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Quest for Speech Enhancement Method in the Analysis of Pathological Voices

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Abstract

In an uncontrolled scenario like hospitals, medical research centres, laboratories, forensics, the voice recordings are normally affected with babble noise. Most of the speech enhancement (SE) methods are limited by the colour noise due to non-consideration of phase aspect. Hence, the objective of the work is to depict a more efficient and compact SE method through the comparative study of conventional SE methods taking into account of both continuous speech and sustained vowels. This approach is supported with supervised voice activity detection (VAD). The study includes an experimental investigation of time and transform-based seven conventional methods. This approach consists of pre-processing, SE evaluation block and supervised VAD section. The speech segments are efficiently detected by VAD using bio-inspired Mel frequency cepstral coefficients and nonlinear features with support vector machine. This supervised VAD helps in reliable estimation of SNR-based parameters. The performance of each of the methods is evaluated with continuous NOIZEUS corpus at varying signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels, laryngeal pathology-based data from Saarbruecken voice database and voice disorder data collected from cancer hospitals. Experimental results show that the performance of the Wiener filtering and geometrical-based SE methods is found to be better comparatively, as far as continuous and sustained vowels are concerned with babble noise. The paper also reveals the significant involvement of nonlinear features in VAD, as the nonlinear dynamical methods are capable of analysing irregular behaviours of vocal cords.

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Data Availability

Databases used in the present study such as SVD [2, 21, 29] and NOIZEUS [4] are publically available, whereas Laryngeal cancer disorder database is available with due permissions. The pertaining details are attached in the form of supplementary material for the reference.

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Acknowledgements

Authors would like to express sincere gratitude to all the participants who took part in the experimental work in the formation of laryngeal cancer disorder database. We also thank the technical staff who all the way assisted with cases in recording sessions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, BLDEAs V.P.Dr.P.G.Halakatti College of Engineering and Technology, Vijayapur, Karnataka, 586103, India

    G. B. Gour

  2. Department of Electronics and Instrumentation, Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, Mysuru, Karnataka, 570006, India

    V. Udayashankara

  3. Department of Radiation Oncology, Sri Siddhivinayak Ganapati Cancer Hospital, Miraj, Maharastra, 416410, India

    Dinesh K. Badakh & Yogesh A. Kulkarni

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Correspondence to G. B. Gour.

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Gour, G.B., Udayashankara, V., Badakh, D.K. et al. Quest for Speech Enhancement Method in the Analysis of Pathological Voices. Circuits Syst Signal Process 42, 3617–3648 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-022-02286-y

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