Ning Bi

A robust speech recognition system embedded in CDMA cellular phone chipsets

PureVoice™ VR is a speech recognition system characterized by noise robustness performance, small footprint, and limited computing requirement. The system was embedded into Qualcomms Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) Mobile Station Modem (MSM) chipsets. The PureVoice™ VR engine enabled many manufactures of CDMA cellular phones to add highly accurate voice-activated dialing features to their handsets and hands-free car kits without significant increase in hardware cost. Users of these cellular phones could make calls by simply speaking names or phone numbers. The current embedded system has the capacity to recognize 100 speaker-dependent (SD) nametags and user defined commands, or 30 speaker-independent (SI) digits and commands in realtime. It also works in a hybrid mode, in which an input utterance can be either SD namtags or SI commands. PureVoice™ VR has successfully supported the voice-activated dialing function for millions of CDMA handsets sold in the world market.

On iris detection for mobile device applications

A novel transform called Gradient Direction Transform for fast detection of naturally curved items in digital images is described in this article. This general purpose image transform is defined to suit platforms with limited memory and processing footprints by utilizing only additions and simple shift and bitwise operations. We present this unique algorithmic approach in application to real world problems of iris detection. The new approach is tested on a large data set and the experiments show promising and superior performance compared to existing techniques.