SInCom 2015

2nd Baden-Württemberg Center of Applied Research Symposium on Information and Communication Systems, SInCom 2015, 13. November 2015 in Konstan

Sector-Based Detection for Hands-Free Speech Enhancement in Cars

Speech-based command interfaces are becoming more and more common in cars. Applications include automatic dialog systems for hands-free phone calls as well as more advanced features such as navigation systems. However, interferences, such as speech from the codriver, can hamper a lot the performance of the speech recognition component, which is crucial for those applications. This issue can be addressed with {\em adaptive} interference cancellation techniques such as the Generalized Sidelobe Canceller~(GSC). In order to cancel the interference (codriver) while not cancelling the target (driver), adaptation must happen only when the interference is active and dominant. To that purpose, this paper proposes two efficient adaptation control methods called ``implicit'' and ``explicit''. While the ``implicit'' method is fully automatic, the ``explicit'' method relies on pre-estimation of target and interference energies. A major contribution of this paper is a direct, robust method for such pre-estimation, directly derived from sector-based detection and localization techniques. Experiments on real in-car data validate both adaptation methods, including a case with 100 km/h background road noise

Ti/Al multi-layered sheets: Accumulative roll bonding (Part A)

Co-deformation of Al and Ti by accumulative roll bonding (ARB) with intermediate heat treatments is utilized to prepare multi-layered Ti/Al sheets. These sheets show a high specific strength due to the activation of various hardening mechanisms imposed during deformation, such as: hardening by grain refinement, work hardening and phase boundary hardening. The latter is even enhanced by the confinement of the layers during deformation. The evolution of the microstructure with a special focus on grain refinement and structural integrity is traced, and the correlation to the mechanical properties is shown

Common, Intermediate and Well-Documented HLA Alleles in World Populations: CIWD Version 3.0.0

A catalog of common, intermediate and well-documented (CIWD) HLA-A, -B, -C, -DRB1, -DRB3, -DRB4, -DRB5, -DQB1 and -DPB1 alleles has been compiled from over 8 million individuals using data from 20 unrelated hematopoietic stem cell volunteer donor registries. Individuals are divided into seven geographic/ancestral/ethnic groups and data are summarized for each group and for the total population. P (two-field) and G group assignments are divided into one of four frequency categories: common (≥1 in 10 000), intermediate (≥1 in 100 000), well-documented (≥5 occurrences) or not-CIWD. Overall 26% of alleles in IPD-IMGT/HLA version 3.31.0 at P group resolution fall into the three CIWD categories. The two-field catalog includes 18% (n = 545) common, 17% (n = 513) intermediate, and 65% (n = 1997) well-documented alleles. Full-field allele frequency data are provided but are limited in value by the variations in resolution used by the registries. A recommended CIWD list is based on the most frequent category in the total or any of the seven geographic/ancestral/ethnic groups. Data are also provided so users can compile a catalog specific to the population groups that they serve. Comparisons are made to three previous CWD reports representing more limited population groups. This catalog, CIWD version 3.0.0, is a step closer to the collection of global HLA frequencies and to a clearer view of HLA diversity in the human population as a whole

Determination of nutrient salts by automatic methods both in seawater and brackish water: the phosphate blank

9 páginas, 2 tablas, 2 figurasThe main inconvenience in determining nutrients in seawater by automatic methods is simply solved: the preparation of a suitable blank which corrects the effect of the refractive index change on the recorded signal. Two procedures are proposed, one physical (a simple equation to estimate the effect) and the other chemical (removal of the dissolved phosphorus with ferric hydroxide).Support for this work came from CICYT (MAR88-0245 project) and Conselleria de Pesca de la Xunta de GaliciaPeer reviewe

Pipelined decoder for the limited context order Burrows–Wheeler transformation

The Burrows–Wheeler transformation (BWT) is a reversible block sorting transform that is an integral part of many data compression algorithms. This work proposes a memory-efficient pipelined decoder for the BWT. In particular, the authors consider the limited context order BWT that has low memory requirements and enable fast encoding. However, the decoding of the limited context order BWT is typically much slower than the encoding. The proposed decoder pipeline provides a fast inverse BWT by splitting the decoding into several processing stages which are executed in parallel

Soft input decoding of generalized concatenated codes using a stack decoding algorithm

This work investigates soft input decoding for generalized concatenated (GC) codes. The GC codes are constructed from inner nested binary Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH)codes and outer Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. In order to enable soft input decoding for the inner BCH block codes, a sequential stack decoding algorithm is used. Ordinary stack decoding of binary block codes requires the complete trellis of the code. In this work a representation of the block codes based on the trellises of supercodes is proposed in order to reduce the memory requirements for the representation of the BCH codes. Results for the decoding performance of the overall GC code are presented. Furthermore, an efficient hardware implementation of the GC decoder is proposed

Wind noise reduction for a closely spaced microphone array in a car environment

Abstract This work studies a wind noise reduction approach for communication applications in a car environment. An endfire array consisting of two microphones is considered as a substitute for an ordinary cardioid microphone capsule of the same size. Using the decomposition of the multichannel Wiener filter (MWF), a suitable beamformer and a single-channel post filter are derived. Due to the known array geometry and the location of the speech source, assumptions about the signal properties can be made to simplify the MWF beamformer and to estimate the speech and noise power spectral densities required for the post filter. Even for closely spaced microphones, the different signal properties at the microphones can be exploited to achieve a significant reduction of wind noise. The proposed beamformer approach results in an improved speech signal regarding the signal-to-noise-ratio and keeps the linear speech distortion low. The derived post filter shows equal performance compared to known approaches but reduces the effort for noise estimation

A decoder with soft decoding capability for high-rate generalized concatenated codes with applications in non-volatile flash memories

This work proposes a decoder implementation for high-rate generalized concatenated (GC) codes. The proposed codes are well suited for error correction in flash memories for high reliability data storage. The GC codes are constructed from inner extended binary Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes and outer Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. The extended BCH codes enable high-rate GC codes. Moreover, the decoder can take advantage of soft information. For the first three levels of inner codes we propose an optional Chase soft decoder. In this work, the code construction is explained and a decoder architecture is presented. Furthermore, area and throughput results are discussed