Growth monitoring in tree plantation farms plays a crucial role in taking necessary actions from early stages to improve harvesting efficiency. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide a fast and efficient way to acquire data from large farms with difficult access. We propose a novel end-to-end system composed of multiple stages to identify areas where seeds have not grown as expected in young tree farms. The system acquires data from UAV flights to generate georeferenced orthophoto images. Next, local binary patterns, distance transform, and watershed segmentation methods are applied on images to detect trees. Finally, tree density distributions are calculated in the granularity of approximately 90 m2tiles. We assessed the system performance by comparing detection results against a ground truth set of over 50000 trees from 16 orthophoto images for two tree species. The median deviation was 2 trees per tile for both species, where the median tree count was 14 and 9 per tile, respectively.

This paper describes the adaptive multirate wideband (AMR-WB) speech codec selected by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for GSM and the third generation mobile communication WCDMA system for providing wideband speech services. The AMR-WB speech codec algorithm was selected in December 2000 and the corresponding specifications were approved in March 2001. The AMR-WB codec was also selected by the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Sector (ITU-T) in July 2001 in the standardization activity for wideband speech coding around 16 kb/s and was approved in January 2002 as Recommendation G.722.2. The adoption of AMR-WB by ITU-T is of significant importance since for the first time the same codec is adopted for wireless as well as wireline services. AMR-WB uses an extended audio bandwidth from 50 Hz to 7 kHz and gives superior speech quality and voice naturalness compared to existing second- and third-generation mobile communication systems. The wideband speech service provided by the AMR-WB codec will give mobile communication speech quality that also substantially exceeds (narrowband) wireline quality. The paper details AMR-WB standardization history, algorithmic description including novel techniques for efficient ACELP wideband speech coding and subjective quality performance of the codec.

We present in this paper new methods for achieving high- quality wideband speech at low rates using the ACELP algorithm. Several innovations are introduced to optimize the quality and minimize the complexity of the coder. A multi-rate wideband speech encoding algorithm based on these techniques was recently selected by 3GPP as the standard for AMR-WB, and is currently one of the candidates for the ITU- T wideband speech coder standard at around 16 kbit/sec. This standard was jointly developed by VoiceAge and Nokia.

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have carried out development and standardisation of a wideband speech codec for GSM and the third generation mobile communication WCDMA system since 1999. The Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) codec algorithm was selected in December 2000, and the corresponding specifications were approved in March 2001. The AMR-WB codec was jointly developed by Nokia and VoiceAge. AMRWB extends the audio bandwidth from 3.4 kHz to 7 kHz and gives superior speech quality and voice naturalness compared to existing 2nd and 3rd generation mobile communication systems. The wideband speech service provided by the AMRWB codec will give mobile communication speech quality that even exceeds (narrowband) wireline quality.