Significance of voiced and unvoiced speech segments for the detection of common cold

This work investigates the significance of the voiced and unvoiced region for detecting common cold from the speech signal. In literature, the entire speech signal is processed to detect the common cold and other diseases. This study uses a short-time energy-based approach to segment the voiced and unvoiced region of the speech signal. Then, frame-wise mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) features are extracted from the voiced and unvoiced segments of each speech utterance, and statistics (mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis) are calculated to get the feature vector for each speech utterance. The support vector machine (SVM) is utilized to analyze the performance of features extracted from the voiced and unvoiced region. Result shows that the feature extracted from voiced segments, unvoiced segments, and complete active speech (CAS) gives almost similar results using the MFCC features and SVM classifier. Therefore, rather than processing the CAS, we can process the unvoiced speech segments, which have fewer frames compared to CAS and voiced regions of speech. The processing of solely unvoiced segments can reduce the time and computation complexity of a speech signal-based common cold detection system.