The only treatment for the terminal symptoms of the laryngeal cancer is to remove the larynx including vocal cords, which mean that the patient loses his voice. Esophageal speech is a method of speech production using an esophagus. An air inhaled in the upper esophagus generates the esophagus vibration to produce a belch-like sound that can be shaped into speech. Although this method has diffic...

The objective of this paper is automatically to identify individual great white sharks in a database of thousands of unconstrained fin images. The approach put forward appreciates shark fins in natural imagery as smooth, flexible and partially occluded objects with an individuality encoding trailing edge. In order to recover animal identities therefrom we first introduce an open contour stroke ...

The mammalian vomeronasal organ detects social information about gender, status, and individuality. The molecular cues carrying this information remain largely unknown. Here, we show that small peptides that serve as ligands for major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules function also as sensory stimuli for a subset of vomeronasal sensory neurons located in the basal Gao- and V2R ...

Atomic force microscopy and single-molecule force spectroscopy were combined to image and manipulate purple membrane patches from Halobacterium salinarum. Individual bacteriorhodopsin molecules were first localized and then extracted from the membrane; the remaining vacancies were imaged again. Anchoring forces between 100 and 200 piconewtons for the different helices were found. Upon extractio...

Analysis of allographs (characters) and allograph combinations (words) is the key for obtaining the discriminating elements of handwriting. While allographs usually inhabit in words and segregation of a word into allographs is more subjective than objective, especially for cursive writing, analysis of handwritten words is a natural and better option. In this study, a handwritten word image is c...

In artistic fields such as western music performance of the past 200 years, individuality is highly valued as a performer’s expression of his or her aesthetic concepts. Yet characterizations of individual performance qualities have largely remained on a descriptive level. In this opinion article, it is argued that if researchers aim at quantifying individuality, then the only feasible approach ...

The task of establishing the distinctiveness of biometric data is important in many types of biometric applications. Earlier work had identified the concept of distance statistics as central to our approach to the individuality of a biometric, and the inferential statistical aspects had been considered crucial in evaluating the individuality of certain biometric data. Here we consider the geome...

Experiments were performed to investigate perceptual contributions of static and dynamic features of vocal tract characteristics to talker individuality. An ARX (Autoregressive with exogenous input) speech production model was used to extract separately voice source and vocal tract parameters from a Japanese sentence, /aoiueoie/ ("Say blue top" in English). The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) w...