Most of voice activity detection (VAD) schemes are operated in the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) domain by classifying each sound frame into speech or noise based on the DFT coefficients. These coefficients are used as features in VAD, and thus the robustness of these features has an important effect on the performance of VAD scheme. However, some shortcomings of modeling a signal in the DFT...

Despite the fact that vascular dementia (VaD) represents the seconding leading cause of dementia in the USA, behind only Alzheimer's disease (AD), there remains a lack of consensus on the pathological criteria required for diagnosis of this disease. A number of clinical diagnostic criteria exist but are poorly validated and inconsistently applied. It is clear that vascular risk factors play an ...

Dementia is a leading cause of mental and physical disability. Vascular dementia (VaD) is the second most common cause of dementia after Alzheimer's disease (AD) constituting 10-15% of the dementia population. Currently there are no approved pharmaceutical options for VaD and the conventional anti-AD therapies provide only modest, short-term relief of symptoms associated with VaD. Herbal medici...

Accurate voice activity detection (VAD) is important for robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. This paper proposes noise-robust VAD using long-term temporal information in speech. Long-term temporal information has been an ASR focus recently, but has not been investigated sufficiently for VAD. This paper describes an attempt to incorporate long-term temporal information into a feat...

Crosstalk in a stereo recording occurs when the speech from one participant is leaked into the close-talking microphones of the other participants. This crosstalk causes degradation of the voice activity detection (VAD) performance on individual channels, in spite of the strength of the crosstalk signal being lower than that of the participant’s speech. To address this problem, we first detect ...

BACKGROUND Multi-infarct dementia (MID), a prominent subtype of vascular dementia (VaD), has only achieved recognition in the last 4 decades. Since its original description, the characterization, etiological understanding, and therapeutic direction of MID and other VaD subtypes has progressed at an astounding rate. SUMMARY This paper divides the landmark discoveries and emergence of new resea...

In this study, we specifically address the problem of in-vehicle voice activity detection (VAD), which has a significant importance for the speech controlled intelligent vehicle. A novel VAD system is proposed based on microphone array beamforming and discriminative Gaussian mixture model. As a binary classification problem, the features and classifiers are explored under the in-vehicle acousti...

Ventricular assist devices (VADs) have revolutionized treatment of advanced heart failure. VAD recipients benefit from improved functional status, better quality of life and good survival result. The advancement of post-VADs implant management, improved durability of devices and scarcity of heart donor have made VAD an attractive alternative to heart transplant, with an increasing trend of it b...

A robust voice activity detector (VAD) is expected to increase the accuracy of ASR in noisy environments. This study focuses on how to extract robust information for designing a robust VAD. To do so, we construct a noise eigenspace by the principal component analysis of the noise covariance matrix. Projecting noise speech onto the eigenspace, it is found that available information with higher S...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies Guinea-Bissau as having severe vitamin A deficiency (VAD). To date, no national survey has been conducted. We assessed vitamin A status among children in rural Guinea-Bissau to assess status and identify risk factors for VAD. METHODS In a vitamin A supplementation trial in rural Guinea-Bissau, children aged 6 months to 2 years who were...