Enticing general engineering undergrads into signal processing with Photo-Editing and image search

The University of Cambridge is unusual in that its Department of Engineering is a single department which covers virtually all branches of engineering under one roof. In their first two years of study, our undergrads study the full breadth of engineering topics and then have to choose a specialization area for the final two years of study. Here we describe part of a course, given towards the end of their second year, which is designed to entice these students to specialize in signal processing and information engineering topics for years 3 and 4. The course is based around a photo editor and an image search application, and it requires no prior knowledge of the z-transform or of 2-dimensional signal processing. It does assume some knowledge of 1-D convolution and basic Fourier methods and some prior exposure to Matlab. The subject of this paper, the photo editor, is written in standard Matlab m-files which are fully visible to the students and help them to see how specific algorithms are implemented in detail. © 2011 IEEE.

An efficient and robust pitch marking algorithm on the speech waveform for TD-PSOLA

In a Text-to-Speech system based on time-domain techniques that employ pitch-synchronous manipulation of the speech waveforms, one of the most important issues that affect the output quality is the way the analysis points of the speech signal are estimated and the actual points, i.e. the analysis pitchmarks. In this paper we present our methodology for calculating the pitchmarks of a speech waveform, a pitchmark detection algorithm, which after thorough experimentation and in comparison with other algorithms, proves to behave better with our TD-PSOLA-based Text-to-Speech synthesizer (Time- Domain Pitch-Synchronous Overlap Add Text to Speech System).

Image sequence segmentation using mixture-models with uniqueness and spatio-temporal consistency constraints

The use of mixture-model techniques for motion estimation and image sequence segmentation was discussed. The issues such as modeling of occlusion and uncovering, determining the relative depth of the objects in a scene, and estimating the number of objects in a scene were also investigated. The segmentation algorithm was found to be computationally demanding, but the computational requirements were reduced as the motion parameters and segmentation of the frame were initialized. The method provided a stable description, in whichthe addition and removal of objects from the description corresponded to the entry and exit of objects from the scene.

Data Analysis on Complicated Construction Data Sources: Vision, Research, and Recent Developments

Compared with construction data sources that are usually stored and analyzed in spreadsheets and single data tables, data sources with more complicated structures, such as text documents, site images, web pages, and project schedules have been less intensively studied due to additional challenges in data preparation, representation, and analysis. In this paper, our definition and vision for advanced data analysis addressing such challenges are presented, together with related research results from previous work, as well as our recent developments of data analysis on text-based, image-based, web-based, and network-based construction sources. It is shown in this paper that particular data preparation, representation, and analysis operations should be identified, and integrated with careful problem investigations and scientific validation measures in order to provide general frameworks in support of information search and knowledge discovery from such information-abundant data sources.