3,708 research outputs found
Blue flag with yellow tiger? Flags, authenticity and identity
The Flag of the Formosa Republic in the collection of the National Taiwan Museum is a national icon. It is a copy of one made in 1895 to mark the formation of a new Taiwanese republic; this replica, described in a contemporary newspaper account as an exact copy, was made in Japan in 1909. The painted flag was an intriguing puzzle. Instrumental analysis and a close study of the flag itself and of surviving historic photographs and records were used to try to establish whether what looked like later additions and repairs were actually part of the original construction. An international team of conservators and scientists from Taiwan, the UK, the USA and Germany carried out the investigation and the conservation treatment. Although dye analysis was inconclusive and it has not yet been possible to ascertain the original colour, it was felt that an addition in the upper right corner and some of the repairs could well be part of the original construction and these were left in situ though other repairs were removed. The paper lining was removed, revealing that the flag was painted on both sides. The fabric was cleaned using a vacuum suction table, while the paint surface was cleaned with swabs. The flag was supported using an adhesive treatment with Lascaux acrylic resin
Efficient and Reliable Measurement and Simulation of Noisy Speech Background
Publication in the conference proceedings of EUSIPCO, Toulouse, France, 200
Methods for Speech SNR Estimation: Evaluation Tool and Analysis of VAD Dependency
The dynamic range of broadband digital system is mostly limited by harmonics and spurious arising from ADC nonlinearity. The nonlinearity may be described in several ways. The distinction between static and dynamic contributions has strong theoretical motivations but it is difficult to independently measure these contributions. A more practical approach is based upon analysis of the complex spectrum, which is well defined, easily measured, and may be used to optimize the ADC working point and to somehow characterize both static and dynamic nonlinearity. To minimize harmonics and spurious components we need a sufficient level of input noise (dither), which destroys the periodicity at multistage pipelined ADC, combined with a careful analysis of the different sources of nonlinearity
ASR Systems in Noisy Environment: Analysis and Solutions for Increasing Noise Robustness
This paper deals with the analysis of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) suitable for usage within noisy environment and suggests optimum configuration under various noisy conditions. The behavior of standard parameterization techniques was analyzed from the viewpoint of robustness against background noise. It was done for Melfrequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), Perceptual linear predictive (PLP) coefficients, and their modified forms combining main blocks of PLP and MFCC. The second part is devoted to the analysis and contribution of modified techniques containing frequency-domain noise suppression and voice activity detection. The above-mentioned techniques were tested with signals in real noisy environment within Czech digit recognition task and AURORA databases. Finally, the contribution of special VAD selective training and MLLR adaptation of acoustic models were studied for various signal features
Uniform approximation of barrier penetration in phase space
A method to approximate transmission probabilities for a nonseparable
multidimensional barrier is applied to a waveguide model. The method uses
complex barrier-crossing orbits to represent reaction probabilities in phase
space and is uniform in the sense that it applies at and above a threshold
energy at which classical reaction switches on. Above this threshold the
geometry of the classically reacting region of phase space is clearly reflected
in the quantum representation. Two versions of the approximation are applied. A
harmonic version which uses dynamics linearised around an instanton orbit is
valid only near threshold but is easy to use. A more accurate and more widely
applicable version using nonlinear dynamics is also described
The Electron Glass in a Switchable Mirror: Relaxation, Aging and Universality
The rare earth hydride YH can be tuned through the
metal-insulator transition both by changing and by illumination with
ultraviolet light. The transition is dominated by strong electron-electron
interactions, with transport in the insulator sensitive to both a Coulomb gap
and persistent quantum fluctuations. Via a systematic variation of UV
illumination time, photon flux, Coulomb gap depth, and temperature, we
demonstrate that polycrystalline YH serves as a model system for
studying the properties of the interacting electron glass. Prominent among its
features are logarithmic relaxation, aging, and universal scaling of the
conductivity
Geometrical Models of the Phase Space Structures Governing Reaction Dynamics
Hamiltonian dynamical systems possessing equilibria of stability type display \emph{reaction-type
dynamics} for energies close to the energy of such equilibria; entrance and
exit from certain regions of the phase space is only possible via narrow
\emph{bottlenecks} created by the influence of the equilibrium points. In this
paper we provide a thorough pedagogical description of the phase space
structures that are responsible for controlling transport in these problems. Of
central importance is the existence of a \emph{Normally Hyperbolic Invariant
Manifold (NHIM)}, whose \emph{stable and unstable manifolds} have sufficient
dimensionality to act as separatrices, partitioning energy surfaces into
regions of qualitatively distinct behavior. This NHIM forms the natural
(dynamical) equator of a (spherical) \emph{dividing surface} which locally
divides an energy surface into two components (`reactants' and `products'), one
on either side of the bottleneck. This dividing surface has all the desired
properties sought for in \emph{transition state theory} where reaction rates
are computed from the flux through a dividing surface. In fact, the dividing
surface that we construct is crossed exactly once by reactive trajectories, and
not crossed by nonreactive trajectories, and related to these properties,
minimizes the flux upon variation of the dividing surface.
We discuss three presentations of the energy surface and the phase space
structures contained in it for 2-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems in the
threedimensional space , and two schematic models which capture many of
the essential features of the dynamics for -DoF systems. In addition, we
elucidate the structure of the NHIM.Comment: 44 pages, 38 figures, PDFLaTe
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