Speech synthesisSpeech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition. Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database.
NoiseNoise is unwanted sound considered unpleasant, loud, or disruptive to hearing. From a physics standpoint, there is no distinction between noise and desired sound, as both are vibrations through a medium, such as air or water. The difference arises when the brain receives and perceives a sound. Acoustic noise is any sound in the acoustic domain, either deliberate (e.g., music or speech) or unintended. In contrast, noise in electronics may not be audible to the human ear and may require instruments for detection.
Walsh functionIn mathematics, more specifically in harmonic analysis, Walsh functions form a complete orthogonal set of functions that can be used to represent any discrete function—just like trigonometric functions can be used to represent any continuous function in Fourier analysis. They can thus be viewed as a discrete, digital counterpart of the continuous, analog system of trigonometric functions on the unit interval. But unlike the sine and cosine functions, which are continuous, Walsh functions are piecewise constant.
Hadamard matrixIn mathematics, a Hadamard matrix, named after the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard, is a square matrix whose entries are either +1 or −1 and whose rows are mutually orthogonal. In geometric terms, this means that each pair of rows in a Hadamard matrix represents two perpendicular vectors, while in combinatorial terms, it means that each pair of rows has matching entries in exactly half of their columns and mismatched entries in the remaining columns.
Cuckoo hashingCuckoo hashing is a scheme in computer programming for resolving hash collisions of values of hash functions in a table, with worst-case constant lookup time. The name derives from the behavior of some species of cuckoo, where the cuckoo chick pushes the other eggs or young out of the nest when it hatches in a variation of the behavior referred to as brood parasitism; analogously, inserting a new key into a cuckoo hashing table may push an older key to a different location in the table.
Bloom filterA Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not – in other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". Elements can be added to the set, but not removed (though this can be addressed with the counting Bloom filter variant); the more items added, the larger the probability of false positives.
Bilinear transformThe bilinear transform (also known as Tustin's method, after Arnold Tustin) is used in digital signal processing and discrete-time control theory to transform continuous-time system representations to discrete-time and vice versa. The bilinear transform is a special case of a conformal mapping (namely, a Möbius transformation), often used to convert a transfer function of a linear, time-invariant (LTI) filter in the continuous-time domain (often called an analog filter) to a transfer function of a linear, shift-invariant filter in the discrete-time domain (often called a digital filter although there are analog filters constructed with switched capacitors that are discrete-time filters).
