A simple but efficient voice activity detection algorithm through Hilbert transform and dynamic threshold for speech pathologies

A simple but efficient voice activity detector based on the Hilbert transform and a dynamic threshold is presented to be used on the pre-processing of audio signals -- The algorithm to define the dynamic threshold is a modification of a convex combination found in literature -- This scheme allows the detection of prosodic and silence segments on a speech in presence of non-ideal conditions like a spectral overlapped noise -- The present work shows preliminary results over a database built with some political speech -- The tests were performed adding artificial noise to natural noises over the audio signals, and some algorithms are compared -- Results will be extrapolated to the field of adaptive filtering on monophonic signals and the analysis of speech pathologies on futures works

Double Fourier analysis for Emotion Identification in Voiced Speech

We propose a novel analysis alternative, based on two Fourier Transforms for emotion recognition from speech -- Fourier analysis allows for display and synthesizes different signals, in terms of power spectral density distributions -- A spectrogram of the voice signal is obtained performing a short time Fourier Transform with Gaussian windows, this spectrogram portraits frequency related features, such as vocal tract resonances and quasi-periodic excitations during voiced sounds -- Emotions induce such characteristics in speech, which become apparent in spectrogram time-frequency distributions -- Later, the signal time-frequency representation from spectrogram is considered an image, and processed through a 2-dimensional Fourier Transform in order to perform the spatial Fourier analysis from it -- Finally features related with emotions in voiced speech are extracted and presented