A perceptual cells guide is provided for persons requiring manual assistance in forming messages upon paper sheets or the like. A substantially rigid guide sheet is secured in position adjacent the face of the paper, and this guide sheet is composed of a plurality of parallel, intersecting horizontal and vertical strips of substantially rigid material, forming a plurality of regularly arranged perceptual cells which extend across and up and down the sheet of paper. The cells are preferably recta...

Apparatus for measuring a subject's sensory perception wherein a test board which is screenable from the subject's view is provided with two pairs of selectively spaceable sensor plates to be grasped by the subject's respective hands and procedure for manipulating such plates to ascertain the subject's sensory ability to match spacings between the respective pairs of sensor plates.

A method is disclosed for determining estimates of the perceived noise masking level of audio signals as a function of frequency. By developing a randomness metric related to the euclidian distance between (i) actual frequency components amplitude and phase for each block of sampled values of the signal and (ii) predicted values for these components based on values in prior blocks, it is possible to form a tonality index which provides more detailed information useful in forming the noise maskin...

A similarity-based database of images, where images are preferably ranked and correlated in correspondence to biological preattentive similarity, supports a new type of interface for visual navigation within the database to the end that a human may perceive not only selected images resultant from a query, but the relationship between the selected images. In particular, navigation is within a display space whose geometric characteristics depend on the geometry of the perceptual space in which ima...

A method and apparatus for perceptual audio coding. The method and apparatus provide high-quality sound for coding rates down to and below 1 bit/sample for a wide variety of input signals including speech, music and background noise. The invention provides a new distortion measure for coding the input speech and training the codebooks, where the distortion measure is based on a masking spectrum of the input frequency spectrum. The invention also provides a method for direct calculation of maskin...

A technique for the masking of quantizing noise in the coding of audio signals is adapted to include geometric interpolation between the thresholds for a tone masking noise and for noise masking a tone, in order to reduce use of bit-rate capability where it is not necessary for transparent or high quality. The technique is usable with the types of channel coding known as "noiseless" or Huffman coding and with variable radix packing. The stereophonic embodiment eliminates redundancies in the sum ...

Simultaneous and temporal masking of digital speech data is applied to an MBE-based speech coding technique to achieve additional, substantial compression of coded speech over existing coding techniques, while enabling synthesis of coded speech with minimal perceptual degradation relative to the human auditory system. A real-time perceptual coder and decoder is disclosed in which speech may be sampled at 10 kHz, coded at an average rate of less than 2 bits/sample, and reproduced in a manner that...

A perceptual delta frame processor for use with a detector array and a noninterlaced video display that produces an image equivalent to that of an image difference processing system. The processor includes a responsivity equalization circuit for processing output signals provided by the detector array that equalize the relative response of its detector elements and provide equalized output signals. A multiplier circuit is provided for inverting the polarity of alternate images to provide constan...

An auditory scene is synthesized by applying two or more different sets of one or more spatial parameters (e.g., an inter-ear level difference (ILD), inter-ear time difference (ITD), and/or head-related transfer function (HRTF)) to two or more different frequency bands of a combined audio signal, where each different frequency band is treated as if it corresponded to a single audio source in the auditory scene. In one embodiment, the combined audio signal corresponds to the combination of two or...

Systems and methods of robust perceptual color identification are disclosed. The methods include a multilevel analysis for determining the robust perceptual color of an object based on observed colors. This multilevel analysis can include a pixel level, a frame level, and/or a sequence level. The determination may make use of color drift matrices and trained functions such as statistical probability functions. The color drift tables and function training are based on training data generated by o...