Hoarse voice denoising for real-time DSP implementation: continuous speech assessment

Voice hoarseness is mainly related to airflow turbulence in the vocal tract. It can be due to vocal fold paralysis, polyps, cordectomisation or other dysfunction, which alter regular speech production, and is commonly treated as a noise component in the speech signal. A denoising approach is proposed, based on low-order singular value decomposition (SVD) of matrices whose entries come from sampled speech data frames, properly organised. A prototype DSP board implementing the procedure was developed. Objective quality indexes are proposed, showing the results achieved with the proposed method both on vowel and consonantal sentences.