Adam Kupryjanow

UPDRS Tests for Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease Employing Virtual-Touchpad

This paper presents a new approach to diagnosing Parkinsons disease. The progression of the disease can be measured by the UPDRS (Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale) scale which is used to evaluate behavioral and motor symptoms of Parkinsons disease. Hitherto the evaluation of the advancement of the disease in the UPDRS scale is made by a specialist through medical observation. The authors suggest a partial automation of this process, i.e. using a multimodal interface called Virtual-Touchpad (VTP) may support the medical diagnosis. The VTP is based on processing the image of hand acquired by a camera. Therefore, a patient is not constrained by any equipment. Two types of UPDRS tests that can be supported by VTP are presented in the paper. In the Finger Taps test the patient taps thumb with the index finger in rapid succession. The Rapid Alternating Movement of Hands test consists in pronation-supination movements of hands. VTP captures the image of the patients hand while performing the test and, based on this image, it assigns hand gesture to the given class. The hand movement velocity is measured and used in the diagnostic process.

Report of the ISMIS 2011 contest: music information retrieval

This report presents an overview of the data mining contest organized in conjunction with the 19th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS 2011), in days between Jan 10 and Mar 21, 2011, on TunedIT competition platform. The contest consisted of two independent tasks, both related to music information retrieval: recognition of music genres and recognition of instruments, for a given music sample represented by a number of pre-extracted features. In this report, we describe aim of the contest, tasks formulation, procedures of data generation and parametrization, as well as final results of the competition.

Methods of Improving Speech Intelligibility for Listeners with Hearing Resolution Deficit

AbstractMethods developed for real-time time scale modification (TSM) of speech signal are presented. They are based on the non-uniform, speech rate depended SOLA algorithm (Synchronous Overlap and Add). Influence of the proposed method on the intelligibility of speech was investigated for two separate groups of listeners, i.e. hearing impaired children and elderly listeners. It was shown that for the speech with average rate equal to or higher than 6.48 vowels/s, all of the proposed methods have statistically significant impact on the improvement of speech intelligibility for hearing impaired children with reduced hearing resolution and one of the proposed methods significantly improves comprehension of speech in the group of elderly listeners with reduced hearing resolution.Virtual slideshttp://www.diagnosticpathology.diagnomx.eu/vs/2065486371761991

Reduction of parasitic pitch variations in archival musical recordings

A new method for reducing parasitic pitch variations in archival audio recordings is presented. The method is intended for analyzing movie soundtracks recorded in optical films. It utilizes image processing for calculating and reducing effects of tape shrinkage being one of the main reasons for parasitic pitch variations in audio accompanying moving images. As long as the film tape characteristics are known the new method can be easily tuned to analyze archival recordings. The new method is also compared to some previous approaches to pitch variation correction.

Multimodal human-computer interfaces based on advanced video and audio analysis

Multimodal interfaces development history is reviewed briefly in the introduction. Examples of applications of multimodal interfaces to education software and for the disabled people are presented, including interactive electronic whiteboard based on video image analysis, application for controlling computers with mouth gestures and the audio interface for speech stretching for hearing impaired and stuttering people. The Smart Pen providing a tool for supporting therapy of developmental dyslexia is presented and results achieved with its application are discussed. The eye-gaze tracking system named “Cyber-Eye” developed at the Multimedia Systems Department employed to many kinds of experiments is presented including analysis of visual activity of patients remaining in vegetative state and their awareness evaluation. The scent emitting multimodal computer interface provides an important supplement of the polysensoric stimulation process, playing an essential role in education and therapy of children with certain developmental disorders. A new approach to diagnosing Parkinsons disease is shown. The progression of the disease can be measured employing the UPDRS (Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale) scale which is used to evaluate motor and behavioral symptoms of Parkinsons disease, based on the multimodal interface called Virtual-Touchpad (VTP) used for supporting medical diagnosis. The paper is concluded with some general remarks concerning the role of multimodal computer interfaces applied to learning, therapy and everyday usage of computerized devices.

Online Sound Restoration for Digital Library Applications

In this paper, a sound restoration system conceived and engineered at the Multimedia Systems Department of the Gdansk University of Technology is discussed with regard to the principles of its design, features of operation and the achieved results. The system has been designed so that: no special sound restoration software is needed to perform audio restoration; no skills in digital signal processing are required from the user; the process of online restoration employs automatic reduction of noise, wow and impulse distortions.

A Method of Real-Time Non-uniform Speech Stretching

Developed method of real-time non-uniform speech stretching is presented. The proposed solution is based on the well-known SOLA algorithm (Synchronous Overlap and Add). Non-uniform time-scale modification is achieved by the adjustment of time scaling factor values in accordance with the signal content. Dependently on the speech unit (vowels/consonants), instantaneous rate of speech (ROS), and speech signal presence, values of the scaling factor are selected. This provides as low as possible difference in the duration of the input and output signal and high naturalness and quality of the modified speech. In the experimental part of the paper accuracy of the proposed ROS estimator is examined. Quality of the speech stretched using the proposed method is assessed in the subjective tests.

Online sound restoration system for digital library applications

Audio signal processing algorithms were introduced to the new online non-commercial service for audio restoration intended to enhance the content of digitized audio repositories. Missing or distorted audio samples are predicted using neural networks and a specific implementation of the Jannsen interpolation method based on the autoregressive model (AR) combined with the iterative restoring of missing signal samples. Since the distortion prediction and compensations algorithms are computationally complex, an implementation which uses parallel computing has been proposed. Many archival recordings are at the same time clipped and affected by wideband noise. To restore those recordings, the algorithm based on the concatenation of signal clipping reduction and spectral expansion was proposed. The clipping reduction algorithm uses an intelligent interpolation to replace distorted samples with the predicted ones based on learning algorithms. Next, spectral expansion is performed in order to reduce the overall level of noise. The online service has been extended with some copyright protection mechanisms. Immunity of watermarks to the sound restoration is discussed with regards to low-level music feature vectors embedded as watermarks. Then, algorithmic issues pertaining watermarking techniques are briefly recalled. The architecture of the designed system is presented.

Knowledge representation of motor activity of patients with Parkinson's disease

An approach to the knowledge representation extraction from biomedical signals analysis concerning motor activity of Parkinson disease patients is proposed in this paper. This is done utilizing accelerometers attached to their body as well as exploiting video image of their hand movements. Experiments are carried out employing artificial neural networks and support vector machine to the recognition of characteristic motor activity disorders in patients. Obtained results indicate that it is possible to interpret some selected patient’s body movements with a sufficiently high effectiveness.

Further Developments of the Online Sound Restoration System for Digital Library Applications

New signal processing algorithms were introduced to the online service for audio restoration available at the web address: www.youarchive.net. Missing or distorted audio samples are estimated using a specific implementation of the Jannsen interpolation method. The algorithm is based on the autoregressive model (AR) combined with the iterative complementation of signal samples. Since the interpolation algorithm is computationally complex, an implementation which uses parallel computing has been proposed. Many archival and homemade recordings are at the same time clipped and contain wideband noise. To restore those recordings, the algorithm based on the concatenation of signal clipping reduction and spectral expansion was proposed. The clipping reduction algorithm uses interpolation to replace distorted samples with the estimated ones. Next, spectral expansion is performed in order to reduce the overall level of noise. The online service has been extended also with some copyright protection mechanisms. Certain issues related to the audio copyright problem are discussed with regards to low-level music feature vectors embedded as watermarks. Then, algorithmic issues pertaining watermarking techniques are briefly recalled. The architecture of the designed system along with the employed workflow for embedding and extracting the watermark are described. The implementation phase is presented and the experimental results are reported. The chapter is concluded with a presentation of experimental results of application of described algorithmic extensions to the online sound restoration service.