Comparative Analysis of Performance of Established Pitch Estimation Methods in Sustained Vowel of Benign Vocal Fold Lesions

양성후두 질환의 지속모음을 대상으로 한 기존 피치 추정 방법들의 성능 비교 분석

In voice pathology, various measurements calculated from pitch values are proposed to show voice quality. However, those measurements frequently seem to be inaccurate and unreliable because they are based on some wrong pitch values determined from pathological voice data. In order to solve the problem, we compared several pitch estimation methods to propose a better one in pathological voices. From the database of 99 pathological voice and 30 normal voice data, errors derived from pitch estimation were analyzed and compared between pathological and normal voice data or among the vowels produced by patients with benign vocal fold lesions. Results showed that gross pitch errors were observed in the cases of pathological voice data. From the types of pathological voices classified by the degree of aperiodicity in the speech signals, we found that pitch errors were closely related to the number of aperiodic segments. Also, the autocorrelation approach was found to be the most robust pitch estimation in the pathological voice data. It is desirable to conduct further research on the more severely pathological voice data in order to reduce pitch estimation errors.