Automatic voice pathology detection and classification systems effectively contribute to the assessment of voice disorders, enabling the early detection of voice pathologies and the diagnosis of the type of pathology from which patients suffer. This paper concentrates on developing an accurate and robust feature extraction for detecting and classifying voice pathologies by investigating different frequency bands using autocorrelation and entropy. We extracted maximum peak values and their corresponding lag values from each frame of a voiced signal by using autocorrelation as features to detect and classify pathological samples. We also extracted the entropy for each frame of the voice signal after we normalized its values to be used as the features. These features were investigated in distinct frequency bands to assess the contribution of each band to the detection and classification processes. Various samples of the sustained vowel /a/ for both normal and pathological voices were extracted from three different databases in English, German, and Arabic. A support vector machine was used as a classifier. We also performed u-tests to investigate if there is a significant difference between the means of the normal and pathological samples. The best achieved accuracies in both detection and classification varied depending on the used band, method, and database. The most contributive bands in both detection and classification were between 1000 and 8000 Hz. The highest obtained accuracies in the case of detection were 99.69%, 92.79%, and 99.79% for Massachusetts eye and ear infirmary (MEEI), Saarbrücken voice database (SVD), and Arabic voice pathology database (AVPD), respectively. However, the highest achieved accuracies for classification were 99.54%, 99.53%, and 96.02% for MEEI, SVD, and AVPD, correspondingly, using the combined feature.

A voice disorder database is an essential element in doing research on automatic voice disorder detection and classification. Ethnicity affects the voice characteristics of a person, and so it is necessary to develop a database by collecting the voice samples of the targeted ethnic group. This will enhance the chances of arriving at a global solution for the accurate and reliable diagnosis of voice disorders by understanding the characteristics of a local group. Motivated by such idea, an Arabic voice pathology database (AVPD) is designed and developed in this study by recording three vowels, running speech, and isolated words. For each recorded samples, the perceptual severity is also provided which is a unique aspect of the AVPD. During the development of the AVPD, the shortcomings of different voice disorder databases were identified so that they could be avoided in the AVPD. In addition, the AVPD is evaluated by using six different types of speech features and four types of machine learning algorithms. The results of detection and classification of voice disorders obtained with the sustained vowel and the running speech are also compared with the results of an English-language disorder database, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) database.