Analysis of speaker recognition methodologies and the influence of kinetic changes to automatically detect Parkinson's Disease

Abstract The diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease is a challenging task which might be supported by new tools to objectively evaluate the presence of deviations in patient's motor capabilities. To this respect, the dysarthric nature of patient's speech has been exploited in several works to detect the presence of this disease, but none of them has deeply studied the use of state-of-the-art speaker recognition techniques for this task. In this paper, two classification schemes (GMM-UBM and i-Vectors-GPLDA) are employed separately with several parameterization techniques, namely PLP, MFCC and LPC. Additionally, the influence of the kinetic changes, described by their derivatives, is analysed. With the proposed methodology, an accuracy of 87% with an AUC of 0.93 is obtained in the optimal configuration. These results are comparable to those obtained in other works employing speech for Parkinson's Disease detection and confirm that the selected speaker recognition techniques are a solid baseline to compare with future works. Results suggest that Rasta-PLP is the most reliable parameterization for the proposed task among all the tested features while the two employed classification schemes perform similarly. Additionally, results confirm that kinetic changes provide a substantial performance improvement in Parkinson's Disease automatic detection systems and should be considered in the future.