Feature enhancement for classifier optimization and dimensionality reduction

Voice is important for professionals like speakers, teachers, actors, singers and it is the important tool for communication. Laryngeal pathologies induce perturbations in the speech signal. Speech signal is discriminated as pathological or healthy based on roughness - breathiness - hoarseness (RBH) in the quality of signal. In recent years pattern recognition along with various signal processing techniques has emerged as an effective non invasive tool for diagnosis of pathological condition. Signal processing techniques tend to generate large number of features representing the signal. Automatic feature reduction techniques are vital in identifying the relevant features and eliminating the redundant ones. We extract features from speech signal using the acoustic analysis. Features are enhanced by alleviating gender bias. Periodic variations in the signal are captured using statistical techniques. We investigate intelligent system to generate reduced feature subset with improvement in diagnostic performance.