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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study attempted to identify the incomplete manifestations of gene(s) producing cleft lip and/or cleft palate. An effort was made to determine how various oral-facial discrepancies, when considered as incomplete manifestations of clefting, might produce an obvious mode of inheritance of the clefting trait i n families with a history of cleft lip and/or cleft palate. Eleven families were studied, selection being made on the basis of the degree of relationship of the affected individuals to the proband. Oral and facial discrepancies including bifid uvula, mandibular lip pits, commissural lip pits, raphe of the upper lip, notching of the alveolus, asymmetrical nasal shape, congenitally missing and malformed maxillary central and lateral incisors, and excessive crowding of the teeth in the anterior segment of the maxillary arch were selected as possible incomplete manifestations of gene action. The results of this study demonstrated that when these manifestations were considered together with the cleft lip and/or cleft palate condition, no additional information on the manner of inheritance of the cleft lip and/or cleft palate trait was produced. Ocular and orbital measurements, which may also be used in determining possible mid-facial discrepancies, were compared between the relatives of families with a history of clefting and a control group of individuals ranging from four to 22 years of age. A total of 166 individuals were compared. Significant differences in the circumference-interorbital index, skeletal interorbital distance, and the canthal index were found. Since these significant differences in the ocular and orbital measurements could not be significantly related to the degree of relationship between affecteds (the test of heritability), they should be held with some reservation until a larger sample can be studied.

By identifying lip movements and characterizing their associations with speech sounds, the performance of speech recognition systems can be improved, particularly when operating in noisy environments. Various method have been studied by research group around the world to incorporate lip movements into speech recognition in recent years, however exactly how best to incorporate the additional visual information is still not known. This study aims to extend the knowledge of relationships between visual and speech information specifically using lip geometry information due to its robustness to head rotation and the fewer number of features required to represent movement. A new method has been developed to extract lip geometry information, to perform classification and to integrate visual and speech modalities. This thesis makes several contributions. First, this work presents a new method to extract lip geometry features using the combination of a skin colour filter, a border following algorithm and a convex hull approach. The proposed method was found to improve lip shape extraction performance compared to existing approaches. Lip geometry features including height, width, ratio, area, perimeter and various combinations of these features were evaluated to determine which performs best when representing speech in the visual domain. Second, a novel template matching technique able to adapt dynamic differences in the way words are uttered by speakers has been developed, which determines the best fit of an unseen feature signal to those stored in a database template. Third, following on evaluation of integration strategies, a novel method has been developed based on alternative decision fusion strategy, in which the outcome from the visual and speech modality is chosen by measuring the quality of audio based on kurtosis and skewness analysis and driven by white noise confusion. Finally, the performance of the new methods introduced in this work are evaluated using the CUAVE and LUNA-V data corpora under a range of different signal to noise ratio conditions using the NOISEX-92 dataset.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1958.

Thesis--Copenhagen. / "Translated from the Danish by Elisabeth Aagesen." "Dansk résumé": p. 253-256. Bibliography: p. 257-266.

Thesis--Copenhagen. / "Translated from the Danish by Elisabeth Aagesen." "Dansk résumé": p. 253-256. Bibliography: p. 257-266.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1958.

Thesis (M.S. in oral sciences)--University of Illinois at Chicago, 1999. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--Dalhousie University, 1996. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--Dalhousie University, 1996. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.