This thesis focuses on the detection of abrupt acoustic discontinuities in the speech signal, which constitute landmarks for consonant sounds. Because a large amount of phonetic information is concentrated near acoustic discontinuities, more focused speech analysis and recognition can be performed based on the landmarks. Three types of consonant landmarks are defined according to its characteri...

In network topology discovery, it is often necessary to collect measurements between network elements without injecting large amounts of traffic into the network. A possible solution to this problem is to actively query the network for some measurements and use these to infer the remaining ones. We frame this as a particular version of the Noisy Matrix Completion problem where the entries refle...

The growing usage of statistical shape analysis in medical imaging calls for effective methods for highly accurate shape correspondence. This paper presents a novel landmark-based method to correspond a set of 2D shape instances in a nonrigid fashion. Different from prior methods, the proposed method combines three important factors in measuring the shape-correspondence error: landmark-correspo...

Facial landmark localization plays an important role in face recognition and analysis applications. In this paper, we give a brief introduction to a coarse-to-fine pipeline with neural networks and sequential regression. First, a global convolutional network is applied to the holistic facial image to give an initial landmark prediction. A pyramid of multi-scale local image patches is then cropp...

Two species of desert ants - the North African Cataglyphis fortis and the central Australian Melophorus bagoti - differ markedly in the visual complexity of their natural habitats: featureless salt pans and cluttered, steppe-like terrain, respectively. Here we ask whether the two species differ in their navigational repertoires, in particular, whether in homing they place different emphasis on ...

For the fast and accurate self-localization of mobile robots, landmarks can be used very efficiently in the complex workspace. In this paper, we propose a simple color landmark model for self-localization and a fast landmark detection and tracking algorithm based on the proposed landmark model. We develop a color landmark with a symmetric and repetitive structure, which shows invariant color hi...

This paper discusses a new approach to improve tone recognition by modeling the tone nucleus with vowel landmark detection. The tone nucleus region is identified based on vowel landmark frames derived by an automatic landmark recognition system. In the corresponding tone recognition experiments, the best results with landmark-based tone nucleus regions outperform the best baseline system result...

Ultrasonography is a safe, rapid, and non-invasive diagnostic tool that has been previously used for imaging infants and canine neonatal brains. The purpose of the present study was to describe the ultrasonographic appearance of the brain in clinically normal caprine neonates. Ultrasonographic examination was done on 12 day-old goat kids, transverse and sagittal transcranial scans were obtained...

and includes sites of high botanical interest. From 2000 to 2004, volunteers sent by the environmental charity Earthwatch helped to gather biodiversity data to back the scientific case for the sanctuary. Using this research, Earthwatch and NCRC demonstrated to the tribal chiefs that the creation of a sanctuary would provide a profitable alternative to unsustainable hunting and fishing. Investme...

BACKGROUND In the concept of cloud-computing-based systems, various authorized users have secure access to patient records from a number of care delivery organizations from any location. This creates a growing need for remote visualization, advanced image processing, state-of-the-art image analysis, and computer aided diagnosis. OBJECTIVES This paper proposes a system of algorithms for automa...