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 kinetics of nickel removal from aqueous solutions using a bio-electrochemical reactor with a packed bed rotating cylinder cathode was investigated. The effects of applied voltage, initial nickel concentration, the rotation speed of the cathode, and pH on the reaction rate constant (k) were studied. The results showed that the cathodic deposition occurred under mass transfer control for all values of the applied voltage used in this research. Accordingly, the relationship between concentration and time can be represented by a first-order equation. The rate constant was found to be dependent on the applied voltage, initial nickel concentration, pH, and rotation speed. It was increased as the applied voltage increased and decreased as t
... Show MoreThis paper develops a nonlinear transient three-dimensional heat transfer finite element model and a rate independent three-dimensional deformation model, developed for the CO2 laser welding simulations in Al-6061-T6 alloy. Simulations are performed using an indirect coupled thermal-structural method for the process of welding. Temperature-dependent thermal properties of Al-6061-T6, effect of latent heat of fusion, and the convective and radiative boundary conditions are included in the model. The heat input to the model is assumed to be a Gaussian heat source. The finite element code ANSYS12, along with a few FORTRAN subroutines, are employed to obtain the numerical results. The benefit of the proposed methodology is that it
... Show MoreIndustrial dyes are major pollutants in wastewater and river water with an initial visible concentration of 1 mg/L. Recent studies have shown the possibility of using polyphenol oxidase in catalytic biological treatment due to its ability to oxidize a large number of dyes and pollutants in wastewater and the flexibility to work in wide ranges of temperature, pH and salinity. It is easy availability as well as the low economic cost resulting from its use in biological treatments, this enzyme polyphenol oxidase was used. The findings in this study showed that the extraction of polyphenol oxidase (PPO) from potato peel was homogenized with potassium phosphate buffer (0.1 M, pH 7) at a ratio of 1:10 (weight: volume) for two min. The res
... Show MoreThe reuse or recycling of waste materials in different aspects of life is served the objective of sustainability and be beneficial to society. In recent years, a wide variety of waste materials were used in pavement construction. One of these materials is glass that generally produces in large quantities and crushed glass can be considered feasible alternative source of aggregate for asphalt mixture production. This study focused on examining the asphalt mixture properties of wearing course using crushed glass as fine aggregates. Fine crushed glass with various percentages by total weight retained on sieve 2.36 mm, 0.3 mm and 0.075 mm was used in the study. The results indicate that mixes containing crushed glass had lower Marshall stabilit
... Show MoreIn this paper, the Monte-Carlo simulation method was used to compare the robust circular S estimator with the circular Least squares method in the case of no outlier data and in the case of the presence of an outlier in the data through two trends, the first is contaminant with high inflection points that represents contaminant in the circular independent variable, and the second the contaminant in the vertical variable that represents the circular dependent variable using three comparison criteria, the median standard error (Median SE), the median of the mean squares of error (Median MSE), and the median of the mean cosines of the circular residuals (Median A(k)). It was concluded that the method of least squares is better than the
... Show MoreNew microphotometer was constructed in our Laboratory Which deals with the determination of Molybdenum (VI) through its Catalysis effect on Hydrogen peroxide and potasum iodide Reaction in acid medium H2SO4 0.01 mM. Linearity of 97.3% for the range 5- 100 ppm. The repeatability of result was better than 0.8 % 0.5 ppm was obtanined as L.U. (The method applied for the determination of Molybdenum (VI) in medicinal Sample (centrum). The determination was compared well with the developed method the conventional method.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are emerging in various application like military, area monitoring, health monitoring, industry monitoring and many more. The challenges of the successful WSN application are the energy consumption problem. since the small, portable batteries integrated into the sensor chips cannot be re-charged easily from an economical point of view. This work focusses on prolonging the network lifetime of WSNs by reducing and balancing energy consumption during routing process from hop number point of view. In this paper, performance simulation was done between two types of protocols LEACH that uses single hop path and MODLEACH that uses multi hop path by using Intel Care i3 CPU (2.13GHz) laptop with MATLAB (R2014a). Th
... Show More