Smoothed cepstrum calculation using stressed vowels in connected speech to objectively measure dysphonia

Voice disorders are rather common: the NIDCD reports that at least 7.5 million people in the United States have vocal problems [1]. To address this problem, voice scientists have developed various objective vocal health measurements [3-6]. To further study those measurements, vocal health practitioners have collected and organized speech databases [3,4,6]. One standard for evaluation of these measurements is the GRBAS Scale [7]. This scale achieves strong perceptual agreement among medical professionals with respect to a speaker´s vocal health. In broad terms, dysphonia represents a marked difficulty in producing voiced phonation. As such, traditional voicing detection algorithms can fail on dysphonic voices [5].