ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Creators: Chakrabarti, Chaitali
The expression and perception of emotions varies across speakers and cultures, thus, determining features and classification methods that generalize well to different conditions is strongly desired. A latent topic models-based method is proposed to learn supra-segmental features from low-level acoustic descriptors. The derived features outperform state-of-the-art approaches over multiple databases. Cross-corpus studies are conducted to determine the ability of these features to generalize well across different databases. The proposed method is also applied to derive features from facial expressions; a multi-modal fusion overcomes the deficiencies of a speech only approach and further improves the recognition performance.
Besides affecting the acoustic properties of speech, emotions have a strong influence over speech articulation kinematics. A learning approach, which constrains a classifier trained over acoustic descriptors, to also model articulatory data is proposed here. This method requires articulatory information only during the training stage, thus overcoming the challenges inherent to large-scale data collection, while simultaneously exploiting the correlations between articulation kinematics and acoustic descriptors to improve the accuracy of emotion recognition systems.
Identifying context from ambient sounds in a lifelogging scenario requires feature extraction, segmentation and annotation techniques capable of efficiently handling long duration audio recordings; a complete framework for such applications is presented. The performance is evaluated on real world data and accompanied by a prototypical Android-based user interface.
The proposed methods are also assessed in terms of computation and implementation complexity. Software and field programmable gate array based implementations are considered for emotion recognition, while virtual platforms are used to model the complexities of lifelogging. The derived metrics are used to determine the feasibility of these methods for applications requiring real-time capabilities and low power consumption.
dynamic state estimation problem whose complexity is intensified
under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or high clutter conditions.
This is important, for example, when tracking
multiple, closely spaced targets moving in the same direction such as a
convoy of low observable vehicles moving through a forest or multiple
targets moving in a crisscross pattern. The SNR in
these applications is usually low as the reflected signals from
the targets are weak or the noise level is very high.
An effective approach for detecting and tracking a single target
under low SNR conditions is the track-before-detect filter (TBDF)
that uses unthresholded measurements. However, the TBDF has only been used to
track a small fixed number of targets at low SNR.
This work proposes a new multiple target TBDF approach to track a
dynamically varying number of targets under the recursive Bayesian framework.
For a given maximum number of
targets, the state estimates are obtained by estimating the joint
multiple target posterior probability density function under all possible
target
existence combinations. The estimation of the corresponding target existence
combination probabilities and the target existence probabilities are also
derived. A feasible sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) based implementation
algorithm is proposed. The approximation accuracy of the SMC
method with a reduced number of particles is improved by an efficient
proposal density function that partitions the multiple target space into a
single target space.
The proposed multiple target TBDF method is extended to track targets in sea
clutter using highly time-varying radar measurements. A generalized
likelihood function for closely spaced multiple targets in compound Gaussian
sea clutter is derived together with the maximum likelihood estimate of
the model parameters using an iterative fixed point algorithm.
The TBDF performance is improved by proposing a computationally feasible
method to estimate the space-time covariance matrix of rapidly-varying sea
clutter. The method applies the Kronecker product approximation to the
covariance matrix and uses particle filtering to solve the resulting dynamic
state space model formulation.