title: Speech Signal and Facial Image Processing for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Assessment.
abstract: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder characterized by recurring breathing pauses during sleep caused by a blockage of the upper airway (UA). OSA is generally diagnosed through a costly procedure requiring an overnight stay of the patient at the hospital. This has led to proposing less costly procedures based on the analysis of patients' facial images and voice recordings to help in OSA detection and severity assessment. In this paper we investigate the use of both image and speech processing to estimate the apnea-hypopnea index, AHI (which describes the severity of the condition), over a population of 285 male Spanish subjects suspected to suffer from OSA and referred to a Sleep Disorders Unit. Photographs and voice recordings were collected in a supervised but not highly controlled way trying to test a scenario close to an OSA assessment application running on a mobile device (i.e., smartphones or tablets). Spectral information in speech utterances is modeled by a state-of-the-art low-dimensional acoustic representation, called i-vector. A set of local craniofacial features related to OSA are extracted from images after detecting facial landmarks using Active Appearance Models (AAMs). Support vector regression (SVR) is applied on facial features and i-vectors to estimate the AHI.
authors.affiliation: GAPS Signal Processing Applications Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Fernando
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Espinoza-Cuadros
authors.affiliation: GAPS Signal Processing Applications Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Rubén
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Fernández-Pozo
authors.affiliation: ATVS Biometric Recognition Group, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Doroteo T
authors.initials: DT
authors.lastname: Toledano
authors.affiliation: Respiratory Department, Sleep Unit, Hospital Quirón, Málaga, Spain.
authors.forename: José D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Alcázar-Ramírez
authors.affiliation: GAPS Signal Processing Applications Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Eduardo
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: López-Gonzalo
authors.affiliation: GAPS Signal Processing Applications Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Luis A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Hernández-Gómez
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D019295:Computational Biology; D005145:Face / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010699:Phonation; D010781:Photography; D020181:Sleep Apnea, Obstructive / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013062:Speech Articulation Tests; D055815:Young Adult