The Effect of the MFCC Frame Length in Automatic Voice Pathology Detection

Automatic voice pathology detection is a research topic, which has gained increasing interest recently. Although methods based on deep learning are becoming popular, the classical pipeline systems based on a two-stage architecture consisting of a feature extraction stage and a classifier stage are still widely used. In these classical detection systems, frame-wise computation of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) is the most popular feature extraction method. However, no systematic study has been conducted to investigate the effect of the MFCC frame length on automatic voice pathology detection. In this work, we studied the effect of the MFCC frame length in voice pathology detection using three disorders (hyperkinetic dysphonia, hypokinetic dysphonia and reflux laryngitis) from the Saarbrücken Voice Disorders (SVD) database. The detection performance was compared between speaker-dependent and speaker-independent scenarios as well as between speaking task -dependent and speaking task -independent scenarios. The Support Vector Machine, which is the most widely used classifier in the study area, was used as the classifier. The results show that the detection accuracy depended on the MFFC frame length in all the scenarios studied. The best detection accuracy was obtained by using a MFFC frame length of 500 ms with a shift of 5 ms.