A Novel Pathological Voice Identification Technique through Simulated Cochlear Implant Processing Systems

Rumana Islam,Esam Abdel-Raheem,Mohammed Tarique

doi:10.3390/app12052398

Abstract

This paper presents a pathological voice identification system employing signal processing techniques through cochlear implant models. The fundamentals of the biological process for speech perception are investigated to develop this technique. Two cochlear implant models are considered in this work: one uses a conventional bank of bandpass filters, and the other one uses a bank of optimized gammatone filters. The critical center frequencies of those filters are selected to mimic the human cochlear vibration patterns caused by audio signals. The proposed system processes the speech samples and applies a CNN for final pathological voice identification. The results show that the two proposed models adopting bandpass and gammatone filterbanks can discriminate the pathological voices from healthy ones, resulting in F1 scores of 77.6% and 78.7%, respectively, with speech samples. The obtained results of this work are also compared with those of other related published works.

Highlights

Humans use speech to convey information in their daily life
One model uses a bank of bandpass filters, and the other uses gammatone filters
It has been shown that the gammatone filter is more suitable for voice pathology identification through the signal processing steps involved in the cochlear implants

Summary

Introduction

Humans use speech to convey information in their daily life. A human speaker encodes information into a continuously time-varying waveform that can be stored, manipulated, and transmitted during speech production. The whole human communication process can be broadly divided into four main parts: speech production, auditory feedback, sound wave transmission, and speech perception [1]. The human voice generation system consists of the lungs, larynx, and vocal tracts. The speech production process originates from the lungs. During the speech production process, humans inhale air and expel it. The most critical components of the human voice generation system are the vocal folds. The larynx controls the vocal folds by using its ligaments, cartilages, and muscles. The primary function of articulators is to filter the sound emanating from the larynx to produce a highly intricate sound

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