Out-of-Vocabulary Rejection based on Selective Attention Model
Based on a psychological selective attention theory a new algorithm is developed to provide reliable out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rejection for speech recognition systems in noisy environments. The developed attention model is based on Broadbent's ‘early filtering’ theory, and the attention adaptation process utilizes a gradient-descent error minimization algorithm with error backpropagation rule. The developed model is applied to isolated-word recognition tasks, and much higher in-vocabulary recognition rates are achieved with the same out-of-vocabulary rejection rates.

title: Training Algorithm with Incomplete Data for Feed-Forward Neural Networks
abstract: A new algorithm is developed to train feed-forward neural networks for non-linear input-to-output mappings with small incomplete data in arbitrary distributions. The developed Training-EStimation-Training (TEST) algorithm consists of 3 steps, i.e., (1) training with the complete portion of the training data set, (2) estimation of the missing attributes with the trained neural networks, and (3) re-training the neural networks with the whole data set. Error back propagation is still applicable to estimate the missing attributes. Unlike other training methods with missing data, it does not assume data distribution models which may not be appropriate for small training data. The developed TEST algorithm is first tested for the Iris benchmark data. By randomly removing some attributes from the complete data set and estimating the values latter, accuracy of the TEST algorithm is demonstrated. Then it is applied to the Diabetes benchmark data, of which about 50% contains missing attributes. Compared with other existing algorithms, the proposed TEST algorithm results in much better recognition accuracy for test data.

title: Current practices of leading e-government countries
abstract: IT is transforming the way governments function and valuable lessons can be learned from the pioneering e-government programs that have led the charge.

title: Endomorphic modelling for two-dimensional time-varying autoregressive model signals
abstract: Physical signals are often non-stationary. We assume that images are non-stationary and each pixel is the output of a different set of two-dimensional autoregressive (AR) model coefficients; therefore, texture cannot be characterised by applying AR modelling techniques to the entire image. A multistage modelling technique, which appears in the literature as "endomorphic modelling", is applied to this kind of signal. The signal is divided into sub-sets of samples and each sub-set is modelled using an AR model. A new image is formed using the same AR model coefficient estimated from different blocks, then the new image is re-modelled using AR models again. This process ends when the variance of the estimated parameters is sufficiently small. The simulation results show that the variances obtained from the estimated coefficients at the second stage are much smaller than the ones from the first stage

title: Injectivity Conditions of 2D and 3D Uniform Cubic B-Spline Functions
abstract: Uniform cubic B-spline functions have been used for mapping functions in various areas such as image warping and morphing, 3D deformation, and volume morphing. The injectivity (one-to-one property) of a mapping function is crucial to obtaining desirable results in these areas. This paper considers the injectivity conditions of 2D and 3D uniform cubic B-spline functions. We propose a geometric interpretation of the injectivity of a uniform cubic B-spline function, with which 2D and 3D cases can be handled in a similar way. Based on our geometric interpretation, we present sufficient conditions for injectivity which are represented in terms of control point displacements. These sufficient conditions can be easily tested and will be useful in guaranteeing the injectivity of mapping functions in application areas.

title: LB_Keogh supports exact indexing of shapes under rotation invariance with arbitrary representations and distance measures
abstract: The matching of two-dimensional shapes is an important problem with applications in domains as diverse as biometrics, industry, medicine and anthropology. The distance measure used must be invariant to many distortions, including scale, offset, noise, partial occlusion, etc. Most of these distortions are relatively easy to handle, either in the representation of the data or in the similarity measure used. However rotation invariance seems to be uniquely difficult. Current approaches typically try to achieve rotation invariance in the representation of the data, at the expense of discrimination ability, or in the distance measure, at the expense of efficiency. In this work we show that we can take the slow but accurate approaches and dramatically speed them up. On real world problems our technique can take current approaches and make them four orders of magnitude faster, without false dismissals. Moreover, our technique can be used with any of the dozens of existing shape representations and with all the most popular distance measures including Euclidean distance, Dynamic Time Warping and Longest Common Subsequence.

title: Noise-robust automatic speech recognition using mainlobe-resilient time-frequency quantile-based noise estimation
abstract: In standard speech recognition systems in which training data are clean speech, the presence of background noise in received signal can severely deteriorate the recognition performance. This paper presents a simple noise-robust speech recognition system based on a modified noise spectral estimation method called mainlobe-resilient time-frequency quantile-based noise estimation (M-R T-F QBNE), which focuses on the mainlobes at harmonic frequencies. We estimate the global signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and select a recognition model, which is best matched to the SNR operating range. Experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of the proposed recognition system is higher than that of the AURORA2 clean training baseline by 23%. Compared to multicondition training, the proposed method achieves comparable recognition accuracy.