Discrimination of Pathological Speech Using Hidden Markov Models

Diagnosis of pathological voice is one of the important issues in biomedical applications of speech technology. This study focuses on the discrimination of voice disorder using HMM (Hidden Markov Model) for automatic detection between normal voice and vocal fold disorder voice. This is a non-intrusive, non-expensive and fully automated method using only a speech sample of the subject. Speech data from normal people and patients were collected. Mel-frequency filter cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) were modeled by HMM classifier. Different states (3 states, 5 states and 7 states), 3 mixtures and left to right HMMs were formed. This method gives an accuracy of 93.8% for train data and 91.7% for test data in the discrimination of normal and vocal fold disorder voice for sustained /a/.