SPIRE: Signal Processing Interpretation and Representation Lab

PROJECTS > SPONSORED > DYSARTHRIA

Dysarthric Speech Analysis and Processing

About

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder which occurs when the muscles used for speaking weaken or the person has some difficulty in controlling and coordinating the muscles. Neurodegenerative diseases, like Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), can cause dysarthria. This disorder affects various aspects of speech production like articulation, phonation, prosody, respiration and resonance. As a result, intelligibility, naturalness and often audibility of speech get compromised, which negatively impact the efficiency of vocal communication for these patients.

The figure below shows the waveforms and associated spectrograms of speech obtained from a dysarthric ALS patient, a dysarthric PD patient and a healthy individual. Each person is uttering the syllable ‘pa’ in succession. It can be observed that the speaking rate significantly reduces for the patients and the information content in the spectrogram becomes confined to lower frequency regions.

Media Content

At SPIRE Lab, we aim to understand such characteristics of dysarthric speech from the perspectives of signal processing as well as speech production. We further aim to utilize these insights in developing speech-based advanced tools and techniques which can enhance the quality of life of the individuals suffering from this condition.

Objectives:

The objectives of our research include, but are not limited to, the following.

To understand and model the effects of dysarthria and the related neurodegenerative disorders on different parts of the speech production system
To develop resource efficient algorithms for speech-based automatic detection and monitoring of the neurodegenerative disorders
To develop data-driven methods of enhancing the naturalness and intelligibility of dysarthric speech
To design automatic speech recognition systems for this type of disordered speech

Background and Motivation:

Till date, there exists no particular laboratory test that can confirm neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and PD. The clinical diagnosis and monitoring processes are highly time-consuming and prone to biases due to subjective perceptions. Thus, automated and efficient diagnostic tools for these diseases are the need of the hour. Moreover, the impaired naturalness and intelligibility of the speech produced by these patients hinder their active participation in societal activities, leading them to social isolation and depression. Speech related assistive aids like speech enhancement and recognition systems can thus greatly benefit the dysarthric speakers, easing their communication process.

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Funding

Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India

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Publications

Journals (Accepted and/or Published):

Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Seena Vengalil, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Inter-speaker acoustic differences of sustained vowels at varied dysarthria severities for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis", JASA Express Letters, vol. 4, no. 12, 2024, Page(s): 125203 [PDF]

Conferences (Accepted and/or Published):

Neelesh Samptur, Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Anirudh Chakravarty K, Seena Vengalil, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Exploring syllable discriminability during diadochokinetic task with increasing dysarthria severity for patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis", In Proc. Interspeech, Kos Island, Greece, 2024, Page(s): 4114-4118 [PDF] [Slides]
Anjali Jayakumar, Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Seena Vengalil, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Low complexity model with single dimensional feature for speech based classification of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis patients and healthy individuals", In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM), Bangalore, India, 2024, Page(s): 1-5 [PDF] [Slides]
Chowdam Venkata Thirumala Kumar, Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Seena Vengalil, Saraswati Nashi, Madassu Keerthipriya, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Spectral analysis of vowels and fricatives at varied levels of dysarthria severity for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis", In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Seoul, Republic of Korea, 2024, Page(s): 12767-12771 [PDF] [Poster]
Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Anjali Jayakumar, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi Yadav, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Transfer learning to aid dysarthria severity classification for patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis", In Proc. Interspeech, Dublin, Ireland, 2023, Page(s): 1543-1547 [PDF] [Poster]
Chowdam Venkata Thirumala Kumar, Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi Yadav, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Classification of multi-class vowels and fricatives from patients having Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis with varied levels of dysarthria severity", In Proc. Interspeech, Dublin, Ireland, 2023, Page(s): 146-150 [PDF] [Slides]
Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi Yadav, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Exploring the role of fricatives in classifying healthy subjects and patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Parkinson’s Disease", In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Rhodes Island, Greece, 2023, Page(s): 1-5 [PDF] [Slides] [Poster]
Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Chowdam Venkata Thirumala Kumar, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi Yadav, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Static and dynamic source and filter cues for classification of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis patients and healthy subjects", In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Rhodes Island, Greece, 2023, Page(s): 1-5 [PDF] [Slides] [Poster]
Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Jhansi Mallela, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi Yadav, Pradeep Reddy, Dipanjan Gope, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Source and vocal tract cues for speech-based classification of patients with Parkinson’s Disease and healthy subjects", In Proc. Interspeech, Brno, Czechia, 2021, Page(s): 2961-2965, [PDF] [Slides]
Tanuka Bhattacharjee, Jhansi Mallela, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi Yadav, Pradeep Reddy, Dipanjan Gope, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Effect of noise and model complexity on detection of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Parkinson’s Disease using pitch and MFCC", In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Toronto, ON, Canada, 2021, Page(s): 7313-7317 [PDF] [Slides] [Poster]
Jhansi Mallela, Aravind Illa, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi yadav, Pradeep Reddy, Dipanjan Gope, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Raw speech waveform based classification of patients with ALS, Parkinson’s Disease and healthy controls using CNN-BLSTM", In Proc. Interspeech, Shanghai, China, 2020, Page(s): 4586-4590 [PDF] [Slides]
Suhas BN, Jhansi Mallela, Aravind Illa, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi Yadav, Dipanjan Gope, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Speech task based automatic classification of ALS and Parkinson’s Disease and their severity using log mel spectrograms", In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM), Bangalore, India, 2020, Page(s): 1-5 [PDF] [Slides]
Jhansi Mallela, Aravind Illa, Suhas BN, Sathvik Udupa, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi Yadav, Pradeep Reddy, Dipanjan Gope, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Voice based classification of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease and healthy controls with CNN-LSTM using transfer learning", In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Barcelona, Spain, 2020, Page(s): 6784-6788 [PDF] [Slides]
Suhas BN, Deep Patel, Nithin Rao, Yamini Belur, Pradeep Reddy, Atchayaram Nalini, Ravi Yadav, Dipanjan Gope, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Comparison of speech tasks and recording devices for voice based automatic classification of healthy subjects and patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis", in Proc. Interspeech, Graz, Austria, 2019, Pages(s): 4564-4568 [PDF] [Poster]
Aravind Illa, Deep Patel, Yamini Belur, Meera SS, Shivashankar N, Preethish Kumar Veeramani, Seena Vengalil, Kiran Polavarapui, Saraswati Nashi, Atchayaram Nalini, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Comparison of speech tasks for automatic classification of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and healthy subjects", In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Calgary, AB, Canada, 2018, Page(s): 6014-6018 [PDF] [Poster]

Posters:

Jhansi Mallela, Aravind Illa, Yamini Belur, Atchayaram Nalini, Seena Vengalil, Saraswati Nashi, Ravi Yadav, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, "Low frequency characteristics are the key differentiators between dysarthric speech in ALS and healthy speech", 2nd Asia Pacific Frontotemporal and Motor Neurone Disease Meeting (APFM), 2020 [PDF] [Slides]

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