Browsing by Subject "Communications Engineering"

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    A comparison of features for large population speaker identification
    (2000) Baloyi, Norman Tinyiko; Mashao, Daniel
    Speech recognition systems all have one criterion in common; they perform better in a controlled environment using clean speech. Though performance can be excellent, even exceeding human capabilities for clean speech, systems fail when presented with speech data from more realistic environments such as telephone channels. The differences using a recognizer in clean and noisy environments are extreme, and this causes one of the major obstacles in producing commercial recognition systems to be used in normal environments. It is the lack of performance of speaker recognition systems with telephone channels that this work addresses. The human auditory system is a speech recognizer with excellent performance, especially in noisy environments. Since humans perform well at ignoring noise more than any machine, auditory-based methods are the promising approaches since they attempt to model the working of the human auditory system. These methods have been shown to outperform more conventional signal processing schemes for speech recognition, speech coding, word-recognition and phone classification tasks. Since speaker identification has received lot of attention in speech processing because of its waiting real-world applications, it is attractive to evaluate the performance using auditory models as features. Firstly, this study rums at improving the results for speaker identification. The improvements were made through the use of parameterized feature-sets together with the application of cepstral mean removal for channel equalization. The study is further extended to compare an auditory-based model, the Ensemble Interval Histogram, with mel-scale features, which was shown to perform almost error-free in clean speech. The previous studies of Elli to be more robust to noise were conducted on speaker dependent, small population, isolated words and now are extended to speaker independent, larger population, continuous speech. This study investigates whether the Elli representation is more resistant to telephone noise than mel-cepstrum as was shown in the previous studies, when now for the first time, it is applied for speaker identification task using the state-of-the-art Gaussian mixture model system.
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    Open Access
    Wireless digital point to multipoint link utilizing wideband CDMA
    (1998) Ambekar, Sanjay; Braun, R M
    One of the proposed techniques for multiple access communications for the third generation is code division multiple access (CDMA). This has been shown to be a viable alternative to both TDMA and FDMA. While there does not appear to be a single multiple accessing technique that is superior to others in all situations, there are characteristics of CDMA that give it a distinct advantage over the other multiple access techniques. In CDMA each user is provided with an unique, orthogonal code. If these K codes are orthogonal and uncorrelated with each other, than K independent users can transmit at the same time and in the same radio bandwidth. The receivers decorrelate the information and regenerate the original transmitted signal. It must be noted that the term "Wideband CDMA" is used comparatively to the only existing commercial CDMA system, IS-95 which uses a spectral bandwidth of only 1.2288 MHz. This thesis examines and evaluates a good set of orthonormal codes (orthogonal and normalized to have equal power) and their application to providing accessing for a point to multipoint (PMP) stationary system. The correlation properties, design and constellation properties of these codes are investigated. The system model is then simulated using Systemview and then evaluated in terms of it's bit error rate, user capacity and Erlang with addition of users to the system.