Tandem Connectionist Feature Extraction for Conversational Speech Recognition
Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) can be used in automatic speech recognition in many ways. A particular application of this tool over the last few years has been the Tandem approach, as described in [7] and other more recent publications. Here we discuss the characteristics of the MLP-based features used for the Tandem approach, and conclude with a report on their application to conversational speech recognition. The paper shows that MLP transformations yield variables that have regular distributions, which can be further modified by using logarithm to make the distribution easier to model by a Gaussian-HMM. Two or more vectors of these features can easily be combined without increasing the feature dimension. We also report recognition results that show that MLP features can significantly improve recognition performance for the NIST 2001 Hub-5 evaluation set with models trained on the Switchboard Corpus, even for complex systems incorporating MMIE training and other enhancements.

title: Long-Term Temporal Features for Conversational Speech Recognition
abstract: The automatic transcription of conversational speech, both from telephone and in-person interactions, is still an extremely challenging task. Our efforts to recognize speech from meetings is likely to benefit from any advances we achieve with conversational telephone speech, a topic of considerable focus for our research. Towards both of these ends, we have developed, in collaboration with our colleagues at SRI and IDIAP, techniques to incorporate long-term (~500 ms) temporal information using multi-layered perceptrons (MLPs). Much of this work is based on prior achievements in recent years at the former lab of Hynek Hermansky at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI), where the TempoRAl Pattern (TRAP) approach was developed. The contribution here is to present experiments showing: 1) that simply widening acoustic context by using more frames of full band speech energies as input to the MLP is suboptimal compared to a more constrained two-stage approach that first focuses on long-term temporal patterns in each critical band separately and then combines them, 2) that the best two-stage approach studied utilizes hidden activation values of MLPs trained on the log critical band energies (LCBEs) of 51 consecutive frames, and 3) that combining the best two-stage approach with conventional short-term features significantly reduces word error rates on the 2001 NIST Hub-5 conversational telephone speech (CTS) evaluation set with models trained using the Switchboard Corpus.

title: On k-Nearest Neighbor Searching in Non-Ordered Discrete Data Spaces
abstract: A k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) query retrieves k objects from a database that are considered to be the closest to a given query point. Numerous techniques have been proposed in the past for supporting efficient k-NN searches in continuous data spaces. No such work has been reported in the literature for k-NN searches in a non-ordered discrete data space (NDDS). Performing k-NN searches in an NDDS raises new challenges. The Hamming distance is usually used to measure the distance between two vectors (objects) in an NDDS. Due to the coarse granularity of the Hamming distance, a k-NN query in an NDDS may lead to a large set of candidate solutions, creating a high degree of non-determinism for the query result. We propose a new distance measure, called granularity-enhanced Hamming (GEH) distance, that effectively reduces the number of candidate solutions for a query. We have also considered using multidimensional database indexing for implementing k-NN searches in NDDSs. Our experiments on synthetic and genomic data sets demonstrate that our index-based k-NN algorithm is effective and efficient in finding k-NNs in NDDSs.

title: Evolutionary techniques for updating query cost models in a dynamic multidatabase environment
abstract: Deriving local cost models for query optimization in a dynamic multidatabase system (MDBS) is a challenging issue. In this paper, we study how to evolve a query cost model to capture a slowly-changing dynamic MDBS environment so that the cost model is kept up-to-date all the time. Two novel evolutionary techniques, i.e., the shifting method and the block-moving method, are proposed. The former updates a cost model by taking up-to-date information from a new sample query into consideration at each step, while the latter considers a block (batch) of new sample queries at each step. The relevant issues, including derivation of recurrence updating formulas, development of efficient algorithms, analysis and comparison of complexities, and design of an integrated scheme to apply the two methods adaptively, are studied. Our theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed techniques are quite promising in maintaining accurate cost models efficiently for a slowly changing dynamic MDBS environment. Besides the application to MDBSs, the proposed techniques can also be applied to the automatic maintenance of cost models in self-managing database systems.

title: A unified adaptive approach to accurate skin detection
abstract: Due to variations of lighting conditions and camera hardware settings and the existence of many ethnic people with a wide range of skin colors, a generic skin model is often inadequate to accurately capture the skin distribution for individual images. In this paper, we propose an adaptive skin detection framework, which allows modeling title skin distribution with significantly higher accuracy and flexibility. First, an adaptive skin model, specific to the image under consideration and refined from the skin-similar space, is derived using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and standard expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. Then, we develop a support vector machine (SVM) classifier to identify the skin Gaussian from the trained GMM (with two Gaussian components) by incorporating spatial and shape information of skin pixels. Extensive experimental results performed on large image databases have demonstrated the effectiveness and benefits of the proposed approach.

title: Fast Human Detection Using a Cascade of Histograms of Oriented Gradients
abstract: We integrate the cascade-of-rejectors approach with the Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HoG) features to achieve a fast and accurate human detection system. The features used in our system are HoGs of variable-size blocks that capture salient features of humans automatically. Using AdaBoost for feature selection, we identify the appropriate set of blocks, from a large set of possible blocks. In our system, we use the integral image representation and a rejection cascade which significantly speed up the computation. For a 320 × 280 image, the system can process 5 to 30 frames per second depending on the density in which we scan the image, while maintaining an accuracy level similar to existing methods.

title: JPEG encoding on the Intel MXP5800: a platform-based design case study
abstract: Multimedia systems are becoming increasingly complex and concurrent. The platform-based design (PBD) methodology (Keutzer et al., 2000) tackles these issues by recommending the use of formal models, carefully defined abstraction layers and the separation of concerns. Models of computation (Lee and Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, 1998) (MoCs) can be used within this methodology to enable specialized synthesis and verification techniques. In this paper, these concepts are leveraged in an industrial case study: the JPEG encoder application deployed on the Intel MXP5800 imaging processor. The modeling is carried out in the Metropolis (Balarin et al., 2003) design framework. We show that the system-level model using our chosen model of computation allows performance estimation within 5% of the actual implementation. Moreover, the chosen MoC is amenable to automation, which enables future synthesis techniques.