Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is considered as an important pre-processing step in speech processing systems such as speech enhancement, speech recognition, gender and age identification. VAD helps in reducing the time required to process speech data and to improve final system accuracy by focusing the work on the voiced part of the speech. An automatic technique for VAD using Fuzzy-Neuro technique (FN-AVAD) is presented in this paper. The aim of this work is to alleviate the problem of choosing the best threshold value in traditional VAD methods and achieves automaticity by combining fuzzy clustering and machine learning techniques. Four features are extracted from each speech segment, which are short term energy, zero-crossing rate, autocorrelation, and log energy. A modified version of fuzzy C-Means is then used to cluster speech segments into three clusters; two clusters for voice and one for unvoiced. After that, three feed forward neural networks are trained to adjust their weights, in which each network represents one cluster. To make the final decision regarding the class type of a given speech segment, the membership degrees of this segment in all clusters along with neural networks' decisions are given to a defuzzification step which finally gives the class type of that segment. The proposed FN-AVAD is tested on the public multimodal emotion database, Surrey AudioVisual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE), and the error rate was 2.08%. The achieved results are comparable to the results achieved by the current published works in the literature.
Steganography is the art of secret communication. Its purpose is to hide the presence of information, using, for example, images as covers. The frequency domain is well suited for embedding in image, since hiding in this frequency domain coefficients is robust to many attacks. This paper proposed hiding a secret image of size equal to quarter of the cover one. Set Partitioning in Hierarchal Trees (SPIHT) codec is used to code the secret image to achieve security. The proposed method applies Discrete Multiwavelet Transform (DMWT) for cover image. The coded bit stream of the secret image is embedded in the high frequency subbands of the transformed cover one. A scaling factors ? and ? in frequency domain control the quality of the stego
... Show MoreMedian filter is adopted to match the noise statistics of the degradation seeking good quality smoothing images. Two methods are suggested in this paper(Pentagonal-Hexagonal mask and Scan Window Mask), the study involved modified median filter for improving noise suppression, the modification is considered toward more reliable results. Modification median filter (Pentagonal-Hexagonal mask) was found gave better results (qualitatively and quantitatively ) than classical median filters and another suggested method (Scan Window Mask), but this will be on the account of the time required. But sometimes when the noise is line type the cross 3x3 filter preferred to another one Pentagonal-Hexagonal with few variation. Scan Window Mask gave bett
... Show MoreThe purpose of this research is to enhance the role of organizational communication in organizations using IT technologies. The results showed that there is a strong relationship with information technology technologies in enhancing the role of organizational communication, which in turn helps to improve the performance of organizations in general
In Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) the non-linear data projection provided by a one hidden layer Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), trained to recognize phonemes, and has previous experiments to provide feature enhancement substantially increased ASR performance, especially in noise. Previous attempts to apply an analogous approach to speaker identification have not succeeded in improving performance, except by combining MLP processed features with other features. We present test results for the TIMIT database which show that the advantage of MLP preprocessing for open set speaker identification increases with the number of speakers used to train the MLP and that improved identification is obtained as this number increases beyond sixty.
... Show MoreThe objective of this work is to design and implement a cryptography system that enables the sender to send message through any channel (even if this channel is insecure) and the receiver to decrypt the received message without allowing any intruder to break the system and extracting the secret information. In this work, we implement an interaction between the feedforward neural network and the stream cipher, so the secret message will be encrypted by unsupervised neural network method in addition to the first encryption process which is performed by the stream cipher method. The security of any cipher system depends on the security of the related keys (that are used by the encryption and the decryption processes) and their corresponding le
... Show MoreDue to the difficulties that Iraqi students face when writing in the English language, this preliminary study aimed to improve students' writing skills by using online platforms remotely. Sixty first-year students from Al-Furat Al–Awsat Technical University participated in this study. Through these platforms, the researchers relied on stimuli, such as images, icons, and short titles to allow for deeper and more accurate participations. Data were collected through corrections, observations, and feedback from the researchers and peers. In addition, two pre and post-tests were conducted. The quantitative data were analysed by SPSS statistical Editor, whereas the qualitative data were analyzed using the Piot table, an Excel sheet. The resu
... Show MoreDue to the availability of technology stemming from in-depth research in this sector and the drawbacks of other identifying methods, biometrics has drawn maximum attention and established itself as the most reliable alternative for recognition in recent years. Efforts are still being made to develop a user-friendly system that is up to par with security-system requirements and yields more reliable outcomes while safeguarding assets and ensuring privacy. Human age estimation and Gender identification are both challenging endeavours. Biomarkers and methods for determining biological age and gender have been extensively researched, and each has advantages and disadvantages. Facial-image-based positioning is crucial for many application
... Show More