Use of Cepstrum-based parameters for automatic pathology detection on speech. Analysis of performance and theoretical justification

Abstract

The majority of speech signal analysis procedures for automatic pathology detection mostly rely on parameters extracted from time-domain processing. Moreover, calculation of these parameters often requires prior pitch period estimation; therefore, their validity heavily depends on the robustness of pitch detection. Within this paper, an alternative approach based on cepstral-domain processing is presented which has the advantage of not requiring pitch estimation, thus providing a gain in both simplicity and robustness. While the proposed scheme is similar to solutions based on Mel-frequency cepstral parameters, already present in literature, it has an easier physical interpretation while achieving similar performance standards.