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Environmental sounds: acquisition, analysis, and representation

The dissertation presents the design and development of a systematic
signal analysis and representation framework beyond short-time Fourier
power spectrum for sounds, in particular environmental sounds. This
framework is consistent with the underlying assumptions of the
analysis method and its elements are correlated with human
perception. The sound signal has to conform to certain conditions for
its power spectrum to have a physical and perceptual meaning. We
contend that very few environmental sounds readily meet these criteria
and argue that the quantities that are traditionally used to describe
sounds need to be repurposed and, if necessary, redefined to represent
sounds by non-Fourier means. We propose a perceptuo-analytic
organization of sounds so that any environmental sound can be analyzed
based on its signal characteristics and perception.

We present environmental sound acquisition in the context of
collection and annotation of a database for the footstep sounds, a
common environmental sound, and show that it can be represented by
these unconventional means and further analyzed to produce
descriptions which are obscured with the traditional analysis. We
present a novel application of extracting gait characteristics from
the footstep sounds which is enabled by the proposed framework.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/53953
Date21 September 2015
CreatorsAltaf, Muhammad Umair Bin
ContributorsJuang, Biing-Hwang (Fred)
PublisherGeorgia Institute of Technology
Source SetsGeorgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation
Formatapplication/pdf

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