We describe an offline unconstrained Arabic handwritten word recognition system based on segmentation-free approach and discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs) with explicit state duration. Character durations play a significant part in the recognition of cursive handwriting. The duration information is still mostly disregarded in HMM-based automatic cursive handwriting recognizers due to the fact...

In this paper, we propose phoneme duration modeling methods with tree-based state tying. Two kinds of phone duration modeling methods are suggested. The first is context independent phoneme duration model in which duration parameters are stored in each phone. The second is context dependent duration model in which duration parameters are stored in each state being shared by context dependent ph...

The design of grating-based instruments to handle and condition coherent ultrafast pulses in the extreme-ultraviolet is discussed. The main application of such instruments is the monochromatization of high-order laser harmonics and free-electron-laser pulses in the femtosecond time scale. Broad-band monochromators require the use of diffraction gratings at grazing incidence. A grating can be us...

Naturalness of synthetic speech depends on appropriate modeling of prosodic aspects. Mostly, three prosody components are modeled: segmental duration, pitch contour and intensity. In this study, we present our work on modeling segmental duration in Turkish by using machine-learning algorithms. The models predict phone durations based on attributes such as phone identity, neighboring phone ident...

Prosodic cues (namely, fundamental frequency, energy and duration) provide important information for speech. For a tonal language such as Chinese, fundamental frequency (F0) plays a critical role in characterizing tone as well, which is an essential phonemic feature. In this paper, we describe our work on duration and tone modeling for telephone-quality continuous Mandarin digits, and the appli...

Prosodic cues (namely, fundamental frequency, energy and duration) provide important information for speech. For a tonal language such as Chinese, fundamental frequency (F0) plays a critical role in characterizing tone as well, which is an essential phonemic feature. In this paper, we describe our work on duration and tone modeling for telephone-quality continuous Mandarin digits, and the appli...

In this paper, a new duration modeling approach for Mandarin speech is proposed. It explicitly takes several major affecting factors as multiplicative companding factors (CFs) and estimates all model parameters by an EM algorithm. Besides, the three basic Tone 3 patterns (i.e., full tone, half tone and sandhi tone) are also properly considered via using three different CFs to separate their aff...

Statistical model is an effective method for character motion modeling. In this paper, a variable duration motion texture is proposed to represent complex human motion that is statistically similar to the original captured motion data. The motion texture is defined as a threelevel structure with moton abstracts, motons and their distribution. The motion texture is modeled by a Semi-SLDS (SemiSw...