MFCC-BASED REMOTE PATHOLOGY DETECTION ON SPEECH TRANSMITTED THROUGH THE TELEPHONE CHANNEL - Impact of Linear Distortions: Band Limitation, Frequency Response and Noise

Advances in speech signal analysis during the last decade have allowed the development of automatic algorithms for a non-invasive detection fo laryngeal pathologies. Performance assessment of such techniques reveals that classification success rates over 90% are achievable. Bearing in mind the extension of these automatic methods to remote diagnosis scenarios, this paper analyses the performance of a pathology detector based on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients when the speech signal has undergone the distortion of an analogue communications channel, namely the phone channel. Such channel is modeled as a concatenation of linear effects. It is shown that while the overall performance of the system is degraded, success rates in the range of 80% can still be achieved. This study also shows that the performance degradation is mainly due to band limitation and noise addition.