Abstract: A method and apparatus is provided for monitoring a flow path having plurality of different solid components flowing therethrough. For example, in the harvesting of a plant material, many factors surrounding the threshing, separating or cleaning of the plant material and may lead to the inadvertent inclusion of the component being selectively harvested with residual plant materials being discharged or otherwise processed. In accordance with the present invention the detection of the selectively harvested component within residual materials may include the monitoring of a flow path of such residual materials by, for example, directing an excitation signal toward of flow path of material and then detecting a signal initiated by the presence of the selectively harvested component responsive to the excitation signal. The detected signal may be used to determine the presence or absence of a selected plant component within the flow path of residual materials.

Abstract: A method and apparatus is provided for monitoring a flow path having plurality of different solid components flowing therethrough. For example, in the harvesting of a plant material, many factors surrounding the threshing, separating or cleaning of the plant material and may lead to the inadvertent inclusion of the component being selectively harvested with residual plant materials being discharged or otherwise processed. In accordance with the present invention the detection of the selectively harvested component within residual materials may include the monitoring of a flow path of such residual materials by, for example, directing an excitation signal toward of flow path of material and then detecting a signal initiated by the presence of the selectively harvested component responsive to the excitation signal. The detected signal may be used to determine the presence or absence of a selected plant component within the flow path of residual materials.

Abstract: The speech recognition system disclosed herein operates to select, from a collection of tokens which represent vocabulary words, those tokens which most closely match an unknown spoken word. The collection of tokens is divided into partitions, each of which is characterized or identified by a representative one of the tokens. Both the tokens and the unknown speech word are represented by a sequence of standard data frames which may, for example, define characteristic spectra. In operation, the system computes the distance from the unknown to each of the representative tokens and then, starting with the partition having the nearest representative token and proceeding through partitions represented by successively more distant tokens, examines the other tokens in that partition while keeping a list of predetermined length identifying the examined tokens which thus far provide the best match. This process is continued until the number of distance calculations performed reaches a preselected level.