Multichannel audio is now widely available to the consumer. These multichannel formats demand numerous loudspeakers. While five or more loudspeakers in the room may be acceptable to the enthusiast, to the normal consumer this is an undesirable compromise. A more widely acceptable compromise, however, is likely to be a small reduction in the surround performance in exchange for fewer 'boxes' aro...

Localisation of multiple active speakers in natural environments with only two microphones is a challenging problem. Reverberation degrades the performance of speaker localisation based exclusively on directional cues. This paper presents an approach based on audio-visual fusion. The audio modality performs the multiple speaker localisation using the Skeleton method, energy weighting, and prece...

Although clinic-based studies have used biochemical validation to estimate the percentage of pregnant women who deny smoking but are actually smokers, a population-based estimate of nondisclosure of smoking status in US pregnant women has not been calculated. The authors analyzed data from the 1999–2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and estimated the percentage of 994 pregnan...

We present a method that exploits the information theoretic framework described in [1] to extract optimal audio features with respect to the video features. A simple measure of mutual information between the resulting audio features and the video ones allows to detect the active speaker among different candidates. The results show that our method is able to exploit the shared speech information...

This paper addresses the problem of distant speech acquisition in multiparty meetings, using multiple microphones and cameras. Microphone array beamforming techniques present a potential alternative to close-talking microphones by providing speech enhancement through spatial filtering. Beamforming techniques, however, rely on knowledge of the speaker location. In this paper, we present an integ...

This paper addresses the problem of three-dimensional speaker orientation estimation in a smart-room environment equipped with microphone arrays. A Bayesian approach is proposed to jointly track the location and orientation of an active speaker. The main motivation is that the knowledge of the speaker orientation may yield an increased localization performance and vice versa. Assuming that the ...

sufficient, these could conceivably provide a reference for derivatives. Realistically, however, this is some way in the future. Undoubtedly an active derivatives market, should it develop, would have a beneficial impact on the spot market. For the industry as a whole, the existence of an active derivatives market would provide a means of financial hedging against price risk, and. a market esta...

This study examined differences in residence, marriage age, and education among 6 language groups (Balochi-Brohi, Urdu, Siraiki, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Pushto) in Pakistan. Ethnic differences were reported for fertility preferences and family planning attitudes, knowledge, and practices. Data were obtained from the 1990-91 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey among 6582 eligible ever-married ...

s for Plenary Speakers John Baez (University of California, Riverside) “Higher Gauge Theory: 2-Connections” Abstract: Gauge theory describes the parallel transport of point particles using the formalism of connections on bundles. In both string theory and loop quantum gravity, point particles are replaced by 1-dimensional extended objects: paths or loops in space. This suggests that we seek som...