A critical requirement in combating terrorism is the ability to acquire advance knowledge of the plans and intentions of terrorist groups. As a step toward this goal, this solicitation requests the development of a pocketable device to identify significant foreign language conversations based on key words and to translate such conversations. In the proposed work, LSI will build upon the PocTransT (Pocketable translator) technology previously developed for ONR, and on our core voice-to-voice translation technology. In order to prove the feasibility of the concept outlined above, we have defined several sets of tasks which will allow us to construct an initial version of such a system, experimentally test it, and demonstrate a functional prototype. These sets of tasks are comprised of linguistic development tasks, system development tasks, and tasks which will experimentally test a range of novel methods for improving recognition of key words in noisy environments by applying noise cancellation and filtering techniques. Finally, the functional prototype derived from these tasks and experiments will be demonstrated. The objective of the Phase I Option tasks is to evaluate design alternatives for a ruggedized system, and to produce a report detailing the evaluation, and presenting design recommendations. There are numerous commercial uses for this technology in law enforcement, fire/paramedic, and critical incident response operations. Language Systems Inc. (LSI) is especially interested in these areas, since the organizations involved are current clients for our PC Windows-based two-way voice-to-voice translation systems. (See our web site at www.lsi.com.)
Keywords: Voice Translation,Handheld Devices,Signal Processing,Noise Cancellation,Adaptive Filtering
