Title: LPC modelling and cepstral analysis applied to vocal fold pathology detection

Authors: Benedito G. Aguiar Neto, Silvana Cunha Costa, Joseana M. Fechine

Addresses: Department of Electrical Engineering, Federal University of Campina Grande, Paraiba, Brazil. ' Federal Center of Technological Education of Paraiba. ' Computer Science Department, Federal University of Campina Grande, Paraiba, Brazil

Abstract: Laryngeal pathologies are generally diagnosed using laryngoscopical exams, which are considered invasive to patients. Digital signal processing techniques are noninvasive and can be applied to perform an acoustic analysis for vocal quality assessment providing an objective diagnosis of pathological voices. This paper aims at specifying and evaluating the acoustic features for vocal fold edema through a parametric modelling based on the resonant structure of the human speech production mechanism by LPC and LPC-based cepstral coefficients and a nonparametric approach related to human auditory perception system by mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. A vector-quantising-trained distance classifier is used in the discrimination process.

Keywords: speech processing; cepstral analysis; vocal fold pathologies; LPC modelling; laryngeal pathologies; human auditory perception; linear predictive coding; vocal quality assessment; pathological voices.

DOI: 10.1504/IJFIPM.2008.020185

International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalised Medicine, 2008 Vol.1 No.2, pp.156 - 170

Published online: 08 Sep 2008 *

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