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.
According to the prevalence of multidrug resistance bacteria, especially Pseudomonas aeruginosa, in which the essential mechanism of drug resistance is the ability to possess an efflux pump by which extrusion of antimicrobial agents usually occurs, this study aims to detect the presence of mexB multidrug efflux gene in some local isolates of this bacteria that show resistance towards three antibiotics, out of five. Sensitivity test to antibiotics was performed on all isolates by using meropenem (10μg/disc), imipenem (10μg/disc), amikacin (30 μg/disc), ciprofloxacin (5μg/disc) and ceftazidime (30 μg/disc). Conventional PCR results showed the presence of mexB gene (244bp) in four isolates out of ten (40%). In addition,25, 50μg/ml of cur
... Show MoreListeria spp. is one of the abortion causative agents in animals, especially in ruminants. This work aimed to detect Listeria spp. in milk and aborted fetus cows in Iraq. A total of 50 organ samples from aborted cow fetuses, including (brain, liver, and spleen), and 50 milk samples from the same aborted cows were collected from Baghdad farms, Iraq from (October 2023- March 2024). The bacteria were identified by conventional culture methods, biochemical tests, and the VITEK2 compact system, followed by molecular confirmation. The antimicrobial resistance pattern assay was performed using the disc diffusion method against eight antibiotic agents, and the L.monocytogenes virulence genes involving prfA,actA, and hylA genes were detected using t
... Show MoreObjective Using two complementary techniques of virus detection human papillomavirus (HPV)[capture of hybrids (CH) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR)], relate the cytological study and/or cervical biopsy with high-risk HPV (HPV-HR) genotypes presence, as well as relating their viral load (VL). Methods About 272 women, who presented most cell alterations compatible with lesions cervical HPV, which has been detected in all high risk by the CH method and HPV genotype detection by PCR. Results In 22% of the patients it was not detected HPV DNA. Genotype 16 and/or 18 was prevalent and was found in 33% of the 212 women studied, meanwhile, mixed infections were found by several genotypes in 25%. In as for the histological lesions found, in 61 pat
... Show MoreLost circulation or losses in drilling fluid is one of the most important problems in the oil and gas industry, and it appeared at the beginning of this industry, which caused many problems during the drilling process, which may lead to closing the well and stopping the drilling process. The drilling muds are relatively expensive, especially the muds that contain oil-based mud or that contain special additives, so it is not economically beneficial to waste and lose these muds. The treatment of drilling fluid losses is also somewhat expensive as a result of the wasted time that it caused, as well as the high cost of materials used in the treatment such as heavy materials, cement, and others. The best way to deal with drilling fluid losses
... Show MoreSoftware-defined networking (SDN) is an innovative network paradigm, offering substantial control of network operation through a network’s architecture. SDN is an ideal platform for implementing projects involving distributed applications, security solutions, and decentralized network administration in a multitenant data center environment due to its programmability. As its usage rapidly expands, network security threats are becoming more frequent, leading SDN security to be of significant concern. Machine-learning (ML) techniques for intrusion detection of DDoS attacks in SDN networks utilize standard datasets and fail to cover all classification aspects, resulting in under-coverage of attack diversity. This paper proposes a hybr
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