Vocal Folds Disorder Detection using Pattern Recognition Methods

Diagnosis of pathological voice is one of the most important issues in biomedical applications of speech technology. This study focuses on the classification of pathological voice using the HMM (hidden Markov model), the GMM (Gaussian mixture model) and a SVM (support vector machine), and then compares the results to work done previously using an ANN (artificial neural network). Speech data were collected from those without and those with vocal disorders. Normal and pathological speech data were mixed in out experiment. Six characteristic parameters (jitter, shimmer, NHR, SPI, APQ and RAP) were chosen. Then the pattern recognition methods (HMM, GMM and SVM) were used to distinguish the mixed data into categories of normal and pathological speech. We found that the GMM-based method can give us superior classification rates compared to the other classification methods.