Abstract
Humans utilize many muscles to produce intelligible speech, including lips, face and throat. Dysarthria is a speech disorder that surfaces when one has weal muscles due to brain damage. Primary characteristics of a dysarthric patient are slurred and slow speech that can be difficult to understand based on the severity of the condition. This paper proposes an approach to improve the intelligibility of the dysarthric speech using a simple yet effective speech-transformation technique such as warping the frequency of LPC poles and mapping coefficients of linear predictive coding. This technique was applied to dysarthric audio from the UA-speech database to obtain the desired results. Both objective and subjective measures are used to evaluate the transformed speech. The obtained results pointed towards a significant improvement in the dysarthric speech’s intelligibility. This method can be used to develop special voice-enabled search platforms for dysarthric patients and in helping rehabilitation of the patients by developing a speech therapy based on auditory feedback.
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Declaration
We the authors declare that this manuscript is original, has not been published before and is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere.
We confirm that the manuscript has been read and approved by all named authors and that there are no other persons who satisfied the criteria for authorship but are not listed. We further confirm that the order of authors listed in the manuscript has been approved by all of us.
We further confirm that the UA-speech database used in the work covered in this manuscript has been acquired from the protected ISLE data server with access provided by Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Professor ECE, University of Illinois. The audio recordings of human patients have been conducted with the ethical approval of all relevant bodies and subjects who refused permission are not represented in the database distribution.
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Roy, A., Thakur, L., Vyas, G., Raj, G. (2019). Towards Improving the Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech. In: Wang, J., Reddy, G., Prasad, V., Reddy, V. (eds) Soft Computing and Signal Processing . Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 898. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3393-4_56
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3393-4_56
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