Sabat Salih Muhamad

Abdulhady Abas Abdullah, Sabat Salih Muhamad, Hadi Veisi

The ability to synthesize spoken language from text has greatly facilitated access to digital content with the advances in text-to-speech technology. However, effective TTS development for low-resource languages, such as Central Kurdish (CKB), still faces many challenges due mainly to the lack of linguistic information and dedicated resources. In this paper, we improve the Kurdish TTS system based on Tacotron by training the Kurdish WaveGlow vocoder on a 21-hour central Kurdish speech corpus instead of using a pre-trained English vocoder WaveGlow. Vocoder training on the target language corpus is required to accurately and fluently adapt phonetic and prosodic changes in Kurdish language. The effectiveness of these enhancements is that our model is significantly better than the baseline system with English pretrained models. In particular, our adaptive WaveGlow model achieves an impressive MOS of 4.91, which sets a new benchmark for Kurdish speech synthesis. On one hand, this study empowers the advanced features of the TTS system for Central Kurdish, and on the other hand, it opens the doors for other dialects in Kurdish and other related languages to further develop.

Dana A Abdullah, Dana Rasul Hamad, Ismail Y. Maolood et al.

Recognizing the same faces with and without masks is important for ensuring consistent identification in security, access control, and public safety. This capability is crucial in scenarios like law enforcement, healthcare, and surveillance, where accurate recognition must be maintained despite facial occlusion. This research focuses on the challenge of recognizing the same faces with and without masks by employing cosine similarity as the primary technique. With the increased use of masks, traditional facial recognition systems face significant accuracy issues, making it crucial to develop methods that can reliably identify individuals in masked conditions. For that reason, this study proposed Masked-Unmasked Face Matching Model (MUFM). This model employs transfer learning using the Visual Geometry Group (VGG16) model to extract significant facial features, which are subsequently classified utilizing the K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) algorithm. The cosine similarity metric is employed to compare masked and unmasked faces of the same individuals. This approach represents a novel contribution, as the task of recognizing the same individual with and without a mask using cosine similarity has not been previously addressed. By integrating these advanced methodologies, the research demonstrates effective identification of individuals despite the presence of masks, addressing a significant limitation in traditional systems. Using data is another essential part of this work, by collecting and preparing an image dataset from three different sources especially some of those data are real provided a comprehensive power of this research. The image dataset used were already collected in three different datasets of masked and unmasked for the same faces.