Time-Varying Vocal Folds Vibration Detection Using a 24 GHz Portable Auditory Radar

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 16; no. 8; p. 1181
• Main Authors: Hong, Hong, Zhao, Heng, Peng, Zhengyu, Li, Hui, Gu, Chen, Li, Changzhi, Zhu, Xiaohua
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 28.07.2016; MDPI
• Subjects: Acoustics; Algorithms; Background noise; Decomposition; Devices; Fundamental frequency; Humans; Learning transfer; Microphones; Noise; Portability; Radar; Radar - instrumentation; Radar systems; Sensors; Signal processing; Speech; Speech - physiology; Speech processing; Speech Recognition Software; Time; Tonal languages; Vibration; Vocal Cords - physiology; Vocal folds; Voice - physiology; non-acoustic; VMD; fundamental frequency; auditory radar; vocal folds
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s16081181

Time-varying vocal folds vibration information is of crucial importance in speech processing, and the traditional devices to acquire speech signals are easily smeared by the high background noise and voice interference. In this paper, we present a non-acoustic way to capture the human vocal folds vibration using a 24-GHz portable auditory radar. Since the vocal folds vibration only reaches several millimeters, the high operating frequency and the 4 × 4 array antennas are applied to achieve the high sensitivity. The Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) based algorithm is proposed to decompose the radar-detected auditory signal into a sequence of intrinsic modes firstly, and then, extract the time-varying vocal folds vibration frequency from the corresponding mode. Feasibility demonstration, evaluation, and comparison are conducted with tonal and non-tonal languages, and the low relative errors show a high consistency between the radar-detected auditory time-varying vocal folds vibration and acoustic fundamental frequency, except that the auditory radar significantly improves the frequency-resolving power.