M. Margaret Withgott

MACH1: nonuniform time-scale modification of speech

We propose a new approach to nonuniform time compression, called Mach1, designed to mimic the natural timing of fast speech. At identical overall compression rates, listener comprehension for Mach1-compressed speech increased between 5 and 31 percentage points over that for linearly compressed speech, and the response times dropped by 15%. For rates between 2.5 and 4.2 times real time, there was no significant comprehension loss with increasing Mach1 compression rates. In A-B preference tests, Mach1-compressed speech was chosen 95% of the time. This paper describes the Mach1 technique and our listener-test results.

Spanning the gap between motion estimation and morphing

Motion estimation is an important and well-studied method for determining correspondences between images in video processing. In contrast with motion estimation, the use of image warping on image sequences is a new and developing field. To provide image warping effects, morphing algorithms rely on mesh points to align two images. Presently, the selection of these mesh points is a labor-intensive, manual process. This paper attempts to automate the selection of mesh points for morphing by recognizing this problem as one of determining image correspondences. Applications include video compression, animation sequence generation and high-quality time dilation of video.<<ETX>>