We have so far proposed a speaking-aid system for laryngectomees using a statistical voice conversion technique. In the proposed system, artificial speech articulated with extremely small sound source signals is detected with a Non-Audible Murmur (NAM)microphone, and then, the detected artificial speech is converted into more natural voice in a probabilistic manner. Although this system basical...

satellite imagery was used as a rapid and spatially explicit method to delineate crop residue cover and to estimate the use and intensity of conservation tillage. the potential of multispectral high-spatial resolution of worldview-2 local data was evaluated using 11 satellite spectral indices and linear spectral unmixing analysis (lsua). experimental plots were examined; residue cover was measu...

We report, to the best of our knowledge, the first experimental characterization of spectral coherence properties of wavelength conversion inside photonic crystal fibers with two zero-dispersion wavelengths (TZDWs) and demonstrate a low-noise femtosecond 1.3-μm source employing the TZDW fiber and a 1.3-W, 240-fs Yb:fiber amplifier as the seeding source. Theoretical investigation shows that puls...

We examine the modal, spectral, and polarization entanglement properties of photon pairs generated in a nonlinear periodically poled two-mode waveguide one-dimensional planar or two-dimensional circular via nondegenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Any of the possible degrees of freedom—mode number, frequency, or polarization—can be used to distinguish the down-converted photons whi...

This paper presents a novel method of enhancing esophageal speech based on statistical voice conversion. Esophageal speech is one of the speaking methods for total laryngectomees. Although it allows laryngectomees to speak by generating a sound source and articulating it to produce audible speech sounds using their esophagus and vocal organs, the generated voices sound unnatural. To improve the...

One of the keys towards high efficiency thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy conversion systems lies in spectral control. Here, we present detailed performance predictions of realistic TPV systems incorporating experimentally demonstrated advanced spectral control components. Compared to the blackbody emitter, the optimized two-dimensional (2D) tantalum (Ta) photonic crystal (PhC) selective emitter ...

In this paper, we propose a novel voice conversion method called speaker model alignment (SMA), which does not require parallel training speech. Firstly, the source and target speaker models, described by Gaussian mixture model (GMM), are trained, respectively. Then, the transformation function of spectral features is learned by aligning the components of source and target speaker models iterat...

Most Voice Conversion (VC) systems exploit source-filter decomposition based on linear prediction (LP) to transform spectral envelopes, incurring as a result various issues related to the oversimplification of the LP voice source model. Whilst residual prediction methods can mitigate this problem, they cannot be used to modify voice source quality. In this paper, a system which employs linear t...

In this paper, we describe a voice transformation meth-od which changes source speaker's acoustic features to those of a target speaker. The method developed here, acoustic features are divided into two parts, linear and nonlinear parts. Linear parts are characterized by LPC cepstrum coe cients which are obtained from LP analysis. As for nonlinear part, which represent the excitation signal, is...

From speech, speaker identity can be mostly characterized by the spectro-temporal structures of spectrum. Although recent researches have demonstrated the effectiveness of employing long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) in voice conversion, traditional LSTM-RNN based approaches usually focus on temporal evolutions of speech features only. In this paper, we improve the con...