Water quality indices (WQIs), which translate numerical values of several water quality characteristics of a sample into a single value, play a very important role in the monitoring, comparison and control of water quality. The WQIs of modern and post-modern times have been almost exclusively based on physical and chemical characteristics, and have seldom included 'biological' characteristics o...

For an assessment of the power quality in power distribution systems, classical Fourier series-based power quality indices are normally employed. The classical Fourier series-based power quality indices assume the periodicity of the disturbance so that the applications are limited to the harmonics. Hence, it is necessary for us to redefine power quality indices for the “transient” disturbances....

A pitch-synchronous method and system for speech coding using timbre vectors is disclosed. On the encoder side, speech signal is segmented into pitch-synchronous frames without overlap, then converted into a pitch-synchronous amplitude spectrum using FFT. Using Laguerre functions, the amplitude spectrum is transformed into a timbre vector. Using vector quantization, each timbre vector is conver...

Poor sleep in children is associated with lower neurocognitive functioning and increased maladaptive behaviors. The current study examined the impact of snoring (the most common manifestation of sleep-disordered breathing) on cognitive and brain functioning in a sample of 35 asymptomatic children ages 5-7 years identified in the community as having habitual snoring (SDB). All participants compl...

A new efficient join cost calculation technique for unit selection based synthesis is proposed. The acoustic features representing the spectral content at the unit boundaries are encoded using multi-stage vector quantization. After applying pseudo-gray coding, the join costs are directly approximated based on the stage-wise codebook indices. As a result, both the memory requirement and the comp...

Dysarthria is present in 23 51% of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, and the perceived characteristics of dysarthria have been shown to predict quality of life in these individuals. Tests of maximum performance such as oral diadochokinesis and Sequential Motion Rates (SMRs) are used in many neurology clinics and are considered to be sensitive indices of dysarthria. This large scale study invest...

Vector quantisation is a widely used technique in low-bit rate coding of speech and image data, but is highly sensitive to noise in the transmission channel. If the reference vector recalled by a corrupted index di ers greatly from the intended reference vector, image quality can be degraded quite dramatically. The index assignment (IA) process attempts to re-order the code book so as to minimi...

Vector quantisation is a widely used technique in low-bit rate coding of speech signals, but is highly sensitive to errors in the transmitted codeword, due to noise in the transmission channel. This can degrade speech quality quite dramatically if the reference vector retrieved by the corrupted index is very di erent from the reference vector corresponding to the intended index. The index assig...