Deep Learning Based Pathological Voice Detection Algorithm Using Speech and Electroglottographic (EGG) Signals

This paper presents a convolutional neural network-based pathological voice detection system using speech and electroglottographic (EGG) signals. Speech signals have been popularly used to detect voice pathology. Recently, the EGG signals have drawn considerable attention from researchers in this field. They argued that the EGG signals could detect the vocal fold vibration more accurately than speech signals and hence can be considered more appropriate for voice pathology detection. This work investigates the effectiveness of the EGG and speech signals in detecting pathological voices using sustained vowel (“/a/”) samples collected from the Saarbrücken Voice Database (SVD). The Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) extracted from the speech and EGG samples are employed as discerning features for this investigation. The results show that the proposed system achieves a higher accuracy (more than 23%) in identifying dysphonic voices from healthy ones with speech signals.