Development and Deployment of an Intelligent Kite Aerial Photography Platform (iKAPP) for Site Surveying and Image Acquisition

Aerial photographs and images are used by a variety of industries, including farming, landscaping, surveying, and agriculture, as well as academic researchers including archaeologists and geologists. Aerial imagery can provide a valuable resource for analyzing sites of interest and gaining information about the structure, layout, and composition of large areas of land that would be unavailable otherwise. Current methods of acquiring aerial images rely on techniques such as satellite imagery,manned aircraft, or more recently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and micro-UAV technologies. These solutions, while accurate and reliable, have several drawbacks. Using satellite imagery or UAVs can prove to be very expensive, costing tens of thousands for images. They can also prove to be time-consuming and in some cases have constraints on use, such as no-fly zones. In this paper, we present an alternative low-cost, versatile solution to these methods, an intelligent kite aerial photography platform (iKAPP), for the purpose of acquiring aerial images and monitoring sites of interest.We show how this system provides flexibility in application, and we detail the system’s design, mechanical operation, and initial flight experiments for a low-cost, lightweight, intelligent platform capable of acquiring high-resolution images. Finally, we demonstrate the system by acquiring images of a local site, showing how the system functions and the quality of images it can capture. The application of the system and its capabilities in terms of capture rates, image quality, and limitations are also presented. The system offers several improvements over traditional KAP systems, including onboard “intelligent” processing and communications. The intelligent aspect of this system stems from the use of self-image stabilization of the camera, the advantage being that one is able to configure the system to capture large areas of a site automatically, and one can see the site acquisition in real time, all of which are not possible with previous methods of AP

The AT&T Next-Gen TTS System

The new AT&T Text-To-Speech (TTS) system for general U.S. English text is based on best-choice components of the AT&T Flextalk TTS, the Festival System from the University of Edinburgh, and ATR's CHATR system. From Flextalk, it employs text normalization, letter-to-sound, and prosody generation. Festival provides a flexible and modular architecture for easy experimentation and competitive evaluation of different algorithms or modules. In addition, we adopted CHATR's unit selection algorithms and modified them in an attempt to guarantee high intelligibility under all circumstances. Finally, we have added our own Harmonic plus Noise Model (HNM) backend for synthesizing the output speech. Most decisions made during the research and development phase of this system were based on formal subjective evaluations. We feel that the new system goes a long way toward delivering on the long-standing promise of truly natural-sounding, as well as highly intelligible, synthesis. 1. INTRODUCTION Text..

CORPUS-BASED TECHNIQUES IN THE AT&T NEXTGEN SYNTHESIS SYSTEM

The AT&T text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system has been used as a framework for experimenting with a perceptuallyguided data-driven approach tospeechsynthesis, with primary focus on data-driven elements in the \back end". Statistical training techniques applied to a large corpus are used to make decisions about predicted speech events and selected speech inventory units. Our recent advances in automatic phonetic and prosodic labeling and a new faster harmonic plus noise model (HNM) and unit preselection implementations have signi cantly improved TTS quality and speeded up both development time and runtime. 1

Weighted Grammar Tools: The GRM Library

We describe the algorithmic and software design principles of a general grammar library designed for use in spoken-dialogue systems, speech synthesis, and other speech processing applications. The library is a set of general-purpose software tools for constructing and modifying weighted finite-state acceptors and transducers representing grammars. The tools can be used in particular to compile weighted contextdependent rewrite rules into weighted finite-state transducers, read and compile, when possible, weighted context-free grammars into weighted automata, and dynamically modify the compiled grammar automata. The dynamic modifications allowed include: grammar switching, dynamic modification of rules, dynamic activation or non-activation of rules, and the use of dynamic lists. Access to these features is essential in spoken-dialogue applications. 2.1 Motivation We describe the algorithmic and software design principles of a general grammar library (GRM library) designed for use in ..