Analysis of COVID-19 Resulting Cough Using Formants and Automatic Speech Recognition System

Abstract

As part of our contributions to researches on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, we have studied the cough changes to the infected people based on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) speech recognition classification, formants frequency and pitch analysis. In this paper, An HMM-based cough recognition system was implemented with 5 HMM states, 8 Gaussian Mixture Distributions (GMMs) and 13 dimensions of the basic Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) with 39 dimensions of the overall feature vector. A comparison between formants frequency and pitch extracted values is realized based on the cough of COVID-19 infected people and healthy ones to confirm our cough recognition system results. The experimental results present that the difference between the recognition rates of infected and non-infected people is 6.7%. Whereas, the formant analysis variation based on the cough of infected and non-infected people is clearly observed with F1, F3, and F4 and lower for F0 and F2.

Keywords: COVID-19—Cough recognition—Formants—HMM—ASR—Pitch.