Facilities

We have a wide range of equipment in the DSVP group. Most of the work takes place on Sun workstations. The group has a total of xxGB of storage provided by several disks connected to a RAID array.

The Active Vision Head

The Active vision head was commissioned from The Department of Cybernetics at the University of Reading. It is based on the Yorick 811R design. It consists of four axes of movement - Pan, Elevation, Left and Right Vergence, plus remote focus and zoom control. Its two 'eyes' consist of two JVC KY-F55B Colour cameras. The Active Vision System is the only system of its kind that we are aware of which provides colour video input.

An integrated suite of software is being developed to provide low level and high level control from a software API of every function of the cameras and the head.

Applications that are making use of the head include real time tracking, motion estimation, stereo colour image analysis. In addition, the system will enable whole new areas of active vision to be explored.

Heterogenous Computer

The heterogeneous computer is a unique system for exploring fine and coarse-grained parallelism in computing. It was integrated for the University by Kane Computing, with support from Xilinx and Texas Instruments. It consists of the following system devices:

• Trimap Peak single board computer
• Alpha Data AD164 Parallel processor board, incorporating a 21164 Alpha processor, XC6200 and TMS320C44 modules
• Sundance SMT320 consisting of 4 x TMS320C44 processors
• 2 x Intel Pentium II CPUs
• PCI and "comport" links between modules
• Software - 3L parallel C for TMS320 and Alpha, TI Go-DSP, Visual C++ and Rational Rose.

Of particular interest is the run-time allocation of intensive computational tasks to specialised modules, using a free-market model.

The AD164 Alpha processor and SMT320 boards

The Heterogeneous Computer

The Agema Thermal Imaging Camera

The Agema Thermal Imaging 900 Camera was purchased as part of an EPSRC grant on the industrial inspection of power supply boards. It has also been used as part of P.W.Webb's research into the thermal modelling of Heterojunction transistors.

Work in progress using the camera involves the analysis of the thermal properties of materials on circuit boards.

Speech Resources

The Group has microphones, amplifiers, pre-amps, DAT machines and loadspeakers for recording and replay, and an anechoic chamber for making high quality speech recordings. As members of LDC, we also have access to a large number of speech databases (e.g., TIMIT, Switchboard II, WSJCam0, Yoho, ATIS, Edinburgh Maptask, NoiseEx, etc.), and the DERA children's speech corpus.

In addition to significant up-to-date processor power, our laboratory hosts a wide range of speech application software, which includes:

• Formant-tracker and fomant synthesiser by John Holmes.
• HMM Toolkit by Entropic, Cambridge v3.0;
• HMM Toolkit and HTK Application Programming Interface;
• Proprietary Segment modelling recogniser;
• AurixSDK (DERA/2020 Speech);
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking;
• DragonTel Toolkit;
• CSLU Toolkit by Ron Cole, Oregon Graduate Institute;
• Laureate (Univ. East Anglia/BT);
• Sound Forge (Sonic Foundry); and
• Festival (Edinburgh).

For research purposes, we have been accumulating a digital library of the latest publications and proceedings to provide direct access to the state-of-the-art world-wide, which are supplemented by regular research seminars.

Guides

Several computing guides are available which explain the use of the various facilities in the group.

Web Authoring

Information for authoring your own web pages is available in the form of advice, guidelines and sample templates.