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.
A simple and novel membraneless paper-based microfluidic fuel cell was presented in this study. The occurrence of laminar flow was employed to ensure no mixing of the fuel and oxidant fluids along the bath of reaction. The acidic wastewater was used as a fuel. It was an air-breathing cell, so air and tab water were used as oxidants. Both the fuel and tab water flowed continuously under gravity. Whatman filter paper was used for preparation of the fuel cell channel and two carbon fibre electrodes were used and firmed on the edges of the cell. The performance of the cell was examined over three consecutive days. The results indicated that the present cell has the potential to generate electric power, but an extensive study is required to harv
... Show MoreAn update of our research is the first to develop and reform the agricultural sector . and promoting production and productivity of this sector multi-sources , which is the management and beekeeping one source . Been applied to the style of beekeeping mobile promiscuous includes twentieth cell in the Iraqe project of mussiab . in which there exist a variety of crops and trees .
Experiment had proved successful and led to raise the level of npoduction of single Dell of the honey to 49 kg over the previous year and surpassed the average production percell in the province of Babylon , which the amount of 13.945 kg , another
... Show MoreThis paper presents an efficient methodology to design modified evaporative air-cooler for winter air-conditioning in Baghdad city as well as using it for summer air-conditioning by adding a heating process after the humidification process. laboratory tests were performed on a direct evaporative cooler (DEC) followed by passing the air on hot water through heat exchanger placed in the coolers air duct exit. The tests were conducted on the 2nd of December /2011 when the ambient temperature was 8.1°C and the relative humidity was (68%). The air flow rate is assumed to vary between 0.069 to 0.209 kg/s with constant water flow rate of 0.03 kg/s in the heat exchanger. The performance is reported in terms of effectiveness of DEC, satura
... Show MoreIn this study, four different spectrophotometric methods were applied for determination of cimetidine and erythromycin ethylsuccinate drugs in pure form and in their pharmaceutical preparations. The suggested methods are simple, sensitive, accurate, not time consuming and inexpensive. The results showed the following: The first method: Based on the formation of ion pair complex of each drug with bromothymol blue (BTB) as a chromogenic reagent. The formed complexes were extracted with chloroform and their absorbance values were measured at 427.5 nm for cimetidine and 416.5nm for erythromycin ethylsuccinate; against their reagents blanks. Two different methods, univariate method and multivariate method, were used to obtain the optimum condit
... Show MoreTo ascertain the stability or instability of time series, three versions of the model proposed by Dickie-Voller were used in this paper. The aim of this study is to explain the extent of the impact of some economic variables such as the supply of money, gross domestic product, national income, after reaching the stability of these variables. The results show that the variable money supply, the GDP variable, and the exchange rate variable were all stable at the level of the first difference in the time series. This means that the series is an integrated first-class series. Hence, the gross fixed capital formation variable, the variable national income, and the variable interest rate
... Show MoreBoth the double-differenced and zero-differenced GNSS positioning strategies have been widely used by the geodesists for different geodetic applications which are demanded for reliable and precise positions. A closer inspection of the requirements of these two GNSS positioning techniques, the zero-differenced positioning, which is known as Precise Point Positioning (PPP), has gained a special importance due to three main reasons. Firstly, the effective applications of PPP for geodetic purposes and precise applications depend entirely on the availability of the precise satellite products which consist of precise satellite orbital elements, precise satellite clock corrections, and Earth orientation parameters. Secondly, th
... Show MoreBackground: Radiopacity is one of the prerequisites for dental materials, especially for composite restorations. It's essential for easy detection of secondary dental caries as well as observation of the radiographic interface between the materials and tooth structure. The aim of this study to assess the difference in radiopacity of different resin composites using a digital x-ray system. Materials and methods: Ten specimens (6mm diameter and 1mm thickness) of three types of composite resins (Evetric, Estelite Sigma Quick,and G-aenial) were fabricated using Teflon mold. The radiopacity was assessed using dental radiography equipment in combination with a phosphor plate digital system and a grey scale value aluminum step wedge with thickness
... Show MoreIn this research, the removal of cadmium (Cd) from simulated wastewater was investigated by using a fixed bed bio-electrochemical reactor. The effects of the main controlling factors on the performance of the removal process such as applied cell voltage, initial Cd concentration, pH of the catholyte, and the mesh number of the cathode were investigated. The results showed that the applied cell voltage had the main impact on the removal efficiency of cadmium where increasing the applied voltage led to higher removal efficiency. Meanwhile increasing the applied voltage was found to be given lower current efficiency and higher energy consumption. No significant effect of initial Cd concentration on the removal efficiency of cadmium b
... Show MoreRecently, the internet has made the users able to transmit the digital media in the easiest manner. In spite of this facility of the internet, this may lead to several threats that are concerned with confidentiality of transferred media contents such as media authentication and integrity verification. For these reasons, data hiding methods and cryptography are used to protect the contents of digital media. In this paper, an enhanced method of image steganography combined with visual cryptography has been proposed. A secret logo (binary image) of size (128x128) is encrypted by applying (2 out 2 share) visual cryptography on it to generate two secret share. During the embedding process, a cover red, green, and blue (RGB) image of size (512
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