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.
<p>The demand for internet applications has increased rapidly. Providing quality of service (QoS) requirements for varied internet application is a challenging task. One important factor that is significantly affected on the QoS service is the transport layer. The transport layer provides end-to-end data transmission across a network. Currently, the most common transport protocols used by internet application are TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol). Also, there are recent transport protocols such as DCCP (data congestion control protocol), SCTP (stream congestion transmission protocol), and TFRC (TCP-friendly rate control), which are in the standardization process of Internet Engineering Task
... Show MoreMultimedia applications impose different QoS requirements (e.g., bounded end-to-end delay and jitter) and need an enhanced transport layer protocol that should handle packet loss, minimize errors, manage network congestion, and transmit efficiently. Across an IP network, the transport layer protocol provides data transmission and affects the QoS provided to the application on hand. The most common transport layer protocols used by Internet applications are TCP and UDP. There are also advanced transport layer protocols such as DCCP and TFRC. The authors evaluated the performance of UDP, DCCP, SCTP, and TFRC over wired networks for three traffic flows: data transmission, video streaming, and voice over IP. The evaluation criteria were thro
... Show MoreOver the past few decades, the surveying fieldworks were usually carried out based on classical positioning methods for establishing horizontal and vertical geodetic networks. However, these conventional positioning techniques have many drawbacks such as time-consuming, too costly, and require massive effort. Thus, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) has been invented to fulfill the quickness, increase the accuracy, and overcome all the difficulties inherent in almost every surveying fieldwork. This research assesses the accuracy of local geodetic networks using different Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) techniques, such as Static, Precise Point Positioning, Post Processing Kinematic, Session method, a
... Show MoreThe water supply network inside the building is of high importance due to direct contact with the user that must be optimally designed to meet the water needs of users. This work aims to review previous research and scientific theories that deal with the design of water networks inside buildings, from calculating the amount of consumption and the optimal distribution of the network, as well as ways to rationalize the use of water by the consumer. The process of pumping domestic water starts from water treatment plants to be fed to the public distribution networks, then reaching a distribution network inside the building till it is provided to the user. The design of the water supply network inside the building is
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Analyzing the size of the interrelationships between the main economic sectors in the Iraqi economy is an important necessity to know the impact of each sector on other economic sectors on the basis of the interrelationships and reciprocity between them, and what these relationships have achieved in terms of enhancing development and increasing the gross domestic product. To achieve the objectives of the study, we relied on mathematical (quantitative) analysis using user-product tables. Issued by the Ministry of Planning / Central Bureau of Statistics and Research (Directorate of National Accounts) for the economic sectors that make up the Iraqi economy. The study conc
... Show MoreThe problem of frequency estimation of a single sinusoid observed in colored noise is addressed. Our estimator is based on the operation of the sinusoidal digital phase-locked loop (SDPLL) which carries the frequency information in its phase error after the noisy sinusoid has been acquired by the SDPLL. We show by computer simulations that this frequency estimator beats the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on the frequency error variance for moderate and high SNRs when the colored noise has a general low-pass filtered (LPF) characteristic, thereby outperforming, in terms of frequency error variance, several existing techniques some of which are, in addition, computationally demanding. Moreover, the present approach generalizes on existing work tha
... Show MoreA new series of Fe (III) , Co (II) , Ni (II) and Cu (II) complexes of the Schiff base, 5 (2-hydroxy benzylidine) -2-thio ether -1, 3, 4-thiadiazole were prepared and characterized .The imine behaves as a bidentate. The nature of bonding and the stereochemistry of the complexes were deduced from metal analyses, infrared, electronic spectra,magnetic susceptibility and conductivity measurements, an octahedral geometry was suggested for all complexes except the copper complex has a square planar geometry .preliminary in vitro tests for antimicrobial activity show that all the prepared compounds except iron complex display good activity to gram positive Staphelococcus aures and gram negative Escherchia coli.
Background: Obesity represents a clear and
present danger to the health of children and
adolescents. Its prevalence among American
youth has doubled in the past 3 decades, and
there are now more overweight and obese
adults in the United States than adults of
normal weight.
Objectives of the study:
1- Finding whether screen watching among
adolescents has an effect on increasing
prevalence overweight and obesity.
2- The effect of other variables like physical
activity, eating in front of screen, eating under
stress on obesity and overweight among the
subjects sample.
Patients &Methods: During 3 months period a
cross sectional survey was conducted on 4
high schools at Baghdad with total
In this research, titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO2 NPs) were prepared through the sol-gel process at an acidic medium (pH3).TiO2 nanoparticles were prepared from titanium trichloride (TiCl3) as a precursor with Ammonium hydroxide (NH4OH) with 1:3 ratio at 50 °C. The resulting gel was dried at 70 °C to obtain the Nanocrystalline powder. The powder from the drying process was treated thermally at temperatures 500 °C and 700 °C. The crystalline structure, surface morphology, and particle size were studied by using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The results showed (anatase) phase of titanium dioxide with the average grain size
... Show MoreMixed ligand metal complexes are synthesized from oxalic acid with Schiff base, and the Schiff base was obtained from trimethoprim and acetylacetone. The synthesized complexes were of the type [M(L1)(L2)], where the metal, M, is Ni(II), Cu(II), Cr(III), and Zn(II), L1 corresponds to the trimethoprim ((Z)-4-((4-amino-5-(3,4,5- trimethoxybenzyl)pyrimidine-2-yl)imino)pentane-2-one) as the first ligand and L2 represent the oxalate anion (𝐶𝑂 ) as a second ligand. Characterization of the prepared compounds was performed by elemental analysis, molar conductivity, magnetic measurements, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR, FT-IR, and Ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectral studies. The recorded infrared data is reinforced with density functional th
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