Perceptually Enhanced Single Frequency Filtering for Dysarthric Speech Detection and Intelligibility Assessment

Abstract

This paper proposes a new speech feature representation that improves the intelligibility assessment of dysarthric speech. The formulation of the feature set is motivated from the human auditory perception and high time-frequency resolution property of single frequency filtering (SFF) technique. The proposed features are named as perceptually enhanced single frequency cepstral coefficients (PE-SFCC). As a part of SFF technique implementation, speech signal passed through a single pole complex bandpass filter bank to obtain high-resolution time-frequency distribution. Then, the distribution is enhanced by using a set of auditory perceptual operators. Lastly, traditional homomorphic analysis has been carried out on the resulting signal to obtain PE-SFCC feature vector. The performance of proposed features in dysarthric speech detection and its intelligibility assessment has been reported on UASPEECH database. The PE-SFCC features outperformed the state-of-the-art features in dysarthric speech detection and intelligibility assessment.