Robust F/sub 0/ and jitter estimation in pathological voices

Abstract

Dysphonic voices were used to compare electroglottographic (EGG) and acoustic measures of fundamental frequency (F/sub 0/) and jitter using a wavematching and an event based technique. Continuous speech was considered in the first part of the study, where the effects of pre filtering the acoustic signals and linearly smoothing the F/sub 0/ contours were analysed. The second part of the investigation compared jitter from sustained vowels (/i/ /a/, /u/), resulting in poor agreement for /i/ and /u/. In /a/ vowels, however, a relatively small mean normalised absolute difference (10.95%) was obtained with a method that is being proposed which combines peak picking and zero crossings, being able to detect a waveform pattern observed in such vowels and reject unreliable measures.