According to a previous investigation of children’s voices, hoarseness is a stable concept with three main predictors: hyperfunction, breathiness, and roughness [McAllister et al., J. Voice 8(3), 230–239 (1994)]. The present investigation analyzes the relation between various acoustic measures and these perceptual voice characteristics, complemented by instability and gratings. The analysis was carried out on a material of vowels sustained by 50 ten-year-old children representing different degrees of hoarseness. The acoustic measures were a frequency perturbation quotient, an amplitude perturbation quotient, and two versions of a harmonics-to-noise measure as proposed by Kasuya et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 1329–1334 (1986)]. Highly significant correlations were found between hoarseness, breathiness, and roughness, on the one hand, and frequency perturbation quotient as well as one of the harmonics-to-noise measures, on the other.

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To automate the visual inspection of assembled printed circuit boards ( PCBs ), the authors have developed a visual inspection machine for Assembled PCBs. The machine detects a variety of defects of assembled PCBs, such as missing parts, polarity errors, improper name of ICs and improper insertion of leads. To achieve this.variety of functions. a micro-programmable image signal processor, the DSP-i, has been introduced into the machine. On the processor, a new character recognifion algorithm called the multistep similarity vector comparison method . is used. This method enables .the inspection machine to reliab!y recogn!ze IC names without the teaching of various patterns of characters from many manufacturers.

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