The inner hair cell stereocilia of the guinea pig cochlea was examined under a scanning electron microscope (SEM) after loud tone exposure onto the ear drum of the animal. Before and after guinea pigs were exposed to intensive and continuous tone such as 106 dB SPL in intensity, the functioning of the cochlea was monitored by N1-N2 audiograms. The structural damage of the stereocilia of inner hair cells (IHCs) and outer hair cells (OHCs) was examined using the SEM in x 1500 magnification. The comparison between the functional change of the cochlea and the structural damage of the IHC stereocilia is done by means of photographic observation. It can be shown that the functional change might be related to the structural damage of the IHC stereocilia after intensive acoustic trauma.

This paper addresses issues encountered in measuring the general, 6-degree-of-freedom motion of a human head, A complete mathematical description for measuring the head motion using the six-accelerometer configured bite-bar is suggested, The description shows that the six-axis vibration cannot be completely obtained without the roll, pitch and yaw angular velocity components, A new method of estimating the three orthogonal (roll, pitch and yaw) angular velocities from the six acceleration measurements is introduced. The estimated angular velocities are shown to enable further quantitative error analysis in measuring the translational and angular accelerations at the head. To make this point clear, experimental results are also illustrated in this paper. They show that when the effects of angular velocities are neglected in the head vibration measurement the maximum percentage errors were observed to be more than $3 \%$ for the angular acceleration of the head and to be close to $5 \%$ for its translational acceleration, respectively. It means that the inclusion of all the angular velocity dependent acceleration components gives more accurate measurement of the head vibration.

A novel scheme to measure the speaker information in speech signal is proposed. We develope the theory of quantitative measurement of the speaker characteristics in the information theoretic point of view, and connect it to the classification error rate. Homomorphic analysis based features, such as mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), linear prediction cepstral coefficient (LPCC), and linear frequency cepstral coefficient (LFCC) are studied to measure speaker specific information contained in those feature sets by computing mutual information. Theories and experimental results provide us quantitative measure of speaker information in speech signal.

Environmental mismatch has been one of important issues discussed in matched field processing for underwater source detection problem. To overcome this mismatch many algorithms professing robustness have been suggested. Feature extraction method (FEM) [Seong and Byun, IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 27(3), 642-652 (2002)] is one of robust matched field processing algorithms, which is based on the eigenvector estimation. Excluding eigenvectors of replica covariance matrix corresponding to large eigenvalues and forming an incoherent subspace of the replica field, the processor is formulated similarly to MUSIC algorithm. In this paper, by using the ocean experimental data, processing results of FEM and MVDR with white noise constraint (WNC) are presented for two levels of multi-tone source. Analysis of eigen-space of CSDM and FEM performance are also presented.

This study was designed to suggest an assessment tool for analyzing the characteristics of Korean phonetic contrast intelligibility among dysarthric individuals. The intelligibility deficit factors of phonetic contrast in Korean dysarthric patients were analyzed through stepwise regression analysis. The 19 acoustic-phonetic contrasts proposed by Kent et al. (1999) have been claimed to be useful for clinical assessment and research on dysarthria. However, the test cannot be directly applied to Korean patients due to linguistic differences between English and Korean. Thus, it is necessary to devise a Korean word intelligibility test that reflects the distinct characteristics of the Korean language. To identify the speech error characteristics of a Korean dysarthric group, a Korean word list was audio-recorded by 3 spastic, 4 flaccid, and 5 mixed type of dysarthric patients. The word list consisted of monosyllabic consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) real word pairs. Stimulus words included 41 phonemic contrast pairs and six triplets. The results showed that the percentage of errors in final position contrast was higher than in any other position. Unlike the results of previous studies, the initial-position contrasts were crucial in predicting the overall intelligibility among Korean patients.

Ryu et al. proposed a multiple target angle-tracking algorithm without a data association problem using angular innovations. This algorithm, however, needs the computational loads in proportion to the square number of sensors regardless of the number of targets, because it uses a nonlinear equation between the signal subspace and angular innovation. In this Paper, we proposed an efficient algorithm for the multiple target angle-tracking using angular innovations. The proposed algorithm extracts the angular innovations from noise subspace. Also, it is demonstrated by computer simulations dealing with the tracking of crossing targets. The simulation results show that the computational loads of the proposed algorithm are $80\%$ and $60\%$ of those of Ryu's algorithm for 3 targets and 6 targets without degrading the performance of the target tracking.