Automatic quality control and enhancement for voice-based remote Parkinson's disease detection

Amir Hossein Poorjam*, Mathew Shaji Kavalekalam, Liming Shi, Jordan P. Raykov, Jesper Rindom Jensen, Max A. Little, Mads Græsbøll Christensen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The performance of voice-based Parkinson's disease (PD) detection systems degrades when there is an acoustic mismatch between training and operating conditions caused mainly by degradation in test signals. In this paper, we address this mismatch by considering three types of degradation commonly encountered in remote voice analysis, namely background noise, reverberation and nonlinear distortion, and investigate how these degradations influence the performance of a PD detection system. Given that the specific degradation is known, we explore the effectiveness of a variety of enhancement algorithms in compensating this mismatch and improving the PD detection accuracy. Then, we propose two approaches to automatically control the quality of recordings by identifying the presence and type of short-term and long-term degradations and protocol violations in voice signals. Finally, we experiment with using the proposed quality control methods to inform the choice of enhancement algorithm. Experimental results using the voice recordings of the mPower mobile PD data set under different degradation conditions show the effectiveness of the quality control approaches in selecting an appropriate enhancement method and, consequently, in improving the PD detection accuracy. This study is a step towards the development of a remote PD detection system capable of operating in unseen acoustic environments.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-16
Number of pages16
JournalSpeech Communication
Volume127
Early online date30 Dec 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark : DFF 4184-00056 .

Keywords

  • Acoustic mismatch
  • Parkinson's disease detection
  • Quality control
  • Speech enhancement

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