Exploiting Wavelet and Prosody-related Features for the Detection of Voice Disorders

An approach for the detection of voice disorders exploiting wavelet and prosody-related properties of speech is presented in this paper. Based on the normalized energy contents of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) coefficients over all voice frames, several statistical measures are first determined. Then, the idea of some prosody-related voice properties, such as mean pitch, jitter and shimmer are utilized to compute similar statistical measures over all the frames. A set of statistical measures of the normalized energy contents of the DWT coefficients is combined with a set of statistical measures of the extracted prosody-related voice properties in order to form a feature vector to be used in both training and testing phases. Two categories of voice samples namely, healthy and disordered are considered here thus formulating the problem in the proposed method as a two-class problem to be solved. Finally, an Euclidean Distance based classifier is used to handle the feature vector for the purpose of detecting the disordered voice. A number of simulations is carried out and it is shown that the statistical analysis based on wavelet and prosody-related properties can effectively detect a variety of voice disorders from the mixture of healthy and disordered voices