Estimation of Severity of Speech Disability through Speech Envelope

In this paper, envelope detection of speech is discussed to distinguish the pathological cases of speech disabled children. The speech signal samples of children of age between five to eight years are considered for the present study. These speech signals are digitized and are used to determine the speech envelope. The envelope is subjected to ratio mean analysis to estimate the disability. This analysis is conducted on ten speech signal samples which are related to both place of articulation and manner of articulation. Overall speech disability of a pathological subject is estimated based on the results of above analysis.Comment: 8 pages,4 Figures,Signal & Image Processing Journal AIRC

Superwideband Bandwidth Extension Using Normalized MDCT Coefficients for Scalable Speech and Audio Coding

A bandwidth extension (BWE) algorithm from wideband to superwideband (SWB) is proposed for a scalable speech/audio codec that uses modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) coefficients as spectral parameters. The superwideband is first split into several subbands that are represented as gain parameters and normalized MDCT coefficients in the proposed BWE algorithm. We then estimate normalized MDCT coefficients of the wideband to be fetched for the superwideband and quantize the fetch indices. After that, we quantize gain parameters by using relative ratios between adjacent subbands. The proposed BWE algorithm is embedded into a standard superwideband codec, the SWB extension of G.729.1 Annex E, and its bitrate and quality are compared with those of the BWE algorithm already employed in the standard superwideband codec. It is shown from the comparison that the proposed BWE algorithm relatively reduces the bitrate by around 19% with better quality, compared to the BWE algorithm in the SWB extension of G.729.1 Annex E