Automated detection of voice disorder in the Saarbrücken voice database: Effects of pathology subset and audio materials

The Saarbrücken Voice Database contains speech and simultaneous electroglottography recordings of 1002 speakers exhibiting a wide range of voice disorders, together with recordings of 851 controls. Previous studies have used this database to build systems for automated detection of voice disorders and for differential diagnosis. These studies have varied considerably in the subset of pathologies tested, the audio materials analyzed, the cross-validation method used and the performance metric reported. This variation has made it hard to determine the most promising approaches to the problem of detecting voice disorders. In this study we reimplement three recently published systems that have been trained to detect pathology using the SVD and compare their performance on the same pathologies with the same audio materials using a common cross-validation protocol and performance metric. We show that under this approach, there is much less difference in performance across systems than in their original publication. We also show that voice disorder detection on the basis of a short phrase gives similar performance to that based on a sequence of vowels of different pitch. Our evaluation protocol may be useful for future studies on voice disorder detection with the SVD