Voice Analysis and Classification System Based on Perturbation Parameters and Cepstral Presentation in Psychoacoustic Scales

Abstract

The paper describes an approach to design a system for analyzing and classification of a voice signal based on perturbation parameters and cepstral representation. Two variants of the cepstral representation of the voice signal are considered: based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and based on bark-frequency cepstral coefficients (BFCC). The work used a generally accepted approach to calculating the MFCC based on the time-frequency analysis by the method of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) with summation of energy in subbands. This method approximates the frequency resolution of human hearing, but has a fixed temporal resolution. As an alternative, a variant of the cepstral representation based on the BFCC has been proposed. When calculating the BFCC, a warped DFT-modulated filter bank was used, which approximates the frequency and temporal resolution of hearing. The aim of the work was to compare the effectiveness of the use of features based on the MFCC and BFCC for the designing systems for the analysis and classification of the voice signal. The results of the experiment showed that in the case when using acoustic features based on the MFCC, it is possible to obtain a voice classification system with an average recall of 80.6 %, and in the case when using features based on the BFCC, this metric is 83.7 %. With the addition of the set of MFCC features with perturbation parameters of the voice, the average recall of the classification increased to 94.1 %, with a similar addition to the set of BFCC features, the average recall of the classification increased up to 96.7 %.