scholarly journals Estimation of Phoneme-Specific HMM Topologies for the Automatic Recognition of Dysarthric Speech

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago-Omar Caballero-Morales
Keyword(s):  
Neurological Diseases ◽  
Gaussian Mixture ◽  
Motor Speech ◽  
Motor Speech Disorder ◽  
Acoustic Modelling ◽  
Speech Database ◽  
Recognition Systems ◽  
Dysarthric Speech ◽  
Different Levels

Dysarthria is a frequently occurring motor speech disorder which can be caused by neurological trauma, cerebral palsy, or degenerative neurological diseases. Because dysarthria affects phonation, articulation, and prosody, spoken communication of dysarthric speakers gets seriously restricted, affecting their quality of life and confidence. Assistive technology has led to the development of speech applications to improve the spoken communication of dysarthric speakers. In this field, this paper presents an approach to improve the accuracy of HMM-based speech recognition systems. Because phonatory dysfunction is a main characteristic of dysarthric speech, the phonemes of a dysarthric speaker are affected at different levels. Thus, the approach consists in finding the most suitable type of HMM topology (Bakis, Ergodic) for each phoneme in the speaker’s phonetic repertoire. The topology is further refined with a suitable number of states and Gaussian mixture components for acoustic modelling. This represents a difference when compared with studies where a single topology is assumed for all phonemes. Finding the suitable parameters (topology and mixtures components) is performed with a Genetic Algorithm (GA). Experiments with a well-known dysarthric speech database showed statistically significant improvements of the proposed approach when compared with the single topology approach, even for speakers with severe dysarthria.

scholarly journals TEDxSK and JumpSK: A New Slovak Speech Recognition Dedicated Corpus

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 346-354
Author(s):  
Ján Staš ◽  
Daniel Hládek ◽  
Peter Viszlay ◽  
Tomáš Koctúr
Keyword(s):  
Speech Recognition ◽  
Total Duration ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Speech Segmentation ◽  
Word Error Rate ◽  
Speech Database ◽  
Recognition Systems ◽  
Speech Transcription ◽  
Speech Segments

Abstract This paper describes a new Slovak speech recognition dedicated corpus built from TEDx talks and Jump Slovakia lectures. The proposed speech database consists of 220 talks and lectures in total duration of about 58 hours. Annotated speech database was generated automatically in an unsupervised manner by using acoustic speech segmentation based on principal component analysis and automatic speech transcription using two complementary speech recognition systems. The evaluation data consisting of 50 manually annotated talks and lectures in total duration of about 12 hours, has been created for evaluation of the quality of Slovak speech recognition. By unsupervised automatic annotation of TEDx talks and Jump Slovakia lectures we have obtained 21.26% of new speech segments with approximately 9.44% word error rate, suitable for retraining or adaptation of acoustic models trained beforehand.

scholarly journals The Importance of Environmental Factors in the Planning of Container Terminals: The Case Study of the Port of Augusta

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 2153
Author(s):  
Nadia Giuffrida ◽  
Maja Stojaković ◽  
Elen Twrdy ◽  
Matteo Ignaccolo
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Container Terminal ◽  
Decision Support Tool ◽  
Container Terminals ◽  
Mitigation Measures ◽  
Support Tool ◽  
Clean Environment ◽  
Different Levels

Container terminals are the main hubs of the global supply chain but, conversely, they play an important role in energy consumption, environmental pollution and even climate change due to carbon emissions. Assessing the environmental impact of this type of port terminal and choosing appropriate mitigation measures is essential to pursue the goals related to a clean environment and ensuring a good quality of life of the inhabitants of port cities. In this paper the authors present a Terminal Decision Support Tool (TDST) for the development of a container terminal that considers both operation efficiency and environmental impacts. The TDST provides environmental impact mitigation measures based on different levels of evolution of the port’s container traffic. An application of the TDST is conducted on the Port of Augusta (Italy), a port that is planning infrastructural interventions in coming years in order to gain a new role as a reference point for container traffic in the Mediterranean.

scholarly journals Integration of Satellite Data with High Resolution Ratio: Improvement of Spectral Quality with Preserving Spatial Details

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
pp. 4418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Sekrecka ◽  
Michal Kedzierski
Keyword(s):  
High Ratio ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Spectral Quality ◽  
Local Statistics ◽  
Panchromatic Image ◽  
Urbanized Area ◽  
Fusion Methods ◽  
Spatial Quality ◽  
Different Levels

Commonly used image fusion techniques generally produce good results for images obtained from the same sensor, with a standard ratio of spatial resolution (1:4). However, an atypical high ratio of resolution reduces the effectiveness of fusion methods resulting in a decrease in the spectral or spatial quality of the sharpened image. An important issue is the development of a method that allows for maintaining simultaneous high spatial and spectral quality. The authors propose to strengthen the pan-sharpening methods through prior modification of the panchromatic image. Local statistics of the differences between the original panchromatic image and the intensity of the multispectral image are used to detect spatial details. The Euler’s number and the distance of each pixel from the nearest pixel classified as a spatial detail determine the weight of the information collected from each integrated image. The research was carried out for several pan-sharpening methods and for data sets with different levels of spectral matching. The proposed solution allows for a greater improvement in the quality of spectral fusion, while being able to identify the same spatial details for most pan-sharpening methods and is mainly dedicated to Intensity-Hue-Saturation based methods for which the following improvements in spectral quality were achieved: about 30% for the urbanized area and about 15% for the non-urbanized area.

scholarly journals Diet-Regulated Anxiety

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Murphy ◽  
Julian G. Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Human Population ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Noncommunicable Disease ◽  
Dietary Manipulation ◽  
Obesogenic Environment ◽  
Preclinical Models ◽  
Societal Challenges ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Different Levels

A substantial proportion of noncommunicable disease originates in habitual overconsumption of calories, which can lead to weight gain and obesity and attendant comorbidities. At the other end of the spectrum, the consequences of undernutrition in early life and at different stages of adult life can also have major impact on wellbeing and quality of life. To help address some of these issues, greater understanding is required of interactions with food and contemporary diets throughout the life course and at a number of different levels: physiological, metabolic, psychological, and emotional. Here we review the current literature on the effects of dietary manipulation on anxiety-like behaviour. This evidence, assembled from study of preclinical models of diet challenge from gestation to adult life, supports a role for diet in the important connections between psychology, physiology, and behaviour. Analogous processes in the human population in our current obesogenic environment are likely to contribute to individual and societal challenges in this area.

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