S transform feature for pathological speech

Pathological speech is difficult to analyze because it is non-stationary and mutative. The study combines the S transform, which has good time-frequency resolution and time-frequency positioning capability with the human auditory Mel characteristics to calculate Mel S-transform cepstrum coefficients (MSCC) which highlight vocal organ pathological lesions. The MSCC are compared with the classical Mel frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC) and the common acoustic characteristics in the NCSC corpus to show that the MSCC are more able to portray the dynamics and to quickly identify pathological speech information. In addition, the MSCC also give classification performance based on the F-Score method with the particle swarm optimization algorithm for feature selection. Therefore, the MSCC provide accurate analyses of pathological speech characteristics for clinical diagnosis.