Automatic detection of laryngeal pathology on sustained vowels using short-term cepstral parameters: Analysis of performance and theoretical justification

Abstract

The majority of speech signal analysis procedures for automatic detection of laryngeal pathologies mainly rely on parameters extracted from time-domain processing. Moreover, calculation of these parameters often requires prior pitch period estimation; therefore, their validity heavily depends on the robustness of pitch detection. Within this paper, an alternative approach based on cepstral - domain processing is presented which has the advantage of not requiring pitch estimation, thus providing a gain in both simplicity and robustness. While the proposed scheme is similar to solutions based on Mel-frequency cepstral parameters, already present in literature, it has an easier physical interpretation while achieving similar performance standards. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.