Lora-based traffic flow detection for smart-road

This paper presents a wireless traffic flow detection system, mainly focused on conditions in which the traffic flow is slow or stopped, which increases the risk of highway accidents. To achieve this goal, a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) based on LoRa called Short LoRa has been developed. This LoRa sub-network complies with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) harmonized standard for its compatibility in Europe countries. In addition, the development of the devices has allowed them to also work on a LoRaWAN network. The introduced development has been compared to a reference system mounted with laser barriers that provided a high accurate comparison. Field tests of the system have been carried out and the data obtained in the measurement has been analyzed with two different methods, and both of them were valid for the application. The results can determine vehicle speed with adequate precision at low speeds. The attenuating behavior of the communication signal is also analyzed through the Radio Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). The relationship between vehicle speed, gate distances and RSSI attenuation has been studied. The system is proven to have efficient results in detecting traffic flow under the conditions for which it has been developed

A Comparison of Front-Ends for Bitstream-Based ASR over IP

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is called to play a relevant role in the provision of spoken interfaces for IP-based applications. However, as a consequence of the transit of the speech signal over these particular networks, ASR systems need to face two new challenges: the impoverishment of the speech quality due to the compression needed to fit the channel capacity and the inevitable occurrence of packet losses. In this framework, bitstream-based approaches that obtain the ASR feature vectors directly from the coded bitstream, avoiding the speech decoding process, have been proposed ([S.H. Choi, H.K. Kim, H.S. Lee, Speech recognition using quantized LSP parameters and their transformations in digital communications, Speech Commun. 30 (4) (2000) 223–233. A. Gallardo-Antolín, C. Pelàez-Moreno, F. Díaz-de-María, Recognizing GSM digital speech, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process., to appear. H.K. Kim, R.V. Cox, R.C. Rose, Performance improvement of a bitstream-based front-end for wireless speech recognition in adverse environments, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process. 10 (8) (2002) 591–604. C. Peláez-Moreno, A. Gallardo-Antolín, F. Díaz-de-María, Recognizing voice over IP networks: a robust front-end for speech recognition on the WWW, IEEE Trans. Multimedia 3(2) (2001) 209–218], among others) to improve the robustness of ASR systems. LSP (Line Spectral Pairs) are the preferred set of parameters for the description of the speech spectral envelope in most of the modern speech coders. Nevertheless, LSP have proved to be unsuitable for ASR, and they must be transformed into cepstrum-type parameters. In this paper we comparatively evaluate the robustness of the most significant LSP to cepstrum transformations in a simulated VoIP (voice over IP) environment which includes two of the most popular codecs used in that network (G.723.1 and G.729) and several network conditions. In particular, we compare ‘pseudocepstrum’ [H.K. Kim, S.H. Choi, H.S. Lee, On approximating Line Spectral Frequencies to LPC cepstral coefficients, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process. 8 (2) (2000) 195–199], an approximated but straightforward transformation of LSP into LP cepstral coefficients, with a more computationally demanding but exact one. Our results show that pseudocepstrum is preferable when network conditions are good or computational resources low, while the exact procedure is recommended when network conditions become more adverse.Publicad

NMF-based temporal feature integration for acoustic event classification

Proceedings of: 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association. Lyon, France, 25-29 August 2013.In this paper, we propose a new front-end for Acoustic Event Classification tasks (AEC) based on the combination of the temporal feature integration technique called Filter Bank Coefficients (FC) and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). FC aims to capture the dynamic structure in the short-term features by means of the summarization of the periodogram of each short-term feature dimension in several frequency bands using a predefined filter bank. As the commonly used filter bank has been devised for other tasks (such as music genre classification), it can be suboptimal for AEC. In order to overcome this drawback, we propose an unsupervised method based on NMF for learning the filters which collect the most relevant temporal information in the short-time features for AEC. The experiments show that the features obtained with this method achieve significant improvements in the classification performance of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based AEC system in comparison with the baseline FC features.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Government grants TSI-020110-2009-103, IPT-120000-2010-24 and TEC2011-26807Publicad

A Speech Recognizer based on Multiclass SVMs with HMM-Guided Segmentation

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is essentially a problem of pattern classification, however, the time dimension of the speech signal has prevented to pose ASR as a simple static classification problem. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers could provide an appropriate solution, since they are very well adapted to high-dimensional classification problems. Nevertheless, the use of SVMs for ASR is by no means straightforward, mainly because SVM classifiers require an input of fixed-dimension. In this paper we study the use of a HMM-based segmentation as a mean to get the fixed-dimension input vectors required by SVMs, in a problem of isolated-digit recognition. Different configurations for all the parameters involved have been tested. Also, we deal with the problem of multi-class classification (as SVMs are initially binary classifers), studying two of the most popular approaches: 1-vs-all and 1-vs-1

A wearable wireless sensor network for indoor smart environment monitoring in safety applications

This paper presents the implementation of a wearable wireless sensor network aimed at monitoring harmful gases in industrial environments. The proposed solution is based on a customized wearable sensor node using a low-power low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN) communications protocol, which as a first approach measures CO2 concentration, and employs different low power strategies for appropriate energy handling which is essential to achieving long battery life. These wearables nodes are connected to a deployed static network and a web-based application allows data storage, remote control and monitoring of the complete network. Therefore, a complete and versatile remote web application with a locally implemented decision-making system is accomplished, which allows early detection of hazardous situations for exposed workers

Fisher-Shannon analysis of ionization processes and isoelectronic series

The Fisher-Shannon plane which embodies the Fisher information measure in conjunction with the Shannon entropy is tested in its ability to quantify and compare the informational behavior of the process of atomic ionization. We report the variation of such an information measure and its constituents for a comprehensive set of neutral atoms, and their isoelectronic series including the mononegative ions, using the numerical data generated on 320 atomic systems in position, momentum, and product spaces at the Hartree-Fock level. It is found that the Fisher-Shannon plane clearly reveals shell-filling patterns across the periodic table. Compared to position space, a significantly higher resolution is exhibited in momentum space. Characteristic features in the Fisher-Shannon plane accompanying the ionization process are identified, and the physical reasons for the observed patterns are described

Fisher-Shannon plane and statistical complexity of atoms

Using the Hartree-Fock non-relativistic wave functions in the position and momentum spaces, the statistical measure of complexity C, due to López-Ruiz, Mancini, and Calbet for the neutral atoms as well as their monopositive and mononegative ions with atomic number Z=1-54 are reported. In C, given by the product of exponential power Shannon entropy and the average density, the latter is then replaced by the Fisher measure to obtain the Fisher-Shannon plane. Our numerical results suggest that in overall the Fisher-Shannon plane reproduces the trends given by C, with significantly enhanced sensitivity in the position, momentum and the product spaces in all neutral atoms and ions considered

SVMs for Automatic Speech Recognition: a Survey

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are, undoubtedly, the most employed core technique for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Nevertheless, we are still far from achieving high-performance ASR systems. Some alternative approaches, most of them based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), were proposed during the late eighties and early nineties. Some of them tackled the ASR problem using predictive ANNs, while others proposed hybrid HMM/ANN systems. However, despite some achievements, nowadays, the preponderance of Markov Models is a fact. During the last decade, however, a new tool appeared in the field of machine learning that has proved to be able to cope with hard classification problems in several fields of application: the Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The SVMs are effective discriminative classifiers with several outstanding characteristics, namely: their solution is that with maximum margin; they are capable to deal with samples of a very higher dimensionality; and their convergence to the minimum of the associated cost function is guaranteed. These characteristics have made SVMs very popular and successful. In this chapter we discuss their strengths and weakness in the ASR context and make a review of the current state-of-the-art techniques. We organize the contributions in two parts: isolated-word recognition and continuous speech recognition. Within the first part we review several techniques to produce the fixed-dimension vectors needed for original SVMs. Afterwards we explore more sophisticated techniques based on the use of kernels capable to deal with sequences of different length. Among them is the DTAK kernel, simple and effective, which rescues an old technique of speech recognition: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). Within the second part, we describe some recent approaches to tackle more complex tasks like connected digit recognition or continuous speech recognition using SVMs. Finally we draw some conclusions and outline several ongoing lines of research

Upper bounds for the decay rate in a nonlocal p-Laplacian evolution problem

We obtain upper bounds for the decay rate for solutions to the nonlocal problem ∂tu(x,t)=∫RnJ(x,y)|u(y,t)−u(x,t)|p−2(u(y,t)−u(x,t))dy with an initial condition u0∈L1(Rn)∩L∞(Rn) and a fixed p>2. We assume that the kernel J is symmetric, bounded (and therefore there is no regularizing effect) but with polynomial tails, that is, we assume a lower bounds of the form J(x,y)≥c1|x−y|−(n+2σ), for |x−y|>c2 and J(x,y)≥c1, for |x−y|≤c2. We prove that ∥u(⋅,t)∥Lq(Rn)≤Ct−n(p−2)n+2σ(1−1q) for q≥1 and t large.This work was partially supported by MEC MTM2010-18128 and MTM2011-27998 (Spain)

Asymptotic behaviour for local and nonlocal evolution equations on metric graphs with some edges of infinite length

We study local (the heat equation) and nonlocal (convolution-type problems with an integrable kernel) evolution problems on a metric connected finite graph in which some of the edges have infinity length. We show that the asymptotic behaviour of the solutions to both local and nonlocal problems is given by the solution of the heat equation, but on a starshaped graph in which there are only one node and as many infinite edges as in the original graph. In this way, we obtain that the compact component that consists in all the vertices and all the edges of finite length can be reduced to a single point when looking at the asymptotic behaviour of the solutions. For this star-shaped limit problem, the asymptotic behaviour of the solutions is just given by the solution to the heat equation in a half line with a Neumann boundary condition at x = 0 and initial datum (2M/N)δx=0 where M is the total mass of the initial condition for our original problem and N is the number of edges of infinite length. In addition, we show that solutions to the nonlocal problem converge, when we rescale the kernel, to solutions to the heat equation (the local problem), that is, we find a relaxation limit.L. I. was partially supported by a grant of Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCSUEFISCDI, project PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016- 2233, within PNCDI III. J.D.R. partially supported by CONICET grant PIP GI No 11220150100036CO (Argentina), PICT-2018-03183 (Argentina) and UBACyT grant 20020160100155BA (Argentina)