14489674
Automatic lyrics alignment for Cantonese popular music
From lyrics-display on electronic music players and Karaoke videos to surtitles for live Chinese opera performance, one feature is common to all these everyday functionalities temporal: synchronization of the written text and its corresponding musical phrase. Our goal is to automate the process of lyrics alignment, a procedure which, to date, is still handled manually in the Cantonese popular song (Cantopop) industry. In our system, a vocal signal enhancement algorithm is developed to extract vocal signals from a CD recording in order to detect the onsets of the syllables sung and to determine the corresponding pitches. The proposed system is specifically designed for Cantonese, in which the contour of the musical melody and the tonal contour of the lyrics must match perfectly. With this prerequisite, we use a dynamic time warping algorithm to align the lyrics. The robustness of this approach is supported by experiment results. The system was evaluated with 70 twenty-second music segments and most samples have their lyrics aligned correctly.
35666520
Automatic Lyrics Alignment on Popular Music
195859283
On fixed edges and edge-reconstruction of series-parallel networks
A graph configuration is a vertex labeled simple graph. We say a configuration is exclusive for graphs with a property in a class of graphs if every graph in the class containing the configuration has the property. We use the method of exclusive configurations to search for graphs without fixed edges and forced edges investigate the fixed edges. An edge e of a graph G is said to be a fixed edge if G-e+e'/spl cong/G implies that e'=e, and a forced edge if G-e+e' is an edge-reconstruction of G implies that e'=e. It is proved that all series-parallel networks contain fixed edges and forced edge except P/sub 2//spl times/K/sub 1/ and P/sub 3//spl times/K/sub 1/. A similar method is used to investigate the alternative wire problem in circuit design. Let G be a Boolean network and w a wire in G. Wire w' is said to be an alternative wire of w if w'/spl ne/w and G-w+w' has the same functionality as that of G. A wire is said to be fixed if it has no alternative wire. We present a set of exclusive configurations for Boolean networks in which every wire is fixed.
7180182
Minimizing mean flow time with error constraint
In a new model of task systems studied by J.W.S. Liu et al. (1987) each task is logically decomposed into two subtasks, mandatory and optional. The authors discuss preemptively scheduling this kind of task system on p>or=1 identical processors so as to minimize the mean flow time. Given a task system and an error threshold K, the goal is to find a preemptive schedule such that each task is executed in the interval of its release time and deadline, the average error is no more than K, and the mean flow time of the schedule is minimized. Such a schedule is called an optimal schedule. It is shown that the problem of finding an optimal schedule is NP-hard for each p>or=1, even if all tasks have the same ready time and deadline. For a single processor, a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm and polynomial time algorithms for various special cases of the problem are given.<<ETX>>
8828112
Real-Time Rate Control Via Variable Frame Rate and Quantization Parameters
Most of existing rate control schemes in the literature focus on the bit allocation under the assumption of constant frame rate. As a result, the distortion of consecutive frames varies in a great extent, which may result in low temporal quality (e.g. flickering effect). In this work, we design rate control with two control parameters (i.e. quantization factor and frame rate) to achieve better tradeoff between spatial quality and temporal quality in low complexity. Our optimization gives two suggested quantization step sizes. One is used to change the frame rate in order to allocate how many bits used in the current frame. Another one is used to change the quantization factor in order to quantize MBs to achieve target bit rates. The experimental results suggest that our scheme can achieve more consistent quality while keeping high spatial quality.
15727543
Securing Mobile Agents for Electronic Commerce: An Experiment
Mobile software agents are becoming a major trend of distributed systems in the next decade. Electronic commerce and information retrieval are two prospective applications of mobile agents. Nevertheless, security is a crucial concern for such systems. Attacks to agents by malicious hosts are the most challenging part of the problem unsolved. In this paper, a Shopping Information Agent System (SIAS) is built based on mobile agent technology. Possible security attacks by malicious hosts to agents in the system are discussed, and solutions to prevent these attacks are presented. Security of the solutions is analysed, and the performance overhead introduced is evaluated.
47450428
An Algorithm to Compact a VLSI Symbolic Layout with Mixed Constraints
A popular algorithm to compact VLSI symbolic layout is to use a graph algorithm similar to finding the "longest path" in a network. The algorithm assumes that the spacing constraints on the mask elements are of the lower bound type. However, to enable the user to have close control over the compaction result, a desired symbolic layout system should allow the user to add either the equality or the upper bound constraints on selected pairs of mask elements as well. This paper proposes an algorithm which uses a graph-theoretic approach to solve efficiently the compaction problem with mixed constraints.