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.
The importance of knowledge is represented in the use of various sources of information, the corresponding to the same level of importance is the use of modern means and technologies in the delivery and investment of these sources to the beneficiaries, among these means and technologies are the multimedia that deal with most of the human senses, but the most important of which is sight and hearing, if these are invested the means in the field of education will give many positive results, such as the speed of receiving information, its clarity, and its freedom from impurities and influences, as well as its stability in memory as it is based on nderstanding, not memorization. On this basis, the experience of supporting the education process
... Show MoreIn the absence of environmental regulation, food stays to be contaminated with heavy metals, which is becoming a big worry for human health. The present research focusses on the environmental and health effects of irrigating a number of crops grown in the soils surrounding the Al-Rustamia old plant using treated wastewater generated by the plant. The physicochemical properties, alkalinity, and electrical conductivity of the samples were evaluated, and vegetable samples were tested for Cd, Pb, Ni, and Zn, levels, and even the transfer factor (TF) from soils to crops and crop and multi-targeted risk, daily intake (DIM) of metals, and health risk index (HRI) was calculated. The findings found that the average contents of Zn, Pb, Ni, an
... Show MoreA low-cost, RGB LED-based visible-light spectrophotometer was designed to measure dyes concentration. Dyes are widely used as indicators or coloring agents in different applications and knowing their concentration is an essential part for many studies. The proposed spectrophotometer provides many functionalities that clones the traditional expensive spectrophotometers for a budged price under $50. It was aimed to provide a versatile tool for instructors and educators to teach their students the fundamental concepts behind spectrophotometry. Malachite green, methyl red, and methyl orange dyes were chosen to be good samples to show the integrity of the proposed spectrophotometer in terms of accuracy, repeatability, and sensitivity as
... Show MoreThis study aims to identify changes in vegetation cover and its impact on the climate of Mosul City. The analytical method of the study relies on changes in Land Use/Land Cover (LULC), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Land Surface Temperature (LST); GIS technology was used to measure these statistics. Landsat (5,8) imagery was used to detect the change in vegetation cover change and land surface temperature during the study period from 2010 to 2022, where the unsupervised classification technique was used to determine LU variations. The results revealed significant changes among the LU classes during the study period, primarily due to human activities. The most prominent change in LU was the urban expansion of agricultural
... Show MoreThis study was focused on biotreatment of soil which polluted by petroleum compounds (Diesel) which caused serious environmental problems. One of the most effective and promising ways to treat diesel-contaminated soil is bioremediation. It is a choice that offers the potential to destroy harmful pollutants using biological activity.
Four bacterial strains were isolated from diesel contaminated soil samples. The isolates were identified by the Vitek 2 system, as Sphingomonas paucimobilis, Pentoae species, Staphylococcus aureus, and Enterobacter cloacae. The potential of biological surfactant production was tested using the Sigma 703D stand-alone tensiometer showed
... Show MoreThe Hopfield network is one of the easiest types, and its architecture is such that each neuron in the network connects to the other, thus called a fully connected neural network. In addition, this type is considered auto-associative memory, because the network returns the pattern immediately upon recognition, this network has many limitations, including memory capacity, discrepancy, orthogonally between patterns, weight symmetry, and local minimum. This paper proposes a new strategy for designing Hopfield based on XOR operation; A new strategy is proposed to solve these limitations by suggesting a new algorithm in the Hopfield network design, this strategy will increase the performance of Hopfield by modifying the architecture of t
... Show MoreThis work was conducted to study the extraction of eucalyptus oil from natural plants (Eucalyptus camaldulensis leaves) using water distillation method by Clevenger apparatus. The effects of main operating parameters were studied: time to reach equilibrium, temperature (70 to100°C), solvent to solid ratio (4:1 to 8:1 (v/w)), agitation speed (0 to 900 rpm), and particle size (0.5 to 2.5 cm) of the fresh leaves, to find the best processing conditions for achieving maximum oil yield. The results showed that the agitation speed of 900 rpm, temperature 100° C, with solvent to solid ratio 5:1 (v/w) of particle size 0.5 cm for 160 minute give the highest percentage of oil (46.25 wt.%). The extracted oil was examined by HPLC.
Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) is involuntary urine leakage during activities that increase abdominal pressure such as coughing, sneezing and lifting of heavy weights. This is a very common disorder among women with history of multiple vaginal deliveries with an obstructed labor. SUI is considered one of the most distressing problems, especially for younger women, with severe quality of life implications, it caused by the loss of urethral support, usually as a consequence of the supporting structural muscles in the pelvis.
Objective: To prove and demonstrate the effect of a fractional CO2 micro-ablative laser (10600nm) in intra vaginal therapy for treating SUI and achieve a clinical improvement of t
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