Speech intelligibility measured with shortened versions of Callsign Acquisition Test (CAT)

The Callsign Acquisition Test (CAT) is a new speech intelligibility test developed by the Human Research and Engineering Directorate of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL-HRED). CAT uses the phonetic alphabet and digit stimuli combined together to form 126 test items.

Objective

The purpose of this study was to assess the reliability of data collected with shorter versions of CAT.

Design

A total of 5 shorter versions of the original list (CAT-120, CAT-60, CAT-40, CAT-30, and CAT-24) were formed and evaluated using 19 participants. Each of the subsets of CAT was presented in pink noise at signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of −6 dB and −9 dB.

Results

Results showed that shortened CAT lists have the capability of providing the same predictive power as the full CAT with good test-retest reliability.

Conclusions

Under the experimental conditions of this study, any of the shorter versions of the CAT can be utilized in place of the full version to reduce testing times with no effect on predictive power.     

New GOES imager algorithms for cloud and active fire detection and fire radiative power assessment across North, South and Central America

Vegetation fires are a key global terrestrial disturbance factor and a major source of atmospheric trace gases and aerosols. Therefore, many earth-system science and operational monitoring applications require access to repetitive, frequent and well-characterized information on fire emissions source strengths. Geostationary imagers offer important temporal advantages when studying rapidly changing phenomena such as vegetation fires. Here we present a new algorithm for detecting and characterising active fires burning within the imager footprints of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), including consideration of cloud-cover and calculation of fire radiative power (FRP), a metric shown to be strongly related to fuel consumption and smoke emission rates. The approach is based on a set of algorithms now delivering near real time (NRT) operational FRP products from the Meteosat Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infra-Red Imager (SEVIRI) imager (available from http://landsaf.meteo.pt/), and the GOES processing chain presented here is designed to deliver a compatible fire product to complete geostationary coverage of the Western hemisphere. Results from the two GOES imagers are intercompared, and are independently verified against the well regarded MODIS cloud mask and active fire products. We find that the detection of cloud and active fires from GOES matches that of MODIS very well for fire pixels having FRP > 30 MW, when the GOES omission error falls to less than 10%. The FRP of fire clusters detected near simultaneously by both GOES and MODIS have a bias of only 22 MW, and a similar bias is found when comparing near-simultaneous GOES East and GOES West FRP observations. However, many fire pixels having FRP < 30 MW remain undetected by GOES, probably unavoidably since it has a much coarser spatial resolution than MODIS. Adjustment using data from the less frequent but more accurate views obtained from high spatial resolution polar orbiting imagers could be used to bias correct regional FRP totals. Temporal integration of the GOES FRP record indicates that during the summer months, biomass burning combusts thousands of millions of tonnes of fuel daily across the Americas. Comparison of these results to those of the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFEDv2) indicate strong linear relationships (r² > 0.9), suggesting that the timely FRP data available from a GOES real-time data feed is likely to be a suitable fire emissions source strength term for inclusion in schemes aiming to forecast the concentrations of atmospheric constituents affected by biomass burning.     

仿真软件在高频电路实验教学中的应用

Multisim10是原理电路设计、电路功能测试的仿真软件.该文利用Multisim10对高频电路中的功率放大器和正弦波振荡器进行了分析,其结果符合理论推导.将Multisim10引入到高频实验教学中,不但能提高学生的学习兴趣,帮助学生更好理解原理电路以及相关特性的测试方法,而且还能提高学生的电路设计能力.     

面向芯片实现的LTE Turbo码参数优化设计

该文分析了LTE系统中Turbo码的译码,并针对定点运算的特点进行了改进。通过大量的仿真确定了定点LOG-MAP译码算法的关键参数。量化比特数和AWGN中GAIN值,外在(extrinsic)信息因子以及定点化、归一化、溢出处理等操作,这些处理使得该译码算法在译码性能上接近浮点LOG-MAP译码算法,对于Turbo译码在硬件上的实现具有一定的参考价值。     

Improving content visibility for high‐ambient‐illumination viewable display and energy‐saving display

Abstract— Nowadays, low‐contrast viewing of LC displays (LCDs) occurs very often, which includes the viewing of mobile LCDs at high ambient illumination and the viewing of LCDs at low‐power mode. These cases result in low‐content visibility and low contrast, leading to an unpleasant viewing experience. In this paper, a technique to improve the perceived contrast and visibility of images at low‐contrast viewing conditions is proposed. The proposed approach enhances image brightness with content and ambient adaptive image brightening and highlights visual parts and boundaries with non‐photorealistic rendering. The proposed technique enables longer battery life for mobile LC devices and makes mobile LC devices viewable at high ambient illumination. It also enables TVs with extreme low‐power consumption and smart‐grid responsive TVs.     

Adaptive predistortion using threshold decomposition‐based piecewise linear modeling

A new adaptive predistortion approach for nonlinear power amplifiers based on the piecewise linear (PWL) approximation of nonlinear functions is presented. The PWL model is obtained using threshold decomposition (TD) of the input‐output characteristics. The TD based PWL model is used to develop a baseband predistorter using both the direct and the indirect learning architectures. The proposed predistorter is proved to provide a better performance in suppressing nonlinear distortion than conventional polynomial predistorters and a reduced hardware complexity as compared to lookup table (LUT) approach. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2011.     

Nonlinear L2-by-3 transform for PAPR reduction in OFDM systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), the multicarrier modulation technique with high bandwidth efficiency and robustness against multipath fading, is used in several high-speed broadband communication systems including digital video broadcasting (DVB), digital audio broadcasting (DAB), asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), wireless local area network (WLAN IEEE 802.11a,g), high performance radio local area network (HIPERLAN 2), and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX IEEE 802.16). However, the transmit signal in OFDM system has a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), one of the major drawbacks of multicarrier transmission, and therefore high dynamic range is required in both the digital to analog converter (DAC) and the power amplifier (PA) for proper operation. Otherwise, the nonlinearities of PA cause out-of-band distortion and increase in bit error rate (BER). Therefore, the reduction in PAPR in OFDM system is desirable in order to obtain power efficiency and increase BER performance. In this paper, a new parametric PAPR reduction technique, L₂-by-3 transform from sliding norm transform (SNT) family is proposed. Based on its parameter, a significant PAPR reduction is obtained. This paper presents the analysis of power saving and computational complexity of the proposed method L₂-by-3 and comparison to two other methods; selected mapping and partial transmit sequence.     

医疗监护系统中WSN节点的软件设计

提出医疗监护系统中无线传感器网络节点软件设计的一些关键技术,包括基于TinyOs系统的nesC语言开发技术、特殊应用场合的MAC层设计技术,以及节点的节能技术。通过实验手段,验证了采用该软件设计技术的医疗监护系统节点具有较高的数据交互可靠性和低功耗特性。     

包含SVC和非线性负荷的电力系统耗散实现与控制

采用Hamilton函数方法研究了包含静止无功补偿器(SVC)和非线性负荷的电力系统的反馈控制问题. 首先建立了系统的非线性微分代数方程模型, 通过预置状态反馈完成了耗散Hamilton实现. 然后利用该耗散实现结构,通过阻尼注入方式设计了基于能量的SVC非线性控制器. 本文所设计的控制器结构简单, 物理意义明确. 仿真结果表明该控制器能有效提高电力系统的暂态稳定性.     

磁能驱动微型泵的性能研究

在电磁驱动原理的基础上,设计并研制了一种磁能驱动的微型泵。微型泵的整体尺寸约为Φ11mm×4mm,腔室半径为5mm,深2mm。利用方差分析方法对实验数据进行了检验,验证了前期微型泵研究中获得的性能参数的正确性。为了进一步缩小微型泵体积、简化控制方式和外围电路,针对微型泵的能源部分,开展了单双电源的对比实验研究,并获得了较好的实验结果。