Automatic quantitative study on the vibrational wave of human vocal folds via videokymography

Videokymography (VKG) is a powerful and cost-friendly method to observe the variability of the vocal fold vibration. A new quantitative method based on image processing, which introduces snakes model and genetic algorithm to improve precision and speed, is presented to analyze the vibration information in VKG automatically. To verify the precision of the proposed algorithm, an indirect simulation setup of vocal folds has been performed. One hundred and twenty images from twelve subjects have been analyzed, and the result shows that the vibration characteristics of vocal folds can be recognized more exactly, and the diseases in vocal fold can be diagnosed quantitatively.