Data-driven impostor selection for T-norm score normalisation and the background dataset in SVM-based speaker verification

A data-driven background dataset refinement technique was recently proposed for SVM based speaker verification. This method selects a refined SVM background dataset from a set of candidate impostor examples after individually ranking examples by their relevance. This paper extends this technique to the refinement of the T-norm dataset for SVM-based speaker verification. The independent refinement of the background and T-norm datasets provides a means of investigating the sensitivity of SVM-based speaker verification performance to the selection of each of these datasets. Using refined datasets provided improvements of 13% in min. DCF and 9% in EER over the full set of impostor examples on the 2006 SRE corpus with the majority of these gains due to refinement of the T-norm dataset. Similar trends were observed for the unseen data of the NIST 2008 SRE.

Rescaling clustering trees using impact ratios for robust hierarchical speaker clustering

We present a novel method for improving hierarchical speaker clustering in the tasks of speaker diarization and speaker linking. In hierarchical clustering, a tree can be formed that demonstrates various levels of clustering. We propose a ratio that expresses the impact of each cluster on the formation of this tree and use this to rescale cluster scores. This provides score normalisation based on the impact of each cluster. We use a state-of-the-art speaker diarization and linking system across the SAIVT-BNEWS corpus to show that our proposed impact ratio can provide a relative improvement of 16% in diarization error rate (DER).

Using Trauma Injury Severity Score (TRISS) variables to predict length of hospital stay following trauma in New Zealand

Aim – To develop and assess the predictive capabilities of a statistical model that relates routinely collected Trauma Injury Severity Score (TRISS) variables to length of hospital stay (LOS) in survivors of traumatic injury. Method – Retrospective cohort study of adults who sustained a serious traumatic injury, and who survived until discharge from Auckland City, Middlemore, Waikato, or North Shore Hospitals between 2002 and 2006. Cubic-root transformed LOS was analysed using two-level mixed-effects regression models. Results – 1498 eligible patients were identified, 1446 (97%) injured from a blunt mechanism and 52 (3%) from a penetrating mechanism. For blunt mechanism trauma, 1096 (76%) were male, average age was 37 years (range: 15-94 years), and LOS and TRISS score information was available for 1362 patients. Spearman’s correlation and the median absolute prediction error between LOS and the original TRISS model was ρ=0.31 and 10.8 days, respectively, and between LOS and the final multivariable two-level mixed-effects regression model was ρ=0.38 and 6.0 days, respectively. Insufficient data were available for the analysis of penetrating mechanism models. Conclusions – Neither the original TRISS model nor the refined model has sufficient ability to accurately or reliably predict LOS. Additional predictor variables for LOS and other indicators for morbidity need to be considered.

Contemporary New Zealand coefficients for the Trauma Injury Severity Score: TRISS(NZ)

Aims – To develop local contemporary coefficients for the Trauma Injury Severity Score in New Zealand, TRISS(NZ), and to evaluate their performance at predicting survival against the original TRISS coefficients. Methods – Retrospective cohort study of adults who sustained a serious traumatic injury, and who survived until presentation at Auckland City, Middlemore, Waikato, or North Shore Hospitals between 2002 and 2006. Coefficients were estimated using ordinary and multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression models. Results – 1735 eligible patients were identified, 1672 (96%) injured from a blunt mechanism and 63 (4%) from a penetrating mechanism. For blunt mechanism trauma, 1250 (75%) were male and average age was 38 years (range: 15-94 years). TRISS information was available for 1565 patients of whom 204 (13%) died. Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves was 0.901 (95%CI: 0.879-0.923) for the TRISS(NZ) model and 0.890 (95% CI: 0.866-0.913) for TRISS (P<0.001). Insufficient data were available to determine coefficients for penetrating mechanism TRISS(NZ) models. Conclusions – Both TRISS models accurately predicted survival for blunt mechanism trauma. However, TRISS(NZ) coefficients were statistically superior to TRISS coefficients. A strong case exists for replacing TRISS coefficients in the New Zealand benchmarking software with these updated TRISS(NZ) estimates.

Changing musical emotion : a computational rule system for modifying score and performance

When communicating emotion in music, composers and performers encode their expressive intentions through the control of basic musical features such as: pitch, loudness, timbre, mode, and articulation. The extent to which emotion can be controlled through the systematic manipulation of these features has not been fully examined. In this paper we present CMERS, a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the control of perceived musical emotion that modifies features at the levels of score and performance in real-time. CMERS performance was evaluated in two rounds of perceptual testing. In experiment I, 20 participants continuously rated the perceived emotion of 15 music samples generated by CMERS. Three music works, each with five emotional variations were used (normal, happy, sad, angry, and tender). The intended emotion by CMERS was correctly identified 78% of the time, with significant shifts in valence and arousal also recorded, regardless of the works’ original emotion.

Trauma and Injury Severity Score (TRISS) coefficients 2009 revision

Background: Currently used Trauma and Injury Severity Score (TRISS) coefficients, which measure probability of survival (Ps), were derived from the Major Trauma Outcome Study (MTOS) in 1995 and are now unlikely to be optimal. This study aims to estimate new TRISS coefficients using a contemporary database of injured patients presenting to emergency departments in the United States; and to compare these against the MTOS coefficients.---------- Methods: Data were obtained from the National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB) and the NTDB National Sample Project (NSP). TRISS coefficients were estimated using logistic regression. Separate coefficients were derived from complete case and multistage multiple imputation analyses for each NTDB and NSP dataset. Associated Ps over Injury Severity Score values were graphed and compared by age (adult ≥ 15 years; pediatric < 15 years) and injury mechanism (blunt; penetrating) groups. Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curves was used to assess coefficients’ predictive performance.---------- Results: Overall 1,072,033 NTDB and 1,278,563 weighted NSP injury events were included, compared with 23,177 used in the original MTOS analyses. Large differences were seen between results from complete case and imputed analyses. For blunt mechanism and adult penetrating mechanism injuries, there were similarities between coefficients estimated on imputed samples, and marked divergences between associated Ps estimated and those from the MTOS. However, negligible differences existed between area under the receiver operating characteristic curves estimates because the overwhelming majority of patients had minor trauma and survived. For pediatric penetrating mechanism injuries, variability in coefficients was large and Ps estimates unreliable.---------- Conclusions: Imputed NTDB coefficients are recommended as the TRISS coefficients 2009 revision for blunt mechanism and adult penetrating mechanism injuries. Coefficients for pediatric penetrating mechanism injuries could not be reliably estimated.

Reflection on the use of rating and score cards for asset and service assessment

The concept of star rating council facilities has progressively gained traction in Australia following the work of Dean Taylor at Marochy Shire Council in Queensland in 2006 – 2007 and more recently by the Victorian STEP asset management program. The following paper provides a brief discussion on the use and merits of star rating within community asset management. We suggest that the current adoption of the star rating system to manage community investment in services is lacking in consistency. It is suggested that the major failing is a lack of clear understanding in the purpose being served by the systems. The discussion goes on to make some recommendations on how the concept of a star system could be further enhanced to serve the needs of our communities better.

The application of phonetic distribution normalisation to likelihood-maximising speech enhancement for robust ASR

Traditional speech enhancement methods optimise signal-level criteria such as signal-to-noise ratio, but such approaches are sub-optimal for noise-robust speech recognition. Likelihood-maximising (LIMA) frameworks on the other hand, optimise the parameters of speech enhancement algorithms based on state sequences generated by a speech recogniser for utterances of known transcriptions. Previous applications of LIMA frameworks have generated a set of global enhancement parameters for all model states without taking in account the distribution of model occurrence, making optimisation susceptible to favouring frequently occurring models, in particular silence. In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of highly disproportionate phonetic distributions on two corpora with distinct speech tasks, and propose to normalise the influence of each phone based on a priori occurrence probabilities. Likelihood analysis and speech recognition experiments verify this approach for improving ASR performance in noisy environments.

Vision-based classification of solder joint defects

Inspection of solder joints has been a critical process in the electronic manufacturing industry to reduce manufacturing cost, improve yield, and ensure product quality and reliability. The solder joint inspection problem is more challenging than many other visual inspections because of the variability in the appearance of solder joints. Although many research works and various techniques have been developed to classify defect in solder joints, these methods have complex systems of illumination for image acquisition and complicated classification algorithms. An important stage of the analysis is to select the right method for the classification. Better inspection technologies are needed to fill the gap between available inspection capabilities and industry systems. This dissertation aims to provide a solution that can overcome some of the limitations of current inspection techniques. This research proposes two inspection steps for automatic solder joint classification system. The “front-end” inspection system includes illumination normalisation, localization and segmentation. The illumination normalisation approach can effectively and efficiently eliminate the effect of uneven illumination while keeping the properties of the processed image. The “back-end” inspection involves the classification of solder joints by using Log Gabor filter and classifier fusion. Five different levels of solder quality with respect to the amount of solder paste have been defined. Log Gabor filter has been demonstrated to achieve high recognition rates and is resistant to misalignment. Further testing demonstrates the advantage of Log Gabor filter over both Discrete Wavelet Transform and Discrete Cosine Transform. Classifier score fusion is analysed for improving recognition rate. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system improves performance and robustness in terms of classification rates. This proposed system does not need any special illumination system, and the images are acquired by an ordinary digital camera. In fact, the choice of suitable features allows one to overcome the problem given by the use of non complex illumination systems. The new system proposed in this research can be incorporated in the development of an automated non-contact, non-destructive and low cost solder joint quality inspection system.

Focus-score weighted super-resolution for uncooperative iris recognition at a distance and on the move

Uncooperative iris identification systems at a distance and on the move often suffer from poor resolution and poor focus of the captured iris images. The lack of pixel resolution and well-focused images significantly degrades the iris recognition performance. This paper proposes a new approach to incorporate the focus score into a reconstruction-based super-resolution process to generate a high resolution iris image from a low resolution and focus inconsistent video sequence of an eye. A reconstruction-based technique, which can incorporate middle and high frequency components from multiple low resolution frames into one desired super-resolved frame without introducing false high frequency components, is used. A new focus assessment approach is proposed for uncooperative iris at a distance and on the move to improve performance for variations in lighting, size and occlusion. A novel fusion scheme is then proposed to incorporate the proposed focus score into the super-resolution process. The experiments conducted on the The Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge portal database shows that our proposed approach achieves an EER of 2.1%, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art averaging signal-level fusion approach by 19.2% and the robust mean super-resolution approach by 8.7%.

A prospective pilot study evaluating the ‘cardiac decompensation score’ in the setting of intraaortic balloon counterpulsation

The study objective was to determine whether the ‘cardiac decompensation score’ could identify cardiac decompensation in a patient with existing cardiac compromise managed with intraaortic balloon counterpulsation (IABP). A one-group, posttest-only design was utilised to collect observations in 2003 from IABP recipients treated in the intensive care unit of a 450 bed Australian, government funded, public, cardiothoracic, tertiary referral hospital. Twenty-three consecutive IABP recipients were enrolled, four of whom died in ICU (17.4%). All non-survivors exhibited primarily rising scores over the observation period (p < 0.001) and had final scores of 25 or higher. In contrast, the maximum score obtained by a survivor at any time was 15. Regardless of survival, scores for the 23 participants were generally decreasing immediately following therapy escalation (p = 0.016). Further reflecting these changes in patient support, there was also a trend for scores to move from rising to falling at such treatment escalations (p = 0.024). This pilot study indicates the ‘cardiac decompensation score’ to accurately represent changes in heart function specific to an individual patient. Use of the score in conjunction with IABP may lead to earlier identification of changes occurring in a patient's cardiac function and thus facilitate improved IABP outcomes.

A DRD2 polymorphism predicts PANSS score variability in schizophrenia patients treated with antipsychotics

Antipsychotic medications act as either antagonists or partial agonists of the dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) and antipsychotic drugs vary widely in their binding affinity for the D2 receptor (Kapur and Seeman, 2000). The DRD2 957CNT (rs6277) polymorphism has previously been associated with schizophrenia (Lawford et al., 2005) and the T-allele of the 957CNT polymorphism is associated with reduced mRNA stability and synthesis of the dopamine D2 receptor (Duan et al., 2003). The aim of the study was to determine if the rs6277 polymorphism predicts some of the variability of positive and negative symptoms observed in schizophrenia patients being treated with antipsychotic medication.

The Foot Heath Status Questionnaire : correct scale score calculation

This letter is in response to the recently published article “Evaluation of two self-referent foot health instruments” by Robert Trevethan (RT) and is in regard to the scale scores he derived when using the quality of life measure, the Foot Health Status Questionnaire [1]. Unfortunately, the journal reviewers and editor did not identify, or address, a fundamental flaw in the methodology of this paper. Subsequently, the inference drawn from this paper could, in all reasonableness, mislead the reader