-4]. The ability of these pozzolanic materials in enhancing the strength of brick or concrete has been proven..

Numerical simulation analysis on water jet pressure distribution at various nozzle aperture

The low velocity water jet is required by small scale Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) to control its position, either to remain statics in its position or to perform a slow and steady locomotion. However, the water jet performance is influenced by the size of nozzle aperture. By studying the pressure distribution around the nozzle area, the water jet velocity could be determined and characterized. In this studies, the ejection pressure was fixed at 23.37 Pa according to the constant actuation. Studies were conducted using ANSYS Fluent software. The results show that the water jet velocity and dynamic pressure are higher for larger nozzle aperture size at constant pressure. The total pressure and dynamic pressure had the lowest pressure drop at certain nozzle aperture size but became constant when the nozzle size was wider. This finding is useful in designing the UUV that powered by contractile water jet thruster

Voice morphing using the generative topographic mapping

In this paper we address the problem of Voice Morphing. We attempt to transform the spectral characteristics of a source speaker's speech signal so that the listener would believe that the speech was uttered by a target speaker. The voice morphing system transforms the spectral envelope as represented by a Linear Prediction model. The transformation is achieved by codebook mapping using the Generative Topographic Mapping, a non-linear, latent variable, parametrically constrained, Gaussian Mixture Model

Wavelet-based voice morphing

This paper presents a new multi-scale voice morphing algorithm. This algorithm enables a user to transform one person's speech pattern into another person's pattern with distinct characteristics, giving it a new identity, while preserving the original content. The voice morphing algorithm performs the morphing at different subbands by using the theory of wavelets and models the spectral conversion using the theory of Radial Basis Function Neural Networks. The results obtained on the TIMIT speech database demonstrate effective transformation of the speaker identity

Sistema de compresión de voz portátil basado en un dsPIC

Las pérdidas de audición son una dolencia que afecta a un gran porcentaje de la Sociedad. Si bien existen dispositivos que permiten mejorar la calidad de vida de las personas con estas dolencias, estas suelen ser costosas y además muchas veces no se ajustan por completo a los requerimientos del usuario. Este trabajo se enfoca en el desarrollo de un dispositivo portátil de asistencia a personas con algún tipo de impedimento auditivo utilizando un dsPIC producido por Microchip. Con el fin de validar los resultados, se utiliza un modelo capaz de simular pérdidas de audición mediante un banco de filtros polifásicos, lo que permite analizar el desempeño de dos algoritmos de compresión: el lineal y el SPINC. Resultados subjetivos experimentales demuestran las ventajas de la utilización de la función SPINC, la cual es implementada en un dispositivo dsPIC33FJ128GP802-E/SP de Microchip, sobre otras como por ejemplo funciones lineales.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Hangkorverzió alkalmazása dysarthriás betegek beszédminőségének javítására

A dysarthria egy gyűjtőfogalom az artikulációs nehezítettségből eredő beszédzavarra, amelynek hátterében számos betegség állhat. A dysarthriás személyek beszédének minősége, érthetősége leromlik, ami az érintettek szociális kapcsolataira és így életminőségére is rossz hatással lehet. A hangkonverziós technológia fejlődésével felvetődik az ötlet, hogy vajon lehetséges-e ezen betegek hangfelvételeinek minőségét, érthetőségét gépi eszközökkel feljavítani, és beszédkommunikációjukat egy ilyen elven működő eszközzel támogatni. Cikkünkben áttekintjük a (neuronhálós) hangkonverziós algoritmusok fő változatait, majd bemutatjuk a dysarthriás betegek felvételein végzett kísérleteink tapasztalatait, és ezek alapján megvitatjuk az egyes módszerek legfontosabb előnyeit és hátrányait

High-Quality Nonparallel Voice Conversion Based On Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Network

Although voice conversion (VC) algorithms have achieved remarkable success along with the development of machine learning, superior performance is still difficult to achieve when using nonparallel data. In this paper, we propose using a cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN) for nonparallel data-based VC training. A CycleGAN is a generative adversarial network (GAN) originally developed for unpaired image-to-image translation. A subjective evaluation of inter-gender conversion demonstrated that the proposed method significantly outperformed a method based on the Merlin open source neural network speech synthesis system (a parallel VC system adapted for our setup) and a GAN-based parallel VC system. This is the first research to show that the performance of a nonparallel VC method can exceed that of state-of-the-art parallel VC methods.Comment: accepted at ICASSP 201

Conversão do contorno de pitch por divisão de componentes para aplicação em sistemas de conversão de voz

Dissertação [mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica, Florianópolis, 2009Esta dissertação propõe uma nova técnica de conversão do contorno de pitch para aplicação em sistemas de conversão de voz. O principal objetivo deste trabalho é possibilitar a aplicação do método proposto aos mais diferentes tipos de sistemas de conversão de voz sem que para tanto seja necessário adaptar ou criar um novo banco de sinais de fala. A abordagem proposta considera o algoritmo MOMEL (modelling melody) para dividir o contorno de pitch levando em conta os componentes macroprosódico e microprosódico, sendo que cada um deles é convertido separadamente. A contribuição do componente macroprosódico, obtida pela interpolação dos dados usando a codificação INTSINT (international transcription system for intonation), é então convertida utilizando um modelo de misturas gaussianas (GMM); enquanto, a contribuição do componente microprosódico é convertida por seleção de segmentos de contorno de pitch. Os problemas inerentes à avaliação de desempenho dos sistemas de conversão de voz são discutidos e um parâmetro denominado índice de desempenho é modificado para permitir uma avaliação objetiva da conversão do contorno de pitch. O desempenho do método proposto é confrontado com dois dos métodos mais utilizados na literatura: conversão utilizando normalização gaussiana (GN) e GMM. O desempenho dos diferentes métodos considerados são avaliados através de dois testes subjetivos: de preferência e de similaridade. Os resultados obtidos ratificam a medida adotada, indicando uma preferência pelo método proposto através da melhoria significativa de desempenho frente aos demais métodos avaliados. A flexibilidade da nova abordagem possibilita ampla gama de aplicações nos mais variados tipos de sistemas de conversão de voz

Text-Independent Voice Conversion

This thesis deals with text-independent solutions for voice conversion. It first introduces the use of vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) for voice conversion. The presented variants of VTLN allow for easily changing speaker characteristics by means of a few trainable parameters. Furthermore, it is shown how VTLN can be expressed in time domain strongly reducing the computational costs while keeping a high speech quality. The second text-independent voice conversion paradigm is residual prediction. In particular, two proposed techniques, residual smoothing and the application of unit selection, result in essential improvement of both speech quality and voice similarity. In order to apply the well-studied linear transformation paradigm to text-independent voice conversion, two text-independent speech alignment techniques are introduced. One is based on automatic segmentation and mapping of artificial phonetic classes and the other is a completely data-driven approach with unit selection. The latter achieves a performance very similar to the conventional text-dependent approach in terms of speech quality and similarity. It is also successfully applied to cross-language voice conversion. The investigations of this thesis are based on several corpora of three different languages, i.e., English, Spanish, and German. Results are also presented from the multilingual voice conversion evaluation in the framework of the international speech-to-speech translation project TC-Star