Robust F-0 and jitter estimation in pathological voices

Dysphonic voices were used to compare electroglottographic (EGG) and acoustic measures of fundamental frequency (F-0) and jitter using a wavematching and an event-based technique. Continuous speech was considered in the first part of the study, where the effects of pre-filtering the acoustic signals and linearly smoothing the F-0 contours were analysed. The second pan of the investigation compared jitter from sustained vowels (/i/, /a/, /u/), resulting in poor agreement for /i/ and /u/. In /a/ vowels, however, a relatively small mean normalised absolute difference (10.95%) was obtained with a method that is being proposed, which combines peak-picking and zero crossings, being able to detect a waveform pattern observed in such vowels and reject unreliable measures.