Sharif Digital Repository

Spectral Subtraction (SS), as a speech enhancement technique, originally designed for improving quality of speech signal judged by human listeners. it usually improve the quality and intelligibility of speech signals, while the speech recognition systems need compensation techniques capable of reducing the mismatch between the noisy speech features and the clean models. This paper proposes a novel approach for solving this problem by considering the SS and the speech recognizer as two interconnected components, sharing the common goal of improved speech recognition accuracy. The experimental evaluations on a real recorded database and the TIMIT database show that the proposed method can... 

This paper presents the SkipTree, a new balanced, distributed data structure for storing data with multidimensional keys in a peer-to-peer network. The SkipTree supports range queries as well as single point queries which are routed in O(log n) hops. SkipTree is fully decentralized with each node being connected to O(logn) other nodes. The memory usage for maintaining the links at each node is O(log n log log n) on average and O(log2 n) in the worst case. Load balance is also guaranteed to be within a constant factor. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005  

This paper introduces a large-scale, validated database for Persian called Sharif Emotional Speech Database (ShEMO). The database includes 3000 semi-natural utterances, equivalent to 3 h and 25 min of speech data extracted from online radio plays. The ShEMO covers speech samples of 87 native-Persian speakers for five basic emotions including anger, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, as well as neutral state. Twelve annotators label the underlying emotional state of utterances and majority voting is used to decide on the final labels. According to the kappa measure, the inter-annotator agreement is 64% which is interpreted as “substantial agreement”. We also present benchmark results... 

This paper introduces a large-scale, validated database for Persian called Sharif Emotional Speech Database (ShEMO). The database includes 3000 semi-natural utterances, equivalent to 3 h and 25 min of speech data extracted from online radio plays. The ShEMO covers speech samples of 87 native-Persian speakers for five basic emotions including anger, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, as well as neutral state. Twelve annotators label the underlying emotional state of utterances and majority voting is used to decide on the final labels. According to the kappa measure, the inter-annotator agreement is 64% which is interpreted as “substantial agreement”. We also present benchmark results... 

With increasing use of computers in everyday life, improved communication between machines and human is needed. To make a right communication and understand a humankind face which is made in a graphical environment, implementing the audio and visual projects like lip reading, audio and visual speech recognition and lip making are needed. Lack of a complete audio and visual database for this application in Farsi language made us provide a new complete Farsi database for this project that is called SFAVD. It is a unique audio and visual database which in addition to considering Farsi conceptual and speech structure, it considers influence of speech on lip changes. This database is created for... 

Supervised speech emotion recognition requires a large number of labeled samples that limit its use in practice. Due to easy access to unlabeled samples, a new semi-supervised method based on auto-encoders is proposed in this paper for speech emotion recognition. The proposed method performed the classification operation by extracting the information contained in unlabeled samples and combining it with the information in labeled samples. In addition, it employed maximum mean discrepancy cost function to reduce the distribution difference when the labeled and unlabeled samples were gathered from different datasets. Experimental results obtained on different emotional speech datasets... 

The growth of database application usage requires DataBase Management Systems (DBMS) that are accessible, reliable, and dependable. One approach to handle these requirements is replication mechanism. Replication mechanism can be divided into various categories. Some related works consider two categories for replication mechanisms: heterogeneous and homogenous however majority of them classify them in three groups: physical, trigger-based and log based schema. Log-based replication mechanisms are the most widely used category among DBMS vendors. Adapting such approach for heterogeneous systems is a complex task, because of lack of log understanding in the other end. Semantic technologies... 

In this paper, the performance of traditional variance-based method for detection of epileptic seizures in EEG signals are compared with various methods based on nonlinear time series analysis, entropies, logistic regression, discrete wavelet transform and time frequency distributions. We noted that variance-based method in compare to the mentioned methods had the best result (100%) applied on the same database. © 2006 IEEE  

Database management systems (DBMS) are one of cloud services with major applications in industry and business. In the use of such services, since the cloud service provider cannot be entrusted with the plain data, the databases are typically encrypted prior to outsourcing. One of the most challenging issues in designing these services is supporting SQL join queries on the encrypted database. The multi-adjustable join scheme (M-Adjoin) [Khazaei-Rafiee 2020], an extension of Adjoin [Popa-Zeldovich 2012 and Mironov-Segev-Shahaf 2017], is a symmetric-key primitive that supports the join queries for a list of column labels on an encrypted database. In previous works, the following security... 

Database management systems (DBMS) are one of cloud services with major applications in industry and business. In the use of such services, since the cloud service provider cannot be entrusted with the plain data, the databases are typically encrypted prior to outsourcing. One of the most challenging issues in designing these services is supporting SQL join queries on the encrypted database. The multi-adjustable join scheme (M-Adjoin) [Khazaei-Rafiee 2020], an extension of Adjoin [Popa-Zeldovich 2012 and Mironov-Segev-Shahaf 2017], is a symmetric-key primitive that supports the join queries for a list of column labels on an encrypted database. In previous works, the following security... 

A major challenge organizations face when hosting or moving their data to the Cloud is how to support complex queries over outsourced data while preserving their confidentiality. In principle, encryption-based systems can support querying encrypted data, but their high complexity has severely limited their practical use. In this paper, we propose an efficient yet secure secret sharing-based approach for outsourcing relational data to honest-but-curious data servers. The problem with using secret sharing in a data outsourcing scenario is how to efficiently search within randomly generated shares. We present multiple partitioning methods that enable clients to efficiently search among shared... 

Eslami and Talebi (2011) [25] proposed an untraceable electronic cash scheme and claimed that their scheme protects the anonymity of customers, detects the identity of double spenders and provides the date attachability of coins to manage the bank database. In this paper, illustrating Eslami and Talebi's scheme, as one of the latest untraceable electronic cash schemes, and showing its weaknesses (in fulfilling the properties of perceptibility of double spender, unforgeability and date attainability of coins) and its faults (related to exchange protocol), we propose a new untraceable electronic cash scheme which is immune to the weaknesses of the former. Our scheme contains anonymity,... 

The main concern of steganography (image hiding) methods is to embed a secret image into a host image in such a way that it causes minimum distortion to the host; to make it possible to extract a version of secret image from the host in such a way that the extracted version of secret image be as similar as possible to its original version (this should be possible even after usual attacks on the host image), and to provide ways of embedding secret images with larger size into a given host image. In this paper we propose a method that covers all above mentioned concerns by suggesting the idea of finding from an image data base, the most suitable host for a given secret image. In our method,... 

Trip attraction has long been considered as a major element in trip demand estimation. Many models have been presented for this purpose. Models use socio-economic variables in order to predict trip attraction. Neural networks and neuro-fuzzy systems are suitable approaches to establish proper models. This paper develops neural and fuzzy-neural models to predict school trip attraction. Neural networks are organized in different architectures and the results have been compared in order to determine the best fitting one. Then an adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is used to estimate number of school trip attraction. Different models were trained, validated and tested with a real... 

It is well known that the use of formal methods in the software development process results in a high-quality software product. However, since formal approaches are just reasoning mechanisms, they do not offer defined ordered steps and guidance for moving between them. Refinement is a technique for moving between specifications but it bears very little resemblance to the real process of software design. An automatic translator from a specification language to an executable code would be highly useful in maximizing the benefits of formal methods. In the domain of database applications, we propose a rule-based algorithm to translate software requirements written in Z specifications to... 

In this paper, we have proposed an efficient and effective nonlinear feature domain noise suppression algorithm, motivated by the minimum mean square error (MMSE) optimization criterion. A Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network in the log spectral domain has been employed to minimize the difference between noisy and clean speech. By using this method, as a pre-processing stage of a speech recognition system, the recognition rate in noisy environments has been improved. We extended the application ofthe system to different environments with different noises without retraining HMMmodel. We trained the feature extraction stage with a small portion of noisy data which was created by... 

Detection and classification of ventricular complexes from the ECG is of considerable importance in Holter and critical care patient monitoring, being essential for the timely diagnosis of dangerous heart conditions. Accurate detection of premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) is particularly important in relation to life-threatening arrhythmias. In this paper, we introduce a model-based dynamic algorithm for tracking the ECG characteristic waveforms using an extended Kalman filter. The algorithm can work on single or multiple leads. A "polargram"--a polar representation of the signal--is introduced, which is constructed using the Bayesian estimations of the state variables. The polargram... 

XML has emerged as a common standard for data exchange over the World Wide Web. One way to manage XML data is to use the power of relational databases for storing and querying them. So the hierarchical XML data should be mapped into flat relational structure. In this paper we propose an algorithm which maps DTD to relational schema and as well as content and structure it preserves the functional dependencies during the mapping process in order to produce relations with less redundancy. This is done by categorizing functional dependencies and introducing four rules to be applied to the relations created by the hybrid inlining algorithm according to each category. These rules will reduce... 

A dense monitoring network is vital for the reliable assessment of PM10 in different parts of an urban area. In this study, a new idea is employed for the re-construction of the 20 shut-down PM10 monitoring stations of Berlin. It endeavours to find the non-linear relationship between the hourly PM10 concentration of both the still operating and the shut-down PM10 monitoring stations by using a fuzzy modelling technique, called modified active learning method (MALM). In addition, the simulations were performed by using not only raw PM10 databases but also log-transformed PM10 databases for skewness reduction. According to the results of hourly PM10 simulation (root mean square error about... 

Facial Action Coding System consists of 44 action units (AUs) and more than 7000 combinations. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) classifier has been used successfully to recognize facial action units (AUs) and expressions due to its ability to deal with AU dynamics. However, a separate HMM is necessary for each single AU and each AU combination. Since combinations of AU numbering in thousands, a more efficient method will be needed. In this paper an accurate real-time sequence-based system for representation and recognition of facial AUs is presented. Our system has the following characteristics: 1) employing a mixture of HMMs and neural network, we develop a novel accurate classifier, which can...