Indic DiarBench: A Multilingual Joint Diarization and ASR Benchmark for Indian Languages

In this work, we introduce Indic DiarBench, a speaker diarization and ASR benchmark dataset spanning all 22 scheduled languages of India. This corpus comprises approximately 108 hours of natural multi-speaker audio from near-field meetings, far-field recordings, and in-the-wild audios. All annotations are human-corrected with time-aligned speaker attributed transcriptions. The dataset captures conversational nuance prevalent in Indian speech, such as English code-mixing, dialectal variation, and frequent speaker overlap. To establish a baseline for joint ASR and diarization capabilities we evaluate leading systems including commercial speech APIs and multimodal large language models. Indic DiarBench is released as an open-access resource to advance inclusive, multilingual speech technology research for Indian languages.

Towards Orthographically-Informed Evaluation of Speech Recognition Systems for Indian Languages

Evaluating ASR systems for Indian languages is challenging due to spelling variations, suffix splitting flexibility, and non-standard spellings in code-mixed words. Traditional Word Error Rate (WER) often presents a bleaker picture of system performance than what human users perceive. Better aligning evaluation with real-world performance requires capturing permissible orthographic variations, which is extremely challenging for under-resourced Indian languages. Leveraging recent advances in LLMs, we propose a framework for creating benchmarks that capture permissible variations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that OIWER, by accounting for orthographic variations, reduces pessimistic error rates (an average improvement of 6.3 points), narrows inflated model gaps (e.g., Gemini-Canary performance difference drops from 18.1 to 11.5 points), and aligns more closely with human perception than prior methods like WER-SN by 4.9 points.

Underwater Fish Species Classification using Convolutional Neural Network and Deep Learning

The target of this paper is to recommend a way for Automated classification of Fish species. A high accuracy fish classification is required for greater understanding of fish behavior in Ichthyology and by marine biologists. Maintaining a ledger of the number of fishes per species and marking the endangered species in large and small water bodies is required by concerned institutions. Majority of available methods focus on classification of fishes outside of water because underwater classification poses challenges such as background noises, distortion of images, the presence of other water bodies in images, image quality and occlusion. This method uses a novel technique based on Convolutional Neural Networks, Deep Learning and Image Processing to achieve an accuracy of 96.29%. This method ensures considerably discrimination accuracy improvements than the previously proposed methods.

Optimization of Transfer Learning for Sign Language Recognition Targeting Mobile Platform

The target of this research is to experiment, iterate and recommend a system that is successful in recognition of American Sign Language (ASL). It is a challenging as well as an interesting problem that if solved will bring a leap in social and technological aspects alike. In this paper, we propose a real-time recognizer of ASL based on a mobile platform, so that it will have more accessibility and provides an ease of use. The technique implemented is Transfer Learning of new data of Hand gestures for alphabets in ASL to be modelled on various pre-trained high- end models and optimize the best model to run on a mobile platform considering the various limitations of the same during optimization. The data used consists of 27,455 images of 24 alphabets of ASL. The optimized model when ran over a memory-efficient mobile application, provides an accuracy of 95.03% of accurate recognition with an average recognition time of 2.42 seconds. This method ensures considerable discrimination in accuracy and recognition time than the previous research.