Intra- and Inter-database Study for Arabic, English, and German Databases:Do Conventional Speech Features Detect Voice Pathology?

A large population around the world has voice complications. Various approaches for subjective and objective evaluations have been suggested in the literature. The subjective approach strongly depends on the experience and area of expertise of a clinician, and human error cannot be neglected. On the other hand, the objective or automatic approach is noninvasive. Automatic developed systems can provide complementary information that may be helpful for a clinician in the early screening of a voice disorder. At the same time, automatic systems can be deployed in remote areas where a general practitioner can use them and may refer the patient to a specialist to avoid complications that may be life threatening. Many automatic systems for disorder detection have been developed by applying different types of conventional speech features such as the linear prediction coefficients, linear prediction cepstral coefficients, and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). This study aims to ascertain whether conventional speech features detect voice pathology reliably, and whether they can be correlated with voice quality. To investigate this, an automatic detection system based on MFCC was developed, and three different voice disorder databases were used in this study. The experimental results suggest that the accuracy of the MFCC-based system varies from database to database. The detection rate for the intra-database ranges from 72% to 95%, and that for the inter-database is from 47% to 82%. The results conclude that conventional speech features are not correlated with voice, and hence are not reliable in pathology detection

Optimizing laryngeal pathology detection by using combined cepstral features

ABSTRACT There are several diseases that affect the human voice quality which can be organic or neurological. Acoustic analysis of voice features can be used as a complementary and noninvasive tool for the diagnosis of laryngeal pathologies. The degree of reliability and effectiveness of the discriminating process depends on the appropriate acoustic feature extraction. This work presents a parametric method based on cepstral features to discriminate pathological voices of speakers affected by vocal fold edema and paralysis from healthy voices. Cepstral, weighted cepstral, delta cepstral, and weighted delta cepstral coefficients are obtained from speech signals. A Vector Quantization is carried out individually for each feature in the classification process, associated with a distortion measurement. The goal is to evaluate a performance of a classifier based on the individual and combined cepstral features. The average, the product and the weighted average are the different combination strategies applied yielding a multiple classifier that is more efficient than each individual technique. To assess the accuracy of the system, 153 speech files of sustained vowel /ah/ (53 healthy, 44 vocal fold edema and 56 paralysis) of the Disordered Voice Database from Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) are used. Results show that the employed parameters are complementary and they can be used to detect vocal disorders caused by the presence of vocal fold pathologies

Using dysphonic voice to characterize speaker's biometry

Phonation distortion leaves relevant marks in a speaker's biometric profile. Dysphonic voice production may be used for biometrical speaker characterization. In the present paper phonation features derived from the glottal source (GS) parameterization, after vocal tract inversion, is proposed for dysphonic voice characterization in Speaker Verification tasks. The glottal source derived parameters are matched in a forensic evaluation framework defining a distance-based metric specification. The phonation segments used in the study are derived from fillers, long vowels, and other phonation segments produced in spontaneous telephone conversations. Phonated segments from a telephonic database of 100 male Spanish native speakers are combined in a 10-fold cross-validation task to produce the set of quality measurements outlined in the paper. Shimmer, mucosal wave correlate, vocal fold cover biomechanical parameter unbalance and a subset of the GS cepstral profile produce accuracy rates as high as 99.57 for a wide threshold interval (62.08-75.04%). An Equal Error Rate of 0.64 % can be granted. The proposed metric framework is shown to behave more fairly than classical likelihood ratios in supporting the hypothesis of the defense vs that of the prosecution, thus ofering a more reliable evaluation scoring. Possible applications are Speaker Verification and Dysphonic Voice Grading

Formant analysis in dysphonic patients and automatic Arabic digit speech recognition

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background and objective</p> <p>There has been a growing interest in objective assessment of speech in dysphonic patients for the classification of the type and severity of voice pathologies using automatic speech recognition (ASR). The aim of this work was to study the accuracy of the conventional ASR system (with Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) based front end and hidden Markov model (HMM) based back end) in recognizing the speech characteristics of people with pathological voice.</p> <p>Materials and methods</p> <p>The speech samples of 62 dysphonic patients with six different types of voice disorders and 50 normal subjects were analyzed. The Arabic spoken digits were taken as an input. The distribution of the first four formants of the vowel /a/ was extracted to examine deviation of the formants from normal.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There was 100% recognition accuracy obtained for Arabic digits spoken by normal speakers. However, there was a significant loss of accuracy in the classifications while spoken by voice disordered subjects. Moreover, no significant improvement in ASR performance was achieved after assessing a subset of the individuals with disordered voices who underwent treatment.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results of this study revealed that the current ASR technique is not a reliable tool in recognizing the speech of dysphonic patients.</p

An intelligent healthcare system for detection and classification to discriminate vocal fold disorders

The growing population of senior citizens around the world will appear as a big challenge in the future and they will engage a significant portion of the healthcare facilities. Therefore, it is necessary to develop intelligent healthcare systems so that they can be deployed in smart homes and cities for remote diagnosis. To overcome the problem, an intelligent healthcare system is proposed in this study. The proposed intelligent system is based on the human auditory mechanism and capable of detection and classification of various types of the vocal fold disorders. In the proposed system, critical bandwidth phenomena by using the bandpass filters spaced over Bark scale is implemented to simulate the human auditory mechanism. Therefore, the system acts like an expert clinician who can evaluate the voice of a patient by auditory perception. The experimental results show that the proposed system can detect the pathology with an accuracy of 99.72%. Moreover, the classification accuracy for vocal fold polyp, keratosis, vocal fold paralysis, vocal fold nodules, and adductor spasmodic dysphonia is 97.54%, 99.08%, 96.75%, 98.65%, 95.83%, and 95.83%, respectively. In addition, an experiment for paralysis versus all other disorders is also conducted, and an accuracy of 99.13% is achieved. The results show that the proposed system is accurate and reliable in vocal fold disorder assessment and can be deployed successfully for remote diagnosis. Moreover, the performance of the proposed system is better as compared to existing disorder assessment systems

The automatic detection of heart failure using speech signals

Heart failure (HF) is a major global health concern and is increasing in prevalence. It affects the larynx and breathing - thereby the quality of speech. In this article, we propose an approach for the automatic detection of people with HF using the speech signal. The proposed method explores mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features, glottal features, and their combination to distinguish HF from healthy speech. The glottal features were extracted from the voice source signal estimated using glottal inverse filtering. Four machine learning algorithms, namely, support vector machine, Extra Tree, AdaBoost, and feed-forward neural network (FFNN), were trained separately for individual features and their combination. It was observed that the MFCC features yielded higher classification accuracies compared to glottal features. Furthermore, the complementary nature of glottal features was investigated by combining these features with the MFCC features. Our results show that the FFNN classifier trained using a reduced set of glottal + MFCC features achieved the best overall performance in both speaker-dependent and speaker-independent scenarios. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.Peer reviewe

A novel hybrid method for vocal fold pathology diagnosis based on russian language

In this paper, first, an initial feature vector for vocal fold pathology diagnosis is proposed. Then, for optimizing the initial feature vector, a genetic algorithm is proposed. Some experiments are carried out for evaluating and comparing the classification accuracies which are obtained by the use of the different classifiers (ensemble of decision tree, discriminant analysis and K-nearest neighbours) and the different feature vectors (the initial and the optimized ones). Finally, a hybrid of the ensemble of decision tree and the genetic algorithm is proposed for vocal fold pathology diagnosis based on Russian Language. The experimental results show a better performance (the higher classification accuracy and the lower response time) of the proposed method in comparison with the others. While the usage of pure decision tree leads to the classification accuracy of 85.4% for vocal fold pathology diagnosis based on Russian language, the proposed method leads to the 8.5% improvement (the accuracy of 93.9%)