Interpreting glottal flow dynamics for detecting COVID-19 from voice
In the pathogenesis of COVID-19, impairment of respiratory functions is often one of the key symptoms. Studies show that in these cases, voice production is also adversely affected -- vocal fold oscillations are asynchronous, asymmetrical and more restricted during phonation. This paper proposes a method that analyzes the differential dynamics of the glottal flow waveform (GFW) during voice production to identify features in them that are most significant for the detection of COVID-19 from voice. Since it is hard to measure this directly in COVID-19 patients, we infer it from recorded speech signals and compare it to the GFW computed from physical model of phonation. For normal voices, the difference between the two should be minimal, since physical models are constructed to explain phonation under assumptions of normalcy. Greater differences implicate anomalies in the bio-physical factors that contribute to the correctness of the physical model, revealing their significance indirectly. Our proposed method uses a CNN-based 2-step attention model that locates anomalies in time-feature space in the difference of the two GFWs, allowing us to infer their potential as discriminative features for classification. The viability of this method is demonstrated using a clinically curated dataset of COVID-19 positive and negative subjects.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Glottal Source Processing: from Analysis to Applications
The great majority of current voice technology applications relies on acoustic features characterizing the vocal tract response, such as the widely used MFCC of LPC parameters. Nonetheless, the airflow passing through th…
Speech Aerodynamics Database, Tools and Visualisation
Aerodynamic processes underlie the characteristics of the acoustic signal of speech sounds. The aerodynamics of speech give insights on acoustic outcome and help explain the mechanisms of speech production. This database…
ARCChirp Complex Cepstrum-based Decomposition for Asynchronous Glottal Analysis
It was recently shown that complex cepstrum can be effectively used for glottal flow estimation by separating the causal and anticausal components of speech. In order to guarantee a correct estimation, some constraints o…
Complex Cepstrum-based Decomposition of Speech for Glottal Source Estimation
Homomorphic analysis is a well-known method for the separation of non-linearly combined signals. More particularly, the use of complex cepstrum for source-tract deconvolution has been discussed in various articles. Howev…
ArticlesAnalysis and Detection of Pathological Voice using Glottal Source Features
Automatic detection of voice pathology enables objective assessment and earlier intervention for the diagnosis. This study provides a systematic analysis of glottal source features and investigates their effectiveness in…
Voice pathology detection