Voice pathology analysis has been one of the useful tools in the diagnosis of the pathological voice, as the method is non-invasive, inexpensive, and can reduce the time required for the analysis. This paper investigates feature extraction based on the Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Packet Transform (DT-CWPT) using energy and entropy measures tested with two classifiers, k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) voice disorders database and Saarbruecken Voice Database (SVD) were used. Five datasets of voice samples were used from these databases, including normal and abnormal samples, Cysts, Vocal Nodules, Polyp, and Paralysis vocal fold. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, very few studies were done on multiclass classifications using specific pathology database. File-based and frame-based investigation for two-class and multiclass were considered. In the two-class analysis using the DT-CWPT with entropies, the classification accuracy of 100% and 99.94% was achieved for MEEI and SVD database respectively. Meanwhile, the classification accuracy for multiclass analysis comprised of 99.48% for the MEEI database and 99.65% for SVD database. The experimental results using the proposed features provided promising accuracy to detect the presence of diseases in vocal fold.
A new approach for speaker and accent recognition based on wavelets, namely Discrete Wavelet Packet (DWPT), Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Packet Transform (DT- CWPT) and Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) based non-linear features are investigated. The results are compared with conventional MFCC and LPC features. k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) classifier are used to quantify the speaker and accent recognition rate. The database for the research was developed using English digits (0~9) and Malay words. The highest accuracy for speaker recognition obtained is 93.54% while for accent recognition; it is 95.86% using Malay words. Combination of features for speaker recognition is obtained from ELM classifier is 98.68 % and for accent recognition is 98.75 % using Malay words.
In the recent years, many research works have been published using speech related features for speech emotion recognition, however, recent studies show that there is a strong correlation between emotional states and glottal features. In this work, Mel-frequency cepstralcoefficients (MFCCs), linear predictive cepstral coefficients (LPCCs), perceptual linear predictive (PLP) features, gammatone filter outputs, timbral texture features, stationary wavelet transform based timbral texture features and relative wavelet packet energy and entropy features were extracted from the emotional speech (ES) signals and its glottal waveforms(GW). Particle swarm optimization based clustering (PSOC) and wrapper based particle swarm optimization (WPSO) were proposed to enhance the discerning ability of the features and to select the discriminating features respectively. Three different emotional speech databases were utilized to gauge the proposed method. Extreme learning machine (ELM) was employed to classify the different types of emotions. Different experiments were conducted and the results show that the proposed method significantly improves the speech emotion recognition performance compared to previous works published in the literature.
A novel clinical decision support system is proposed in this paper for evaluating the fetal well-being from the cardiotocogram (CTG) dataset through an Improved Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (IAGA) and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). IAGA employs a new scaling technique (called sigma scaling) to avoid premature convergence and applies adaptive crossover and mutation techniques with masking concepts to enhance population diversity. Also, this search algorithm utilizes three different fitness functions (two single objective fitness functions and multi-objective fitness function) to assess its performance. The classification results unfold that promising classification accuracy of 94% is obtained with an optimal feature subset using IAGA. Also, the classification results are compared with those of other Feature Reduction techniques to substantiate its exhaustive search towards the global optimum. Besides, five other benchmark datasets are used to gauge the strength of the proposed IAGA algorithm.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a type of progressive neurodegenerative disorder that has affected a large part of the population till now. Several symptoms of PD include tremor, rigidity, slowness of movements and vocal impairments. In order to develop an effective diagnostic system, a number of algorithms were proposed mainly to distinguish healthy individuals from the ones with PD. However, most of the previous works were conducted based on a binary classification, with the early PD stage and the advanced ones being treated equally. Therefore, in this work, we propose a multiclass classification with three classes of PD severity level (mild, moderate, severe) and healthy control. The focus is to detect and classify PD using signals from wearable motion and audio sensors based on both empirical wavelet transform (EWT) and empirical wavelet packet transform (EWPT) respectively. The EWT/EWPT was applied to decompose both speech and motion data signals up to five levels. Next, several features are extracted after obtaining the instantaneous amplitudes and frequencies from the coefficients of the decomposed signals by applying the Hilbert transform. The performance of the algorithm was analysed using three classifiers - K-nearest neighbour (KNN), probabilistic neural network (PNN) and extreme learning machine (ELM). Experimental results demonstrated that our proposed approach had the ability to differentiate PD from non-PD subjects, including their severity level - with classification accuracies of more than 90% using EWT/EWPT-ELM based on signals from motion and audio sensors respectively. Additionally, classification accuracy of more than 95% was achieved when EWT/EWPT-ELM is applied to signals from integration of both signal's information.
Parkinson's Disease (PD) is characterized as the commonest neurodegenerative illness that gradually degenerates the central nervous system. The goal of this review is to come out with a summary of the recent progress of numerous forms of sensors and systems that are related to diagnosis of PD in the past decades. The paper reviews the substantial researches on the application of technological tools (objective techniques) in the PD field applying different types of sensors proposed by previous researchers. In addition, this also includes the use of clinical tools (subjective techniques) for PD assessments, for instance, patient self-reports, patient diaries and the international gold standard reference scale, Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). Comparative studies and critical descriptions of these approaches have been highlighted in this paper, giving an insight on the current state of the art. It is followed by explaining the merits of the multiple sensor fusion platform compared to single sensor platform for better monitoring progression of PD, and ends with thoughts about the future direction towards the need of multimodal sensor integration platform for the assessment of PD.