a bstra ct   background: continuous high - intensity noise in the neonatal intensive care unit (nicu) is stressful for premature infants and its reduction is considered as a nursing care. this study aimed to evaluate the effects of earmuffs’ use on the physiologic and motor responses of premature infants.   materials and methods: this is a clinical trial conducted on 64 premature infants admitt...

Analysis of denoised speech using enhancement algorithms shows the presence of two kinds of degradation: speech distortion and residual background noise. Due to the fact that objective criteria are not able to evaluate separately them, we tested one composite criteria and we proposed a novel couple separating speech distortion and residual background noise. Firstly, we show the ability of propo...

evaluation criteria for different versions of the same database the concept of information, during its development, is connected to the concept of entropy created by the 19th century termodynamics scholars. information means, in this view point, order or negentropy. on the other hand, entropy is connected to the concepts as chaos and noise, which cause, in turn, disorder. in the present paper, ...

Four impulse noise auditory injury criteria adopted by NATO countries, namely, the MIL-STD-1474D (USA), Pfander (Germany), Smoorenburg (Netherlands), and L(Aeq8) (France), are evaluated against human volunteer data. Data from subjects wearing single-hearing protection exposed to increasing blast overpressure effects were obtained from tests sponsored by the US Army Medical Research and Material...

The wavelet multiscale edge representation of signals developed by Mallat and Zhong provides a new tool for signal and image processing. We built up a tree structure of wavelet-transform(WT) maxima and developed metrics for analyzing the WT maxima tree. These metrics fall into two classes corresponding to two perceptual criteria, scaling and spatial stabilities, for discriminating features from...

A 4 bit/sample transform coder is designed using a psychoacoustically derived noise masking threshold based on the shortterm input spectrum of the signal. The coder has been tested in a formal subjective test involving a wide selection of monophonic audio inputs. The signals used in the test were of 15 kHz bandwidth, sampled at 32 kHz. The bit rate of the resulting coder was 128 kbits/s. The su...