27585937
Multi-modal Sign Icon Retrieval for Augmentative Communication
This paper addresses a multi-modal sign icon retrieval and prediction technology for generating sentences from ill-formed Taiwanese sign language (TSL) for people with speech or hearing impairments. The design and development of this PC-based TSL augmented and alternative communication (AAC) system aims to improve the input rate and accuracy of communication aids. This study focuses on 1) developing a effective TSL icon retrieval method, 2) investigating TSL prediction strategies for input rate enhancement, 3) using a predictive sentence template (PST) tree for sentence generation. The proposed system assists people with language disabilities in sentence formation. To evaluate the performance of our approach, a pilot study for clinical evaluation and education training was undertaken. The evaluation results show that the retrieval rate and subjective satistactory level for sentence generation was significantly improved.
15699236
Facial Phoneme Extraction for Taiwanese Sign Language Recognition
We have developed a system that recognizes the facial expressions in Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL) using a phoneme-based strategy. A facial expression is decomposed into three facial phonemes of eyebrow, eye, and mouth. A fast method is proposed for locating facial phonemes. The shapes of the phonemes were then matched by the deformable template method, giving feature points representing the corresponding phonemes. The trajectories of the feature points were tracked along the video image sequence and combined to recognize the type of facial expression. The tracking techniques and the feature points have been tailored for facial features in TSL. For example, the template matching methods have been simplified for tracking eyebrows and eyes. The mouth was tracked using the optical flow method, taking lips as homogeneous patches. The experiment has been conducted on 70 image sequences covering seven facial expressions. The average recognition rate is 83.3%.
44825673
Vision-Based Recognition of Hand Shapes in Taiwanese Sign Language
The pixel-based shape representation has been sensitive to rotation. In this paper, we propose a pixel-based descriptor that is invariant with rotation and scale for the hand shape recognition in Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL). Based on the property that a hand shape is characteristic of a unique pointing direction, angle normalization is used to meet the rotation-invariant requirement. With angle normalization, the traces of class covariance matrices have been reduced almost all over the classes of hand shapes, implying a less overlap between classes. It is confirmed by the experiments that show an increase in recognition accuracy.
12571074
Hand Motion Recognition for the Vision-based Taiwanese Sign Language Interpretation
In this paper we present a system to recognize the hand motion of Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL) using the Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) through a vision-based interface. Our hand motion recognition system consists of four phases: construction of color model, hand tracking, trajectory representation, and recognition. Our hand tracking can accurately track the hand positions. Since our system is recognized to hand motions that are variant with rotation, translation, symmetric, and scaling in Cartesian coordinate system, we have chosen invariant features which convert our coordinate system from Cartesian coordinate system to Polar coordinate system. There are nine hand motion patterns defined for TSL. Experimental results show that our proposed method successfully chooses invariant features to recognition with accuracy about 90%.
8586136
Emotion recognition using acoustic features and textual content
The paper presents an approach to emotion recognition from speech signals and textual content. In the analysis of speech signals, thirty-three acoustic features are extracted from the speech input. After principle component analysis (PCA), 14 principle components are selected for discriminative representation. In this representation, each principle component is the combination of the 33 original acoustic features and forms a feature subspace. Support vector machines (SVMs) are adopted to classify the emotional states. In text analysis, all emotional keywords and emotion modification words are manually defined. The emotion intensity levels of emotional keywords and emotion modification words are estimated from a collected emotion corpus. The final emotional state is determined based on the emotion outputs from the acoustic and textual approaches. The experimental result shows that the emotion recognition accuracy of the integrated system is better than each of the two individual approaches.
27793990
Fail Safe Distributed Fault Diagnosis of Multiprocessor Systems
31789422
Performance Analysis of Multistage Interconnection Network Configurations and Operations
A performance evaluation using both analytical and simulation models, of circuit-switching multistage interconnection networks in aspects of configurations and operations is presented. Two configurations of the networks, single and dual, are evaluated. Network operations considered include conflict resolution strategies and communication strategies. Two different conflict resolution strategies, drop and hold, are analyzed. New analyses using Markov chains, are given, and are verified by simulation results. In the single-network configuration, it is shown that the drop strategy is better than the hold strategy for randomly distributed traffic. In the dual network configuration, five different communication strategies are investigated, and the optimum performance level is shown to be dependent on the length of the data transfer time. >
8015300
MPI programming environment for IBM SP1/SP2
In this paper we discuss an implementation of the message passing interface standard (MPI) for the IBM Scalable Power PARALLEL 1 and 2 (SP1, SP2). Key to a reliable and efficient implementation of a message passing library on these machines is the careful design of a UNIX-Socket like layer in the user space with controlled access to the communication adapters and with adequate recovery and flow control. The performance of this implementation is at the same level as the IBM-proprietary message passing library (MPL). We also show that in the IBM SP1 and SP2 we achieve integrated tracing ability, where both system events, such as context switches and page fault etc., and MPI related activities are traced, with minimal overhead to the application program, thus presenting application programmers the trace of all the events that ultimately affect efficiency of a parallel program.
445830
The PIR-International Protein Sequence Database.
The Protein Information Resource (PIR; http://www-nbrf.georgetown. edu/pir/) supports research on molecular evolution, functional genomics, and computational biology by maintaining a comprehensive, non-redundant, well-organized and freely available protein sequence database. Since 1988 the database has been maintained collaboratively by PIR-International, an international association of data collection centers cooperating to develop this resource during a period of explosive growth in new sequence data and new computer technologies. The PIR Protein Sequence Database entries are classified into superfamilies, families and homology domains, for which sequence alignments are available. Full-scale family classification supports comparative genomics research, aids sequence annotation, assists database organization and improves database integrity. The PIR WWW server supports direct on-line sequence similarity searches, information retrieval, and knowledge discovery by providing the Protein Sequence Database and other supplementary databases. Sequence entries are extensively cross-referenced and hypertext-linked to major nucleic acid, literature, genome, structure, sequence alignment and family databases. The weekly release of the Protein Sequence Database can be accessed through the PIR Web site. The quarterly release of the database is freely available from our anonymous FTP server and is also available on CD-ROM with the accompanying ATLAS database search program.
5461786
Analysis and Comparison of Geometric and Algebraic Multigrid for Convection-Diffusion Equations
The discrete convection-diffusion equations obtained from streamline diffusion finite element discretization are solved on both uniform meshes and adaptive meshes. Estimates of error reduction rates for both geometric multigrid (GMG) and algebraic multigrid (AMG) are established on uniform rectangular meshes for a model problem. Our analysis shows that GMG with line Gauss-Seidel smoothing and bilinear interpolation converges if $h\gg \epsilon^{2/3}$, and AMG with the same smoother converges more rapidly than GMG if the interpolation constant $\beta$ in the approximation assumption of AMG satisfies $\beta \ll (\frac{h}{\sqrt{\epsilon}})^{\alpha}, \hs{1mm} \mbox{where $ \alpha = \Big\{ {\begin{smallmatrix} 1, & {h < \sqrt \varepsilon, } \\ 2, & {h \ge \sqrt \varepsilon.} \\ \end{smallmatrix}}$}$ On unstructured triangular meshes, the performance of GMG and AMG, both as solvers and as preconditioners for GMRES, are evaluated. Numerical results show that GMRES with AMG preconditioning is a robust and reliable solver on both type of meshes.