Life Sounds Extraction and Classification in Noisy Environment

International audienceThis paper deals with the sound event detection in a noisy environment and presents a first classification approach. Detection is the first step of our sound analysis system and is necessary to extract the significant sounds before ini-tiating the classification step. We present three original event detection algorithms. Among these algorithms, one is based on the wavelet and gives the best performances. We evaluate and compare their performance in a noisy en-vironment with the state of the art algorithms in the field. Then, we present a statistical study to obtain the acous-tical parameters necessary for the training and, the sound classification results. The detection algorithms and sound classification are applied to medical telemonitoring. We re-place video camera by microphones surveying life sounds in order to preserve patient's privacy

Sound Detection and Classification for Medical Telesurvey

International audienceMedical Telesurvey needs human operator assistance by smart information systems. This paper deals with the sound event detection in a noisy environment and presents a first classification approach. Detection is the first step of our sound analysis system and is necessary to extract the sig-nificant sounds before initiating the classification step. An algorithm based on the Wavelet Transform is evaluated in noisy environment. Then Wavelet based cepstral coeffi-cients are proposed and their results are compared with more classical parameters. Detection algorithm and sound classification methods are applied to medical telemonitor-ing. In our opinion, microphones surveying life sounds are better preserving patient privacy than video cameras

The Peculiar Phase Structure of Random Graph Bisection

The mincut graph bisection problem involves partitioning the n vertices of a graph into disjoint subsets, each containing exactly n/2 vertices, while minimizing the number of "cut" edges with an endpoint in each subset. When considered over sparse random graphs, the phase structure of the graph bisection problem displays certain familiar properties, but also some surprises. It is known that when the mean degree is below the critical value of 2 log 2, the cutsize is zero with high probability. We study how the minimum cutsize increases with mean degree above this critical threshold, finding a new analytical upper bound that improves considerably upon previous bounds. Combined with recent results on expander graphs, our bound suggests the unusual scenario that random graph bisection is replica symmetric up to and beyond the critical threshold, with a replica symmetry breaking transition possibly taking place above the threshold. An intriguing algorithmic consequence is that although the problem is NP-hard, we can find near-optimal cutsizes (whose ratio to the optimal value approaches 1 asymptotically) in polynomial time for typical instances near the phase transition.Comment: substantially revised section 2, changed figures 3, 4 and 6, made minor stylistic changes and added reference

Stellar archaeology with Gaia: the Galactic white dwarf population

Gaia will identify several 1e5 white dwarfs, most of which will be in the solar neighborhood at distances of a few hundred parsecs. Ground-based optical follow-up spectroscopy of this sample of stellar remnants is essential to unlock the enormous scientific potential it holds for our understanding of stellar evolution, and the Galactic formation history of both stars and planets.Comment: Summary of a talk at the 'Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade' conference in La Palma, March 2015, to be published in ASP Conference Series (editors Ian Skillen & Scott Trager

On Distant Speech Recognition for Home Automation

The official version of this draft is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16226-3_7International audienceIn the framework of Ambient Assisted Living, home automation may be a solution for helping elderly people living alone at home. This study is part of the Sweet-Home project which aims at developing a new home automation system based on voice command to improve support and well-being of people in loss of autonomy. The goal of the study is vocal order recognition with a focus on two aspects: distance speech recognition and sentence spotting. Several ASR techniques were evaluated on a realistic corpus acquired in a 4-room flat equipped with microphones set in the ceiling. This distant speech French corpus was recorded with 21 speakers who acted scenarios of activities of daily living. Techniques acting at the decoding stage, such as our novel approach called Driven Decoding Algorithm (DDA), gave better speech recognition results than the baseline and other approaches. This solution which uses the two best SNR channels and a priori knowledge (voice commands and distress sentences) has demonstrated an increase in recognition rate without introducing false alarms

A Dense Companion to the Short-Period Millisecond Pulsar Binary PSR J0636+5128

PSR J0636+5128 is a millisecond pulsar in one of the most compact pulsar binaries known, with a 96\,min orbital period. The pulsar mass function suggests a very low-mass companion, similar to that seen in so-called "black widow" binaries. Unlike in most of those, however, no radio eclipses by material driven off from the companion were seen leading to the possibility that the companion was a degenerate remnant of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf. We report the discovery of the optical counterpart of its companion in images taken with the Gemini North and Keck~I telescopes. The companion varies between $r=25$ and $r=23$ on the 96\,min orbital period of the binary, caused by irradiation from the pulsar's energetic wind. We modeled the multi-color lightcurve using parallax constraints from pulsar timing and determine a companion mass of $(1.71\pm0.23)\times 10^{-2}\,M_\odot$, a radius of $(7.6\pm1.4)\times 10^{-2}\,R_\odot$, and a mean density of $54\pm26\,{\rm g\,cm}^{-3}$, all for an assumed neutron star mass of $1.4\,M_\odot$. This makes the companion to PSR J0636+5128 one of the densest of the "black widow" systems. Modeling suggests that the composition is not predominantly hydrogen, perhaps due to an origin in an ultra-compact X-ray binary.Comment: 4 figures, 1 table. Submitted to ApJ on June 29, 2018. Accepted on July 20, 201