Effect of a simulated analogue telephone channel on the performance of a remote automatic system for the detection of pathologies in voice: Impact of linear distortions on cepstrum-based assessment - Band limitation, frequency response and additive noise

Abstract

Advances in speech signal analysis during the last decade have allowed the development of automatic algorithms for a non-invasive detection of laryngeal pathologies. Performance assessment of such techniques reveals that classification success rates over 90 % are achievable. Bearing in mind the extension of these automatic methods to remote diagnosis scenarios, this paper analyses the performance of a pathology detector based on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients when the speech signal has undergone the distortion of an analogue communications channel, namely the phone channel. Such channel is modeled as a concatenation of linear effects. It is shown that while the overall performance of the system is degraded, success rates in the range of 80% can still be achieved. This study also shows that the performance degradation is mainly due to band limitation and noise addition. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.