Detection of Neurogenic Voice Disorders Using the Fisher Vector Representation of Cepstral Features

Neurogenic voice disorders (NVDs) are caused by damage or malfunction of the central or peripheral nervous system that controls vocal fold movement. In this paper, we investigate the potential of the Fisher vector (FV) encoding in automatic detection of people with NVDs. FVs are used to convert features from frame level (local descriptors) to utterance level (global descriptors). At the frame level, we extract two popular cepstral representations, namely, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and perceptual linear prediction cepstral coefficients (PLPCCs), from acoustic voice signals. In addition, the MFCC features are also extracted from every frame of the glottal source signal computed using a glottal inverse filtering (GIF) technique. The global descriptors derived from the local descriptors are used to train a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Experiments are conducted using voice signals from 80 healthy speakers and 80 patients with NVDs (40 with spasmodic dysphonia (SD) and 40 with recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy (RLNP)) taken from the Saarbruecken voice disorder (SVD) database. The overall results indicate that the use of the FV encoding leads to better identification of people with NVDs, compared to the defacto temporal encoding. Furthermore, the SVM trained using the combination of FVs derived from the cepstral and glottal features provides the overall best detection performance.