This paper presents an electrolaryngeal (EL) speech enhancement method capable of significantly improving naturalness of EL speech while causing no degradation in its intelligibility. An electrolarynx is an external device that artificially generates excitation sounds to enable laryngectomees to produce EL speech. Although proficient laryngectomees can produce quite intelligible EL speech, it s...

An electrolarynx is a device that artificially generates excitation sounds to produce electrolaryngeal (EL) speech. Although proficient laryngectomees can produce intelligible EL speech by using this device, it sounds quite unnatural due to the mechanical excitation. To address this issue, we have proposed several EL speech enhancement methods using statistical voice conversion and showed that ...

We present a hybrid approach to improving naturalness of electrolaryngeal (EL) speech while minimizing degradation in intelligibility. An electrolarynx is a device that artificially generates excitation sounds to enable laryngectomees to produce EL speech. Although proficient laryngectomees can produce quite intelligible EL speech, it sounds very unnatural due to the mechanical excitation produ...

This study develops a pattern correlation method to determine the type of major El Niño events since 1870 from a reconstructed sea surface temperature dataset. Different from other identification methods, this method allows an El Niño event to be of the Central-Pacific (CP) type, the Eastern-Pacific (EP) type, or the Mixed type (i.e. the both types coexist). Application of this method to the 39...

We propose and analyze a method for improving the performance of subpixel Edge Localization (EL) techniques through compensation of the systematic portion of the localization error. The method is based on the estimation of the EL characteristic through statistical analysis of a test image and is independent of the EL technique in use.

A new variant of Local Linearization (LL) method is proposed for the numerical (strong) solution of differential equations driven by (additive) alpha-stable Lévy motions. This is studied through simulations making emphasis in comparison with the Euler method from the viewpoint of numerical stability. In particular, a number of examples of stiff equations are shown in which the Euler method has ...

The EL estimators have some favorable higher order asymptotic properties. We extend the EL method proposed by Donald et al. (2003) to estimate non-i:i:d: continuous-time models with the known functional form of the conditional characteristic function. In many cases even the MLE method can not be performed, the EL method can do. More over, not only does the EL method resolve the problem of covar...

AIM Endothelial lipase (EL) is a determinant of plasma levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C). However, little is known about the impact of EL activity on plasma lipid profile. We aimed to establish a new method to evaluate EL-specific phospholipase activity in humans. METHODS Plasma samples were obtained from 115 patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) and 154 patients wi...