This book is intended to give an overview of the major results achieved in the field of natural speech understanding inside ESPRIT Project P. 26, "Advanced Algorithms and Architectures for Speech and Image Processing". The project began as a Pilot Project in the early stage of Phase 1 of the ESPRIT Program launched by the Commission of the European Communities. After one year, in the light of the preliminary results that were obtained, it was confirmed for its 5-year duration. Even though the activities were carried out for both speech and image understand ing we preferred to focus the treatment of the book on the first area which crystallized mainly around the CSELT team, with the valuable cooperation of AEG, Thomson-CSF, and Politecnico di Torino. Due to the work of the five years of the project, the Consortium was able to develop an actual and complete understanding system that goes from a continuously spoken natural language sentence to its meaning and the consequent access to a database. When we started in 1983 we had some expertise in small-vocabulary syntax-driven connected-word speech recognition using Hidden Markov Models, in written natural lan guage understanding, and in hardware design mainly based upon bit-slice microprocessors.

"Ultra Low Bit-Rate Speech Coding" focuses on the specialized topic of speech coding at very low bit-rates of 1 Kbits/sec and less, particularly at the lower ends of this range, down to 100 bps. The authors set forth the fundamental results and trends that form the basis for such ultra low bit-rates to be viable and provide a comprehensive overview of various techniques and systems in literature to date, with particular attention to their work in the paradigm of unit-selection based segment quantization. The book is for research students, academic faculty and researchers, and industry practitioners in the areas of speech processing and speech coding.

Cognitive radio is 5-G technology, comes under IEEE 802.22 WRAN (Wireless Regional Area Network) standards. It is currently experiencing rapid growth due to its potential to solve many of the problems affecting present-day wireless systems. The foremost objective of "Introduction to Cognitive Radio Networks and Applications" is to educate wireless communication generalists about cognitive radio communication networks. Written by international leading experts in the field, this book caters to the needs of researchers in the field who require a basis in the principles and the challenges of cognitive radio networks.

When Speech and Audio Signal Processing published in 1999, it stood out from its competition in its breadth of coverage and its accessible, intutiont-based style. This book was aimed at individual students and engineers excited about the broad span of audio processing and curious to understand the available techniques. Since then, with the advent of the iPod in 2001, the field of digital audio and music has exploded, leading to a much greater interest in the technical aspects of audio processing. This Second Edition will update and revise the original book to augment it with new material describing both the enabling technologies of digital music distribution (most significantly the MP3) and a range of exciting new research areas in automatic music content processing (such as automatic transcription, music similarity, etc.) that have emerged in the past five years, driven by the digital music revolution. New chapter topics include: Psychoacoustic Audio Coding, describing MP3 and related audio coding schemes based on psychoacoustic masking of quantization noise Music Transcription, including automatically deriving notes, beats, and chords from music signals. Music Information Retrieval, primarily focusing on audio-based genre classification, artist/style identification, and similarity estimation. Audio Source Separation, including multi-microphone beamforming, blind source separation, and the perception-inspired techniques usually referred to as Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA).

Voice communications remains the most important facet of mobile radio services, which may be delivered over conventional fixed links, the Internet or wireless channels. This all-encompassing volume reports on the entire 50-year history of voice compression, on recent audio compression techniques and the protection as well as transmission of these signals in hostile wireless propagation environments. Audio and Voice Compression for Wireless and Wireline Communications, Second Edition is divided into four parts with Part I covering the basics, while Part II outlines the design of analysis-by-synthesis coding, including a 100-page chapter on virtually all existing standardised speech codecs. The focus of Part III is on wideband and audio coding as well as transmission. Finally, Part IV concludes the book with a range of very low rate encoding techniques, scanning a range of research-oriented topics. Fully updated and revised second edition of “Voice Compression and Communications”, expanded to cover Audio features Includes two new chapters, on narrowband and wideband AMR coding, and MPEG audio coding Addresses the new developments in the field of wideband speech and audio compression Covers compression, error resilience and error correction coding, as well as transmission aspects, including cutting-edge turbo transceivers Presents both the historic and current view of speech compression and communications. Covering fundamental concepts in a non-mathematical way before moving to detailed discussions of theoretical principles, future concepts and solutions to various specific wireless voice communication problems, this book will appeal to both advanced readers and those with a background knowledge of signal processing and communications.