Many vertebrates eavesdrop on alarm calls of other species, which is a remarkable ability, given geographical variation in community composition and call diversity within and among species. We used micro-geographical variation in community composition to test whether individuals recognize heterospecific alarm calls by: (i) responding to acoustic features shared among alarm calls; (ii) having in...

Alarm sounds triggered by biomedical equipment play a key role in providing healthcare in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). This paper presents our work on automatic detection of acoustic alarms in a noisy NICU environment, where knowledge about the particular characteristics of each alarm class is integrated at different stages of the detection system. The feature extraction is based on a...

Automatic warning systems for protection against airborne threats require a high detection probability at long ranges. Infrared Search and Track (IRST) systems which are designed as monocular and passive systems are able to fulfil this requirement. However, due to clutter and distortions by other objects, like birds or clouds, these systems do not achieve the required low false alarm rate. For ...

Video-based fire detection is currently a fairly common application with the growth in the number of installed surveillance video systems. Moreover, the related processing units are becoming more powerful. Smoke is an early sign of most fires; therefore, selecting an appropriate smoke-detection method is essential. However, detecting smoke without creating a false alarm remains a challenging pr...

Intensive Care Units (ICUs) are equipped with many sophisticated sensors and monitoring devices to provide the highest quality of care for critically ill patients. However, these devices might generate false alarms that reduce standard of care and result in desensitization of caregivers to alarms. Therefore, reducing the number of false alarms is of great importance. Many approaches such as sig...

Background: Monitoring serves to maintain physiologic variables within normal limits and when a parameter crosses a set threshold, an alarm is triggered. Therefore, this study aimed to determine whether alarm limits are properly adjusted in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) by nursing staff or not.Methods: The data concerning alarm limits corresponding to the three shifts of nursing...