Pathological Voice Detection Using Joint Subsapce Transfer Learning

A pathological voice detection system is designed to detect pathological characteristics of vocal cords from speech. Such systems are particularly susceptible to domain mismatch where the training and testing data come from the source and target domains, respectively. Due to the difference in speech disease etiology, recording environment, and device, etc., the feature distributions of source and target domain are quite different. Meanwhile, considering the high costs of annotating labels, it is hard to acquire labeled data in the target domain. This paper attempts to formulate cross-domain pathological voice detection as an unsupervised domain adaptation problem. Joint subspace transfer learning (JSTL) aims to find a projection matrix to transform source and target domain data into a common space. The maximum mean discrepancy function is used to measure the divergence across databases. Intra-class and inter-class distance act as regularization to guarantee the maximum separability between different classes. A graph matrix is constructed to help transfer knowledge from the relevant source data to the target data. Three popular pathological voice databases were selected in this paper. For six cross-database experiments, the accuracy of the method proposed increased by up to 15%. For different voice categories, the category of structural voice showed the most significant increase, nearly 20%.