Characterization of glottal activity from speech signals

Abstract

The objective of this work is to characterize certain important features of excitation of speech, namely, detecting the regions of glottal activity and estimating the strength of excitation in each glottal cycle. The proposed method is based on the assumption that the excitation to the vocal-tract system can be approximated by a sequence of impulses of varying strengths. The effect due to an impulse in the time-domain is spread uniformly across the frequency-domain including at zero-frequency. We propose the use of a zero-frequency resonator to extract the characteristics of excitation source from speech signals by filtering out most of the time-varying vocal-tract information. The regions of glottal activity and the strengths of excitation estimated from the speech signal are in close agreement with those observed from the simultaneously recorded electro-glotto-graph signals. The performance of the proposed glottal activity detection is evaluated under different noisy environments at varying levels of degradation.