The new generation of text-to-speech systems needs the ability to control the voice quality of the synthesized speech by varying the excitation source. This feature is fundamental to improve naturalness and to synthesize female or child voices. The variation of the voice quality is also important when trying to synthesize expression. The problem involves two aspects: the ability to control the ...

Over the last decade, the Concentration, Asymmetry and Smoothness (CAS), as well as the M20 and GINI parameters have become popular to automatically classify distant galaxies in images. Ellipticals, spirals and irregular galaxies all appear to occupy different regions of this parameter space. At the same time, the Source Extractor (SE) program has become the mainstay to produce object catalogs ...

The use of supervised neural networks for the estimation of seismic source parameters from SAR interferometric data is presented in this paper. The RNGCHN software allowed the generation of the input-output pairs necessary for the learning phase of the net. After being trained, the net has been tested on real measured data. The obtained results encourage future developments of such an approach.

Longitudinal changes were investigated for selected voice source parameters: fundamental frequency (F0), jitter (period perturbation quotient, PPQ), shimmer (amplitude perturbation quotient, APQ) and glottal noise (normalized noise energy, NNE). Acoustic analyses were made on the sustained phonation of the Japanese vowel /a/ of 20 males and 38 females with no laryngeal disease, which were recor...

Both in speech synthesis and in sound coding it is often beneficial to have a measure that predicts whether, and to what extent, two sounds are different. This chapter addresses the problem of estimating the perceptual effects of small modifications to the spectral envelope of a harmonic sound. A recently proposed auditory model is investigated that transforms the physical spectrum into a patte...

A persistent problem in estimating the severity of local tsunamis generated by earthquakes is explaining the great event-to-event variability of tsunami run-up heights relative to the magnitude of the earthquake. Undoubtedly, there is always variability in run-up that is dependent on local bathymetry. However, many earthquakes in recent years have produced unexpectedly high local run-up heights...