An efficient mel-LPC analysis method for speech recognition

This paper proposes a simple and efficient time domain technique to estimate an all-pole model on a mel-frequency axis (Mel-LPC), i.e., a bilinear transformed all-pole model by Strube. Autocorrelation coefficients on the mel-frequency axis are exactly derived by computing cross-correlation coefficients between speech signal and all-pass filtered one without any approximation. This method requires only two-fold computational cost as compared to conventional linear prediction analysis. The recognition performance of mel-cepstral parameters obtained by the Mel LPC analysis is compared with those of conventional LP mel-cepstra and the mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC) through gender-dependent phoneme and word recognition tests. The results show that the Mel-LPC cepstrum attains a significant improvement in recognition accuracy over conventional LP mel-cepstrum, and gives slightly higher accuracy for male speakers and slightly lower accuracy for female speakers than MFCC.5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 98), November 30 -- December 4, 1998, Sydney, Australi

Obesity and Gastrointestinal Diseases

The prevalence of obesity in the Japanese population has been increasing dramatically in step with the Westernization of lifestyles and food ways. Our study demonstrated significant associations between obesity and a number of gastrointestinal disorders in a large sample population in Japan. We demonstrated that reflux esophagitis and hiatal hernia were strongly related to obesity (BMI > 25) in the Japanese. In particular, obesity with young male was a high risk for these diseases. On the other hand, it has been reported that obesity is also associated with Barrett’s esophagus and colorectal adenoma; however, obesity was not a risk factor for these diseases in our study. The difference of ethnicity of our subjects may partly explain why we found no data to implicate obesity as a risk factor for Barrett’s esophagus. Arterial sclerosis associated with advanced age and hyperglycemia was accompanied by an increased risk of colorectal adenoma