title: Modulation Spectra Morphological Parameters: A New Method to Assess Voice Pathologies according to the GRBAS Scale.
abstract: Disordered voices are frequently assessed by speech pathologists using perceptual evaluations. This might lead to problems caused by the subjective nature of the process and due to the influence of external factors which compromise the quality of the assessment. In order to increase the reliability of the evaluations, the design of automatic evaluation systems is desirable. With that in mind, this paper presents an automatic system which assesses the Grade and Roughness level of the speech according to the GRBAS perceptual scale. Two parameterization methods are used: one based on the classic Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, which has already been used successfully in previous works, and other derived from modulation spectra. For the latter, a new group of parameters has been proposed, named Modulation Spectra Morphological Parameters: MSC, DRB, LMR, MSH, MSW, CIL, PALA, and RALA. In methodology, PCA and LDA are employed to reduce the dimensionality of feature space, and GMM classifiers to evaluate the ability of the proposed features on distinguishing the different levels. Efficiencies of 81.6% and 84.7% are obtained for Grade and Roughness, respectively, using modulation spectra parameters, while MFCCs performed 80.5% and 77.7%. The obtained results suggest the usefulness of the proposed Modulation Spectra Morphological Parameters for automatic evaluation of Grade and Roughness in the speech.
authors.affiliation: ETSIST, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus Sur, Carretera de Valencia km 7, 28031 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Laureano
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Moro-Velázquez
authors.affiliation: ETSIST, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus Sur, Carretera de Valencia km 7, 28031 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Jorge Andrés
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Gómez-García
authors.affiliation: ETSIST, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus Sur, Carretera de Valencia km 7, 28031 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Juan Ignacio
authors.initials: JI
authors.lastname: Godino-Llorente
authors.affiliation: ETSIST, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus Sur, Carretera de Valencia km 7, 28031 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Gustavo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Andrade-Miranda
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013018:Sound Spectrography / Q000379:methods*; D014831:Voice; D014832:Voice Disorders / Q000145:classification* / Q000175:diagnosis*; D055815:Young Adult