Speech modifications in interactive speech: effects of age, sex and noise type

When attempting to maintain conversations in noisy communicative settings, talkers typically modify their speech to make themselves understood by the listener. In this study, we investigated the impact of background interference type and talker age on speech adaptations, vocal effort and communicative success. We measured speech acoustics (articulation rate, mid-frequency energy, fundamental frequency), vocal effort (correlation between mid-frequency energy and fundamental frequency) and task completion time in 114 participants aged 8–80 years carrying out an interactive problem-solving task in good and noisy listening conditions (quiet, non-speech noise, background speech). We found greater changes in fundamental frequency and mid-frequency energy in non-speech noise than in background speech and similar reductions in articulation rate in both. However, older participants (50+ years) increased vocal effort in both background interference types, whereas younger children (less than 13 years) increased vocal effort only in background speech. The presence of background interference did not lead to longer task completion times. These results suggest that when the background interference involves a higher cognitive load, as in the case of other speech of other talkers, children and older talkers need to exert more vocal effort to ensure successful communication. We discuss these findings within the communication effort framework. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.

Influence of Recorded Pattern on Background Interference impact in Magnetic Recording

This paper discusses the impact of background interference on a recorded pattern for heat-assisted magnetic recording technology (HAMR). Several patterns of the background track were examined, with the log bit error rate and signal to noise ratio measured via a spin-stand tester using HAMR head and media. It was found that the low frequency pattern gave the highest BER and SNR loss due to the strong magnetic field from the adjacent tracks. Similar to its practical use, the PRBS pattern also showed high interference. These observations may be used to support HDD areal density growth.

Improved YOLOv3 Network for Insulator Detection in Aerial Images with Diverse Background Interference

Automatic inspection of insulators from high-voltage transmission lines is of paramount importance to the safety and reliable operation of the power grid. Due to different size insulators and the complex background of aerial images, it is a difficult task to recognize insulators in aerial views. Most of the traditional image processing methods and machine learning methods cannot achieve sufficient performance for insulator detection when diverse background interference is present. In this study, a deep learning method—based on You Only Look Once (YOLO)—will be proposed, capable of detecting insulators from aerial images with complex backgrounds. Firstly, aerial images with common aerial scenes were collected by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), and a novel insulator dataset was constructed. Secondly, to enhance feature reuse and propagation, on the basis of YOLOv3 and Dense-Blocks, the YOLOv3-dense network was utilized for insulator detection. To improve detection accuracy for different sized insulators, a structure of multiscale feature fusion was adapted to the YOLOv3-dense network. To obtain abundant semantic information of upper and lower layers, multilevel feature mapping modules were employed across the YOLOv3-dense network. Finally, the YOLOv3-dense network and compared networks were trained and tested on the testing set. The average precision of YOLOv3-dense, YOLOv3, and YOLOv2 were 94.47%, 90.31%, and 83.43%, respectively. Experimental results and analysis validate the claim that the proposed YOLOv3-dense network achieves good performance in the detection of different size insulators amid diverse background interference.

Perfluoro-tert-butanol: a cornerstone for high performance 19F magnetic resonance imaging

As a valuable complement to its proton-based counterpart (1H MRI/NMR), fluorine-based magnetic resonance imaging/spectroscopy (19F MRI/NMR) provides quantitative images or spectroscopy without background interference, which has become an extensively used...

NIR-II Cell Endocytosis-Activated Fluorescent Probes For In Vivo High-Contrast Bioimaging Diagnostics

Fluorescence probes have great potential to empower bioimaging, precision clinical diagnostics and surgery. However, current probes have been limited for in vivo high-contrast diagnostics, due to substantial background interference from...