Synthetic speech usually suffers from bad F0 contour surface. The prediction of the underlying pitch targets robustly relies on the quality of the predicted prosodic structures, i.e. the corresponding sequences of tones and breaks. In the present work, we have utilized a linguistically enriched annotated corpus to build data-driven models for predicting prosodic structures with increased accuracy. We have then used a linear regression approach for the F0 modeling. An appropriate XML annotation scheme has been introduced to encode syntax, grammar, new or already given information, phrase subject/object information, as well as rhetorical elements in the corpus, by exploiting a Natural Language Generator (NLG) system. To prove the benefits from the introduction of the enriched input meta-information, we first show that while tone and break CART predictors have high accuracy when standing alone (92.35% for breaks, 87.76% for accents and 99.03% for endtones), their application in the TtS chain degrades the Linear Regression pitch target model. On the other hand, the enriched linguistic meta-information minimizes errors of models leading to a more natural F0 surface. Both objective and subjective evaluation were adopted for the intonation contours by taking into account the propagated errors introduced by each model in the synthesis chain.

This paper describes continuous speech recognition incorporating the additional complement information, e.g., voice characteristics, speaking styles, linguistic information and noise environment, into HMM-based acoustic modeling. In speech recognition systems, context-dependent HMMs, i.e., triphone, and the tree-based context clustering have commonly been used. Several attempts to utilize not only phonetic contexts, but additional complement information based on context (factor) dependent HMMs have been made in recent years. However, when the additional factors for testing data are unobserved, methods for obtaining factor labels is required before decoding. In this paper, we propose a model integration technique based on general factor dependent HMMs for decoding. The integrated HMMs can be used by a conventional decoder as standard triphone HMMs with Gaussian mixture densities. Moreover, by using the results of context clustering, the proposed method can determine an optimal number of mixture components for each state dependently of the degree of influence from additional factors. Phoneme recognition experiments using voice characteristic labels show significant improvements with a small number of model parameters, and a 19.3% error reduction was obtained in noise environment experiments.

Spontaneously spoken Japanese includes a lot of grammatically ill-formed linguistic phenomena such as fillers, hesitations, inversions, and so on, which do not appear in written language. This paper proposes a novel method of robust dependency parsing using a large-scale spoken language corpus, and evaluates the availability and robustness of the method using spontaneously spoken dialogue sentences. By utilizing stochastic information about the appearance of ill-formed phenomena, the method can robustly parse spoken Japanese including fillers, inversions, or dependencies over utterance units. Experimental results reveal that the parsing accuracy reached 87.0%, and we confirmed that it is effective to utilize the location information of a bunsetsu, and the distance information between bunsetsus as stochastic information.

System-level fault diagnosis deals with the problem of identifying faulty nodes (processors) in a multiprocessor system. Each node is faulty or fault-free, and it can test other nodes in the system, and outputs the test results. The test result from a node is reliable if the node is fault-free, but the result is unreliable if it is faulty. In this paper, we prove that four variants of the hypercube: the crossed cube, the twisted cube, the Mobius cube, and the enhanced cube, are adaptively diagnosed using at most 4 parallel testing rounds, with at most n faulty nodes (for the enhanced cube, with at most n + 1 faulty nodes), where each processor participates in at most one test in each round. Furthermore, we propose another diagnosis algorithm for the n-dimensional enhanced cube with at most n + 1 faulty nodes, and show that it is adaptively diagnosed with at most 5 rounds in the worst case, but with at most 3 rounds if the number of existing faulty nodes is at most n -log(n + 1).

This paper presents a multiple constrained subspace based multiuser detector for synchronous long-code downlink multirate DS-CDMA systems. The novel receiver adapts its fractionally-spaced equaliser tap-weights based upon two modes, namely training and decision-directed modes. Switching between two modes is achieved by changing the code constraint in the associated subspace algorithm. Moreover, detection of the desired user requires the knowledge of the desired user's spreading code only. Simulation results show that the proposed receiver is capable of multiple access interference (MAI) suppression and multipath mitigation. Besides, the results reveal the improvement in terms of convergence speed and mean square error (MSE) of the proposed receiver over the existing receiver in both static and dynamic environments.

In this letter, a novel wavelet-based semi-fragile watermarking scheme is presented which exploiting the time-frequency feature of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and high sensitivity on initial value of chaotic map. We also analyze the robustness to mild modification and fragility to malicious attack of our scheme. Its application includes tamper detection, image verification and copyright protection of multimedia content. Simulation results show the scheme can detect and localize malicious attacks with high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), while tolerating certain degree of JPEG compression and channel additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN).

This paper presents an optimal load balancing algorithm based on both of the ANFIS (Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System) modeling and the FIS (Fuzzy Inference System) for the local status of real servers. It also shows the substantial benefits such as the removal of load-scheduling overhead, QoS (Quality of Service) provisioning and providing highly available servers, provided by the suggested method.

Process-centered software engineering environments (PSEEs) facilitate controlling complicated software processes. Traditional PSEEs are generally centrally controlled, which may result in the following drawbacks: (1) the server may become a bottleneck and (2) when the server is down, processes need to be suspended. To overcome the drawbacks, we developed a decentralized process engine ADPE (agent-based decentralized process engine). ADPE can be embedded in any PSEE to decentralize the PSEE. This paper presents ADPE.

Recently, many algorithms have been proposed for fast full search motion estimation. Among them, successive elimination algorithm (SEA) and its modified algorithms significantly speed up the performance of the full search algorithm. By introducing the inequality equation between the norm and the mean absolute difference (MAD) of two matching blocks, the SEA can successively eliminate invalid candidate blocks without any loss in estimation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a partial norm based early rejection algorithm (PNERA) for fast block motion estimation. The proposed algorithm employs the sum of partial norms from several subblocks of the block. Applying the sum of partial norms to the inequality equation, we can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the full search algorithm. In an attempt to reduce the computational load further, the modified algorithms using partial norm distortion elimination (PNDE) and subsampling methods are also proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is about 4 to 9 times faster than the original exhaustive full search, and is about 3 to 4 times faster than the SEA.

In this paper an analog-digital signal processing scheme for multichannel signal reception with low-IF receivers is proposed and its performance is investigated. In the low-IF receivers, the signal in the mirror frequency causes interference to the desired signal. In the proposed analog-digital signal processing scheme, the interference signal is extracted with the analog filter and the interference to the desired signal is reconstructed by LMS algorithm.

The paper first researches the properties of neural networks in the framework of the dual linear programming theory, then discusses the variation range of a Hessian matrix associated to dual linear programming problems. By means of eigenvalues method, a Lipschitz constant based formula for determining the algorithm step-size is presented. Two examples are given to show that the proposed formula is efficacious.

An active shield circuit which effectively reduces the substrate noise on the entire area inside the guard ring regardless of the noise source position is proposed. Simulation result shows that the proposed circuit can reduce the noise level to -85 dB while a conventional guard ring gives -52 dB.

A numerical technique for improving the accuracy of a rectangular loop antenna based on the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method is proposed. In this technique, a quasi-static field behaviour is incorporated into the FDTD update equations, and the more accurate numerical technique can be obtained without the need of using fine cells. The simulation results of this proposed technique are compared with the Method of Moment to confirm the effectiveness of the technique.

The High Tc SQUID was used in an unshielded environment to make eddy current nondestructive testing measurement on a multi-layer aluminum structure. As a demonstration of their capabilities, subsurface defects in a multilayer aluminum structure have been located and mapped using phase shift with no magnetic shielding around the specimen.

Recently Azou et al. proposed a method of model reduction for discrete systems based on a new impulse response Gramian. The reduced model was derived by first approximating the low-order impulse response Gramian, and then matching some Markov parameters and time-moments of an original model. In this note a modified method is presented so that the reduced model exactly preserves the low-order impulse response Gramian together with a slightly different set of Markov parameters and time-moments of the original model.

This paper focuses on the MC-CDMA (Multi Carrier-Code Division Multiple Access) with the MMSEC (Minimum Mean Square Error Combining) receiver, which is a good candidate of a transmission scheme for beyond 3G systems. This paper evaluates the forward link capacity using the MMSEC receiver in the MC-CDMA cellular system, which employs TDM (Time Division Multiplex) transmission for multiple users. In this paper, the PDF (Probability Distribution Function) of the SINR (Symbol to Interference plus Noise energy Ratio) after MMSEC under multi-cell environment are calculated with the various number of the code division multiplexes. Based on the PDF, the numerical relation can be derived between the peak rate of the adaptive transmission and the average transmission rate per sector.

This paper presents a new fast and robust circle extraction method that is capable of extracting circles from images with complicated backgrounds. It is not based on the Hough transform (HT) that requires a time-consuming voting process. The proposed method uses a least-squares circle fitting algorithm for extracting circles. The arcs are fitted by extended digital lines that are extracted by a fast line extraction method. The proposed method calculates accurate circle parameters using the fitted arcs instead of evidence histograms in the parameter space. Tests performed on various real-world images show that the proposed method quickly and accurately extracts circles from complicated and heavily corrupted images.

In this letter, we propose a low-complexity estimation method of cyclic-prefix (CP) length for a discrete multitone (DMT) very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) system. Using the sign bits of the received DMT VDSL signals, the proposed method provides a good estimate of CP length, which is suitable for various channel characteristics. This simple estimation method is consistent with the initialization procedure of T1E1.4 multi-carrier modulation (MCM)-based VDSL Standard. Finally, simulation results with VDSL test loops are presented.

The complete subtree (CS) method is widely accepted for the broadcast encryption. A new method for assigning keys in the CS method is proposed in this paper. The essential idea behind the proposed method is to use two trapdoor permutations. Using the trapdoor information, the key management center computes and assigns a key to each terminal so that the terminal can derive all information necessary in the CS method. A terminal has to keep just one key, while log2 N + 1 keys were needed in the original CS method where N is the number of all terminals. The permutations to be used need to satisfy a certain property which is similar to but slightly different from the claw-free property. The needed property, named strongly semi-claw-free property, is formalized in terms of probabilistic polynomial time algorithm, and its relation to the claw-free property is discussed. It is also shown that if the used permutations fulfill the strongly semi-claw-free property, then the proposed method is secure against attacks of malicious users.

Efficient extraction of interconnect parasitic parameters has become very important for present deep submicron designs. In this paper, the improved boundary element method (BEM) is presented for 3-D interconnect resistance extraction. The BEM is accelerated by the recently proposed quasi-multiple medium (QMM) technology, which quasi-cuts the calculated region to enlarge the sparsity of the overall coefficient matrix to solve. An un-average quasi-cutting scheme for QMM, advanced nonuniform element partition and technique of employing the linear element for some special surfaces are proposed. These improvements considerably condense the computational resource of the QMM-based BEM without loss of accuracy. Experiments on actual layout cases show that the presented method is several hundred to several thousand times faster than the well-known commercial software Raphael, while preserving the high accuracy.